Days 28-29: Cody, Wyoming -> The Badlands, South Dakota

-Tatonka near our campsite in the Badlands National Park

Friday we woke at our leisure and went downtown to Cody to experience the Fourth of July festivities “western-style.” No running water at the campsite means no showering so there’s not much to do besides eat breakfast and go. We had our rice krispies, closed the pop-top, and headed downtown. We spent the day doing Cody things – listening to live country music in the local park, touring the Buffalo Bill museum, eating dinner at the Proud Cut restaurant (apparently the best in town although we likened it to a fancy burger joint), and watching a shoot-out at the long-running, history-rich Irma hotel, whose namesake is Buffalo Bill’s daughter. The town owes its roots to Buffalo Bill but tourists like us, interested in western history and culture, perpetuate its existence. We ended the day with a ride on the scrambler at the local carnival where we were the oldest by about 20 years. Jono nearly had a tantrum after finding out there was no fried dough and left the grounds grumbling “How can you call yourselves a carnival without fried dough?!” We got back to our campsite on the reservoir in Buffalo Bill State Park in time to witness the destruction of our neighbors’ tent by the wind. Those poor guys were sleeping in their car when we left this morning.

Today we drove east from Cody, through the Bull Horn National Forest on route 16, where the sky opened its chutes and released marble sized hail as we drove over the mountain pass. It seems like a beautiful place and if we didn’t need to drive 7 hours we’d have stopped to camp. Tonight we’re in the Badlands National Park camping for free!! What an oddly beautifully place.

We’ve been traveling for four weeks now and have begun to define tourism in our own way. The richest parts of our days are our drives along smaller, faintly mapped roads that bring us through the center of towns where regular life comes to pass; where there are few super highways to bring outsiders like ourselves into the picture, and we can begin to see how existence here occurs, as if we’re flies on a wall/cow. Our aim for the last week or so is to continue this trend to travel on less-traveled routes as to feel a little less like tourists wherever we wind up.

Tomorrow we’re going to go on a hike in the Badlands and then to Rosebud Indian Reservation to see a pow-wow and watch fireworks for the 4th.

One week to go...