Comfort Inn & Suites Custer

... State Park has campgrounds, cabins and a lodge, all of which require reservations during the summer season. And, we've learned that the most scenic portions of the byway close after the first snow fall - so plan accordingly!!

Here's a link to the Norbeck Byway http://www.byways.org/explore/byways/24 59/

... news in all this is that we were able to pickup the local PBS station on our antennea so we were able to watch the entire Ken Burns series on the National Parks. It was fascinating and and we hope you got to watch it as well. If not I'm sure it will be on again and again!!

The forecast for the upcoming week is for a couple ...

... the animals loved. We also wondered about the lady walking along the road a mile or two back and the herd was going her way.

We were so lucky to be close enougth to see the herd. They looked very natural and undisturbed. Our drive continued up and we saw more groups of buffalos on their own. One group had a mother, teenager, and pre-adolescent buffalo eating grass. There were also goat and deers.

There's a place out here near the Badlands named Wall Drugs. The place is in Wall, SD and is the Western equivalent of South of the Border ..... every few miles there's a silly billboard for hundreds of miles. Aside from those signs .... there is nothing and I do mean nothing. Still the Badlands are beautifully stark

... was a store, would be an understatement as it truly did cover their property which had to be 5 acres ! There was even an old donkey walking around inside ! Olivia got a piece of obsidian from here as you cannot take any from Yellowstone (which has huge cliffs of obsidian) It was the shiny black rock used to make arrowheads.The town we wanted to see was "Pringle" ! We took pictures below the sign and went past a ...

... believe our first mistake was traveling in the early afternoon instead of later at dusk. No live buffalo, but we did purchase our final 'buddy', an Elk. Feeling a bit discouraged, we decide to stop at a 'rock shop' on the way back to our campsite. I bought four colorful rocks from an extremely dry, boring man. After all, he does sell rocks for a living. . . . Phil and I write post cards and I continue to blog for just over an ...

Drove into the badlands around 2:00am. Looming heaps of badland sand mountains came careening toward the car like the tips of icebergs in the night, threatening the roadways and casting ominous shadows from the headlights on the mountains in the distance. Custer State park is a little slice of what I imagine British Columbia might be like, in the middle of the flat dry South Dakota ...

... and when we started it back up, it worked just fine. Who knew that all you had to do was look under the hood. Anyway, we figured we better have it looked at, so we asked the attendant at Crazy Horse who recommended going into the town of Custer. We passed on the memorial for the time being, and headed straight there. When we arrived in Custer, we were able to find an auto shop called Lamonts Garage with little trouble, however ...

... through park with great views of animals that most tourists don't have the opportunity to see in the wild. They had all of the local wildlife present: black bear, grizzly bear, mountain lion, grey wolf, reindeer, elk, fox, otter, buffalo, and various types of goats/sheep. After the drive through park they had a walking area too. I guess since Michelle was with child they offered us a golf-cart tour, which was good since we were getting hungry again and this gave us an ...

... around, since we were all so hungry. But there was plenty, even with Jason and I carb-o-loading for our big run the next day. Sunday morning Jason and I woke up at 6:30 AM to head out on a 20-mile training run for our Marathon, that is a month away... YIKES!!! At the ranch there is a 10-mile loop of country dirt roads, so we decided to just do two laps... easier said than done. The first 5 miles of the loop were easy with a slight downhill, which ...