Aptly named! Yes, yes yes – they are bad lands! The Native Americans thought so, as did the French and I heartily agree. Bad I say! The Lakota people were the first to call this place “mako sica” or “land bad.” Extreme temperatures, lack of water, and the exposed rugged terrain led to this name. In the early 1900’s, French-Canadian fur trappers called it “les mauvais terres pour traverse,” or “bad lands to travel through.” Today, the term badlands has a more geologic definition. Badlands form when soft sedimentary rock is extensively eroded in a dry climate. The Badlands National Park’s typical scenery of sharp spires, gullies, and ridges is a premier example of badlands topography. Courtesy of National Parks Service.gov A loud humming buzz greeted us as we pulled into the registration lane at the KOA. Allison was beside herself when she found out that the noise was hundreds of cicadas in the trees, and even more disturbed when she ran into one of their molted exoskeletons clinging to the bark of a tree while she was hooking up the water hose. Poor thing. California girls don’t grow up around cicadas. It was exactly those extreme temperatures that kept us firmly planted at the campground alternating between playing Canasta in our climate-controlled RV and running for a quick bake and dip at the pool. There was no way in H-E double hockey sticks that we were going to hike the Badlands in 95 degree weather. We’ve been on a hunt for our passions and guess what, turns out we are both overwhelmingly passionate about NOT hiking in ungodly heat. So we got up the next morning at 7am in order to see the park at a reasonable temperature before we had to check...

FREE ADMISSION to this 76,000 square foot “American Experience” includes the Backyard with its Branding Iron Arcade, animated T-Rex, panning & mining experience for fossils and gemstones, Train Station Water Show & fun picture-taking props in a picnic area. It was on the way – we had to stop! History of Ted and Dorothy Hustead and Wall Drug – Courtesy of Wall Drug It was December 1931. Dorothy and I had just bought the only drugstore in a town called Wall on the edge of the South Dakota Badlands. We’d been open a few days, and business had been bad. I stood shivering on the wooden sidewalk. In this little prairie town there were only 326 people, 326 poor people. Most of them were farmers who’d been wiped out either by the Depression or drought. Dorothy and I were excited about Wall, but when we got back home and told our families about the plan, we found them skeptical. “That town is in the middle of nowhere,” a cousin said, “and furthermore, everybody there is flat broke busted.” My father-in-law was understanding, but even he said, “You know, Wall is just about as Godforsaken as you can get.” But Dorothy and I couldn’t give up on Wall, so our families agreed that we should all pray about the decision. Led by two of Dorothy’s aunts, who were Dominican nuns, we asked God’s guidance. In the end everyone felt that it was God’s will for us to go to Wall. But now that Dorothy and I were all alone here, we wondered if we’d heard God right. “Don’t worry,” said Dorothy. “We’ll make it go. And just think, Ted, pretty soon that monument at Mount Rushmore will be done, and then there will be an...

We were in South Dakota back in the middle of July, July 20th actually. Today is September 21st which makes that a literal two months ago, but it feels like a year ago to me. I can still remember the enormous KOA in Rapid City with its incredible $2 all you can eat pancake breakfast. I remember how hot it was during the days, and how the clouds would strike a dramatic pose every afternoon in front of the setting sun just before the thunder and lightening storms took the stage to thrill us each evening. July was our sixth month in, the supposed half-way mark, and I’m trying to remember honestly how we felt about everything back then. I look back through the photos and am excited all over by what we saw because it was really incredible, but I also remember the hints of being worn out and the faint hue of “damn this tiny RV” starting to show. It didn’t help that it was hot. I hate hot unless I’m at a pool or a beach and even then I’ve been known to whine. The stress of our rushed schedule, the 4 days of driving, and the tire blow out had impacted our sense of well-being for sure. Driving may seem like an easy thing on the surface, but driving a 29 foot RV requires a certain amount of physicality and attentiveness. It’s not relaxing. Even being a passenger can wear you out if you’re like me; a control-freak, prone to startling at any new noise and throwing your arms out dramatically for support on tight turns because you’re sure the RV is about to tip over. I also tend to obsess over the white line on my side and any...

I had to squint against the whiteness that glowed up at me from the grass. Cricket and countless other nameless bug buzzings rose from the green fields that sprawled out to the horizon in every direction. A drip of sweat itched my skin on its way down my cleavage and the sun was doing its best Top Chef impersonation, executing a nice sear on my forehead. There was an appropriate cringing, but I couldn’t stop my rebellious eye from following the line of the crevasse down into the darkness. Suddenly his hand reached around and grabbed his denim waste band. He yanked it up hard and smacked himself. It seems the large red ants that had been crawling up my ankles, were also finding their way down the exposed glowing white butt crack of the tow truck driver who was lying beneath our RV in the middle of nowhere Montana. My mom and I had apparently BOTH engaged in jinxing activity that day. Independently we’d had the same thought – “Gee, how lucky we’ve [they’ve] been that we [they] haven’t had a flat tire or anything.” Boom! Shakalakalaka. That “lakalaka” sound was the tread of the right inside rear tire flapping madly into the undercarriage of our RV until it finally separated itself from us and landed like a giant black orange peel in the road. There were no cars in sight on the narrow two lanes of well-worn asphalt that we had been traveling, so there was no added panic involved in slowing down and coming to a stop. This was a good thing, because my hysterical heart was already thumping my eyes out of their sockets. We’ve mentioned that our RV is loud. We’ve mentioned that the RV does not have the...

For our first full day at Glacier National Park we opted to have a Red Jammer chauffeur us along the Going-to-the-Sun Road. This most famous road goes over the Continental Divide at Logan Pass and traverses the entire park from East to West. It also has a great story behind it, one that illustrates the potentially glorious result that can come from fighting against the attitude of “but that’s the way we’ve always done it”. A young landscape engineer named Thomas Vint was brave enough to suggest the now stunning, but then extremely dangerous, route for the road. It’s a National Historic Landmark as well as an Historic Civil Engineering Landmark and spans 53 miles (85 km) across the width of the park. A fleet of 1930s red tour buses were built to offer tours of the road and they are lovingly called “jammers” because the driver had to jam the transmission’s gears hard to control their speed. The red buses were rebuilt in 2001 to run on propane (with gas) and this is where Ali and I found ourselves that morning, in the very back seat of a red bus along with 15 other people. The bus picked us up right at our campground and took us into the park at the St. Mary Lake entrance. The back seat was a little squishy so it was tough to get comfortable and find room for your legs and arms, but our charming driver jumped right into a story. Within moments we were passing by the same lake that Tom Hanks ran by in the movie Forest Gump. The lake that he said was so beautiful it was like there were two skies, one up above and one in that lake. Don’t forget that you...

After our delightful day at the lakes, we hooked back up with the RV and headed another hour down the highway to the town of Canmore. The Worldmark was perched at the top of a hill overlooking the city, and yet still underneath the incredible mountains which were in view no matter where you were in town. It was a fairly late arrival for us and not only did we need to bring in all our laundry and clothes for the week, but we needed to empty the fridge so that we could shut everything off in the rig while it was parked. Even with the luggage cart, we made close to 10 trips from the RV to our room which was on the sixth floor. Once we got everything into the room, priority number one was a cocktail, priority number two, laundry. We’d saved up all our dirty clothes for a while, knowing that the Worldmark would have free machines. Many of our campgrounds have coin-op machines which we use, but it’s a couple bucks per load and not always the nicest equipment. We slept in, had a lazy morning and then spent our first day in town wandering through the shops and galleries in Canmore and taking care of some errands, namely grocery shopping and bike maintenance. We were expecting Ann and Jen to arrive the next day, but not until the late afternoon, so we made a plan to get up early and drive out to Johnston Canyon for a long hike. We’d read about it in our Canada book, it is one of the most popular hikes in Banff National Park and it lived up to all our expectations. The trail followed the river upwards for 2 miles on both...