Badlands to Cheyenne, every terrain you can think of.

Yesterday's trek started in the Badlands, went through the mountains then underground, and across the prairie to Cheyenne Wyoming.  The road(16A) from Keystone SD to Wind Cave is what you pretended you were doing when you drove those little cars on rails at Busch Gardens or Kings Dominion.  The GPS actually showed spirals and loops.  There were wooden bridges that you drove under, curled around and then drove across.  There were one lane tunnels blasted through the rock that idiots would stand in, blocking traffic taking pictures.   It would be a great road for motorcycles, as long as it was closed to traffic coming the other way, otherwise it would be too brief a ride.

One thing we've decided this trip is that a picnic is where you make it.  We don't need no stinkin' picnic tables.  Under a Juniper tree in Badlands or on a stone fence in Wind Cave work just fine.  Let the other tourists compete and jockey for the tables, to hell with them.
Wind Cave is the 6th largest discovered cave system in the world, it's as flashy as Luray, but it's cool and dark and has passages everywhere that you could easily get lost and die in.  We only went down about 150 ft, but the caves go as deep as 500 feet below the surface.  It was perfect for me, cool and damp and dark, just how I like it.  There's nothing like the dark of a cave when they turn out the lights.

After Wind Cave, it was across the prairie to Ft. Laramie, WY.  Along the way there were antelope, bison out the wazoo, and prairie dogs being as stinkin' cute as they could be.  Ft. Laramie is your basic half restored old frontier fort/town etc.  They've done a nice job with the buildings, especially the store and the long calvary barracks are pretty cool.  Here, Lily had her first Sarsparilla.  Her first question? How is this different from root beer.  I had to look it up.  From what i read, they're the same but root beer has more stuff in it.  Sioux City Sarsparilla is really good though, if you are of that persuasion.

Then a brief 110 mile trip to Cheyenne, with a stop in Guernsey to see some of the ruts cut into the rock by the wagons going west along the Oregon Trail 150 years ago.  After a lovely Mexican dinner at Guadalajara, it was crash city baby.  Out like a light.

The Odyssey has done over 2000 miles on this trip so far, it's really hard to believe this is only Day 4 for Lily and I, Day 7 for Clare.  Denver tonight, where we'll see Clare's old friends and Lily's old friend and maybe, just maybe, my friend from Junior high who I haven't seen in 30 years.  There won't be as much travelogue, we're slowing down a bit before the Moab/Bryce/Zion/Grand Canyon run.

I did want to mention the place we ate in Keystone SD, the town there is reminds us of Jackson Hole, or Cherokee NC, basically a much smaller Pigeon Forge touristy, kitschy area.  Ruby's House is absolutely of that ilk, a saloon theme, even to the point of the bar waitress walking around in one of those corsets you saw in old Western movies.  The food was good though, and if you embrace the kitsch, it's a very good place to go.