That movie scarred me. Watched it at my aunt and uncles cabin in the woods with the door open when I was a kid.
Just got back from a 10 day "vacation", drove a kid to college in St Paul, did about 4,500 miles round trip, going to slowly go over the photos and post interesting ones. Was a long, hard trip with too much driving to exploration ratio. But we had fun and places we did not get to hike are added to the list for when we do get the time... First day was California to Nevada to South West Utah.
The Badlands @TRNP, North Dakota. We visited the Badlands NP in South Dakota about 20 years ago and it is wonderful, however, to do it this time we would have to go through South Dakota which is, frankly, my least favorite state to traverse. It is flat and boring like most of the midwest, but has these cheap advertising signs everywhere for hundreds of miles. I was ready to kill someone at the end of the last time we drove through it, so decided to give North Dakota a try. FWIW, the badlands in ND are not as dramatic as the ones in SD, but there is a lot more color and a lot more wildlife to observe, add the fact that ND itself is actually very pretty and Bismarck had one of the best Indian dinners I ever had, and I would recommend North Dakota over South Dakota any day of the week
We were doing a BLM road somewhere in Utah, pretty much by ourselves, when we heard a small plane, surprisingly he chose to land somewhere on a bit of flat nothingness. We yelled at him to see if he was OK, he was out and ignored us, maybe taking pictures of his plane in the middle. Research shows it to be a Zenith STOL CH701 - a kitplane designed for short/no airport landing / taking off.
You met my buddy Bob! We got acquainted when I passed through that part of Teddy Roosevelt in 2019. I told him all about watching the Buffalo Bison's home opener 2 weeks earlier. He likes the Bisons but hates the Bills........and yeah, crossing S. Dakota is about as boring as it gets (though the western end is gorgeous). And it's nice to hear that someone else was as disgusted by all that signage as I was. What a blight on the landscape.
