We woke to a beautiful sunny blue sky. Even early in the morning the sun was strong and there was not much shade to take cover. We got to enjoy a meal for the first time at the site’s picnic table. We then packed up and headed out through the scenic Badlands road towards our next destination. The scenic road was incredible, and we made many scenic stops. We stopped to observe some prairie dogs we had heard so much about (we had even watched a YouTube video about them back home). On our way out, we came across both Bison and Prairie Dogs by the Badlands National Park sign.
We then headed into the town of Wall. There was Wall Drug, a tourist attraction that was advertise for hundreds of miles on bill boards along the I-90. While the kids and I explored Wall Drug Katherine headed to resupply on groceries. Wall Drug was incredible, with stores within stores. Kathrine rejoined us and we had a quick lunch and headed on our way towards Custer State Park. As we got closer to Rapid City, traffic was backed up on the highway due to a transport track whose’s trailer contents had caught fire. This ended up being about a 20 min delay.
Our plan was to visit the Mount Rushmore monument, Custer State Park, and drive through the Needles Highway and camp at the Devil’s monument. With more time spent in the badlands and Wall Drug, there was no way we were going to be able to do any of this, so we decided to just head to Custer State Park and camp there for the night and look at doing everything else tomorrow. This was the second night where we didn’t actually have a camp site booked anywhere, and it came in handy to not be tied to a destination that we had to get to.
As we got closer to the Black Hills National Forest, it was incredible to see forest and hills again after so many days driving across the prairies and in badlands. The roads became incredibly windy with a much slower speed limit. On the way there Katherine had found that there was one tent only site available at the Custer State Park Games Lodge Campground. But we weren’t sure what they meant by a “walk in site” and decided we would check it out first. We first stopped at the visitor centre which was across from the campground. The very helpful ladies there told us to “book it right away!”. Apparently it is an extremely difficult campground to get a site at, and someone must have just cancelled. Katherine had a hard time booking it online, and apparently you can’t just show up at the campground. She went over to the campground and used the courtesy phone to talk to the reservation call centre. After about 40 min she was finally able to secure the site. In the mean time the kids enjoyed the extremely fancy and impressive movie theatre in the visitor centre that showed a clip about the state park.
The helpful ladies at the visitor centre suggested we drive down 5 to 10 min along the wildlife loop as there were recent sightings there of a Bison herd. We went down but didn’t see the buffalo herd and decided to head back to our campsite as it was starting to get late and everyone was getting tired and hungry. We did see some pronghorns and a turtle.
We got to our campsite and enjoyed the lack of wind, and most importantly, lack of mosquitoes! For some reason there were no mosquitoes what-so-ever at the campground. The campground had laundry which desperately needed again. Extremely clean facilities and well spaced out camp sites. The volunteer campground host stopped by to check in with us, and she said she was very surprised there was still an unbooked site this afternoon that we ended up getting. She said bookings open a year in advance and they are usually fully booked every single night in the summer.
After dinner the kids stopped by a program being run by the state park at the near by barn building on rock climbing in . To my surprise I took them and left them there and they ended up staying there listening on their own Custer State Park (except for Toby who left with me and only rejoined Ryo and Mia near the tail end of the program). Just down the road I could see what looked like bighorn sheep or pronghorns.
With our change in plans we now had a 6 hour drive day tomorrow which included the rest of the 20 mile wild life loop and needles highway. We decided we didn’t have time for Mount Rushmore or Devil’s tower.
Trip Around The World 
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