Scott and I have a lot of catching up to do. We’ve been through a lot over the past couple weeks and haven’t had as much chance to share as we would like. Luckily we’re taking a little break in Denver to recharge the batteries, so I’m going to try and tell as many stories as we can.

After Scott and I exited Minnesota, we drove across almost all of South Dakota in one day. I was remembering a conversation that I had with my uncle Pete, an avid road-tripper, where he sort of indicated that there was “not much” in this part of the country and that we’d probably want to blow through it as quickly as possible. Boy, was he right- it was all corn. Oceans of corn. As far as the eye could sea.

As we found out later during a conversation with a Black Hills native, South Dakota is divided into the East of the Missouri river (corn), the Western part (wheat and ranches) and the oasis- the Black Hills. He was definitely right about the Black Hills, but I also noticed the transition from corn the wheat as we drove across the state. Always been a much bigger fan of wheat fields than corn fields. Something about the color makes them beautiful to me. I was going to say they seem romantic, but from me that just comes out sounding idiotic.

Towards the end of the night Scott and I had to find an emergency camp location due to an oncoming storm. I’ll plead the fifth on where we picked but I will say this: we were desperate, it was very dark and when we woke up we discovered that we were a lot closer to someones front yard than we were comfortable with.

That’s the nice thing about packing so light. Right after the realization that we basically camped in somebody’s driveway, we packed up and got the hell out of there. Next stop, the Badlands!