Wall, SD and Badlands
After waking up in Wasta, we drove a little further east to Wall, South Dakota. Our destination was Wall Drug, a drugstore that has been in business since 1931, slowly transforming from old fashioned pharmacy to huge West-themed museum, shopping mall and tourist attraction.
They still sell regular drug store products but now offer any souvenir or tchotchke a tourist might want within a 76,000 square foot warehouse, the interior of which is made to resemble old-timey storefronts. They're known for advertising with billboards hundreds of miles away.
From Wall we continued south into the Badlands National Park, a beautiful open space with unpaved roads, hundreds of thousands (I'm guessing) prairie dogs and amazing rock formations.
The cliffs and hills you see throughout the Badlands (we learned later at the Visitor Center) are undergoing constant erosion and change from year to year throughout the seasons. You can hike out and camp but we stuck to the roads, getting out at various viewpoints and walking around.
We saw a bighorn sheep. We were hoping for a thunderstorm, being likely this time of year, but none materialized while we were in the park. As you can see, it was a beautiful, sunny day. We stopped at a turnout and had lunch, watching chipmunks/ground squirrels scurry up the crumbly hills.
After getting enough of the Badlands, we kept driving in the direction of Cheyenne towards Denver. We got as far as tiny Yoder, WY that night, stopping at a free campsite near a few reservoirs/game reserves. In the morning we biked around a little bit, exploring the area and finding shotgun shells from hunters.
Yoder, WY:
We got into Cheyenne mid-day and took showers at the YMCA, then went to a coffee shop for lunch and wifi. It felt kind of good in Cheyenne, warm and windy. We got into Arvada, CO (outside of Denver) that the evening to our Boondocker's Welcome spot.
