Day 6 – La Crosse, Wisconsin, through Minnesota to Sioux Falls, South Dakota on the I-90W

It had rained quite a bit overnight, but it had stopped by the time we woke up. Everything was wet but was starting to slowly dry up. We had breakfast, kids did a bit of school work, and played at the campground park with a couple of other kids from the park while we packed up the semi-wet tent.

We headed back out to the I-90 interstate and made our way to our destination of Sioux Falls “Jellystone Family campground”. As we left La Crosse we crossed the Mississippi River. There were many hills/cliffs and then the highway started to climb about 400ft, before it levelled off and we appeared to have hit the prairies and their very flat landscape. The drive was super easy again on the highway, and we stopped for lunch in the town of Albert Lee. As we entered the town we could see that it was a really well kept town. We had a picnic lunch at a park, which was nice but there was no real parking lot so we tucked the van beside a utility building. After some time of course a utility worker drove by and seemed to say from a distance that we couldn’t park there and then drove away. We found what appeared to be a nicer park on the map so decided after eating that we’d take the kids there to let them run around a bit more. The next park was indeed much nicer and on the river that was running through town, and we spent a good hour there before hitting the road again. The town of Albert Lee was to our surprise a nice little town with some very nice homes along the water. It even had a vineyard and a winery!

Back on the highway things became very flat, and we could see hundreds and hundreds of wind turbines. The highway became completely straight and flat with almost no traffic. I was just so glad we were not biking through the prairies like we did 13 years ago (and today the winds were a headwind no less). All the driving today helped me catch up on our blog from the last few days. Once on the campsite we are so busy with just survival there is really no time for blogging most nights.

We arrived to a very busy Jellystone Yogi bear campground, expected considering it was a Friday in August. The campground was filled with families. Definitely not a place we would have chosen to stay in our twenties but definitely somewhere we purposefully picked for the night with the kids. We were right off the highway and under a massive powerline, but all the amenities and then some for the kids including a heated pool, jumping pillow, mini-golf, gaga ball pit, etc etc. The kids had a great time on the jumping pillow to burn off their energy from the long drive. There must have been 30 to 40 kids on the jumping pillow at one time with kids throwing footballs around. It’s amazing no one was getting seriously hurt (boy do I sound old typing this).

We caught up on the backlog of laundry, and I took the kids to the pool while Katherine set up the tent and dinner. I have never been to a campground where the sites were so small and so close together, with our neighbours being 3 families in one with a bunch of kids constantly running around. The thing with families with younger kids is they all tend to go to bed early, but as I type this up near midnight there are still kids running around the campground yelling and screaming.. but the highway traffic is helping to drown them out. Definitely going to need earplugs tonight just from the highway noise. This is one noisy campground and for once it’s not our kids making the ruckus.

On the theme of the campground with the full service bar the night before, turns out the Yogi bear campground sells beer and wine at the camp store. Another first we’ve seen after all the campgrounds we’ve been to in our lives.

Katherine pointed out that we had breakfast in Wisconsin, lunch in Minnesota, and dinner in South Dakota. We will finally be starting to slow down and be spending more than one night as we get closer to the National Parks. We will be staying at the Badlands for two nights, but first we have another 4+ hour drive tomorrow.