DAY 45: "The BadLands......Are GoodLands...."

DAY 45:  The Badlands, South Dakota - August 14, 2010

Cool picture of the three of us....

The picture above has nothing to do with where we went today.......I just liked it!  If you can't make out the heads, it's Bubblehead Liz, Peacehead Murphy and Along-For-The-Ride Charlie......The three of us went for an evening ride yesterday, saw our shadow and thought it was kinda cool.......

My butt is SORE, my hands have CALLOUSES, and my hair looks like I just blow-dryed it upside down.......it's been a LOOOOONG day on the bike!  A few wrong turns, couple of roads twice and we ended up riding about 250 very WINDY miles today.

We headed to the Badlands, South Dakota today!  I guess I seriously flunked geography cause I never knew what the Badlands were until today.....I just knew I wanted to see them!   And boy-howdy, I'm sure glad we did!  It was worth the 250 mile round trip!

Amarillo.....Meet Mars

Imagine if you will, you're heading down the highway......your helmet bobbing back and forth as you're singing "Dancing Queen" by Abba when all of a sudden, you round a corner, and WHAM.......suddenly you have gone from Amarillo, Texas to.....to......to......MARS.   Welcome to the Badlands, South Dakota!

WOW.......its beautiful.....in a weird type of way......First, they look like mountains from a distance.....but they're not.  I don't know what it is, but it appears to be a combination of sand, shale, rock, gravel.....but GOOGLE said its actually made up of "eroded buttes (I think thats funny!), spires blended with the largest protected mixed grass prairie in the US." I still don't know what its made of.......who cares.....

Chuck upon realizing they don't have pancakes.

Anyway, I just had to stop and "feel" it; then it occurred to me that I needed a "sample" of it......but Chuck said it was against the law (actually, I think he was just hungry and wanted to move on....), so I stopped, poured my water out of my water bottle, looked both ways for Park Rangers, and proceeded to fill my water bottle up with....with....."eroded buttes".

Like I mentioned, Chuck was hungry, of course.  The man "Lives to Eat and Eats to Live", so I promised him an Ihop stop.......We were coming up on a town called Interior, SD........I was pretty sure when I saw the population sign of Interior, SD that there probably wasn't going to be an Ihop.......Interior, SD...Pop 72.  There was only one place to eat and it didn't look a thing like Ihop.......They had only one thing on the menu.....cheeseburgers......

1-Item Restaurant in Interior, SD

We ordered our cheeseburgers (Chuck kept mumbling something about wanting pancakes....) and as we were waiting for them, we were greeted by the restaurant's two waiter-dogs (literally...they were golden retrievers)......It was about this same time we noticed we were the only people in this "restaurant" (and I use that term very loosely) that were wearing a color other than black and we didn't have the words "HARLEY DAVIDSON" on our backs, our heads or our pants.

I love tunnels!

We finished up there, scooted on down the road (Chuck still mumbling about not getting pancakes); Liz has now moved on to "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gee's when I discovered the COOLEST road ever!  Winding, one-lane tunnels.......GREAT!  Meanwhile, my passenger keeps asking, "How much longer??......Are we almost there yet??.......When will we get there??...." errrrrrrrrrrr........