So far, South Dakota is pretty great.
I mean, sure, there’s a lot of nothing here. Grassy prairies stretching as far as the eye can see, without even a tree or ramshackle old barn to break the horizon between land and sky. But we’ve also discovered a lot of something here… and some of that something is, well, really something.
Big Thumbs Up for Big Sioux
Our first two nights in South Dakota were at the Big Sioux Recreation Area outside of Sioux Falls. This is a really pretty campground just a few miles from the largest city in the state. We had a nice, tree-shaded site that backed onto a walking and biking trail on the bank of the Big Sioux River. As we pulled in, there was a feral cat strolling down the trail, so Zora naturally spent the next two days monitoring all passersby for additional feline activity. Alas, we never saw kitty again.

The falls in Sioux Falls.
After checking out horny Moses, we drove across town to see David’s, um, man parts. Rumor has it that his unmentionables, even undersized as they are (cut the guy some slack for shrinkage, he was squaring off against a giant!), caused quite a stir when the bronze casting of Michelangelo’s marble original was unveiled in Sioux Falls in the early 1970s.
A Different Kind of Silo

This launch facility is closed, but hundreds of others are still operational—and still using 1960s vintage equipment. What could possibly go wrong?
It was an interesting experience, stepping into the underground control room where “missiliers” had been just a couple key-turns away from annihilating the world I grew up in (although I learned that actually two separate launch centers had to independently receive and confirm launch commands in order to initiate Armageddon). The entire facility has been preserved exactly as it was on the day it was deactivated in 1993, right down to the issues of Newsweek and Time in the Day Room with cover photos of David Koresh and the burning Waco compound.
It was the last tour of the day and I was the only American in the group, so I got to help the ranger take down the American flag at the launch facility while the tourists from Europe and the couple from Saskatchewan snapped photos.
Baking in The Badlands

Those sure are some baaad lands.
Maureen was relieved when we pulled into our campsite, because it meant she didn’t have to listen to me sing the same Bruce Springsteen song over and over anymore, as I had for the past few hours. The campground was nothing special—just a loop road with wide spots to pull over on the shoulder of the pavement. And our assigned site was smack on a small hill, which made for some white knuckle moments unhitching the trailer and hoping the wheel chocks would win out against gravity. Plus, it was 90 degrees with no trees for shade anywhere in the campground.
The rest of the park was fantastic, however. Zora and I saw a really informative ranger talk about prairie dogs (Maureen was battling some kind of flu) the first night, and then saw hundreds of actual prairie dogs the next day on a drive through the park. (The little stinkers didn’t seem impressed when I shouted at them with trivia from the ranger talk the night before: “Do you guys know that scientists regard your vocalizations as a sophisticated language that allows you to alert each other about the specific appearance of potential threats near your burrows?”) We also saw amazing, multicolored mounds and spires of layered rock, a coyote stalking a buffalo, and a bighorn sheep. But Zora really only cared about those damned prairie dogs.