So, heading west out of Merriman for a short time on Route 20, we turned north on highway 73, and soon found ourselves in South Dakota, and happy about it because we had never been in a Dakota, and we were on route to see the holy grail of all USA road trips, Mount Rushmore. As an added bonus, we got to pass through the Bad Lands which we were looking forward to, but which did not seem all that bad viewed from an air conditioned car at 50 miles per hour, but as the movie and the printed information at the visitors center informed us, it was very, very bad, even horrible if you were making your way west in a wagon train at the rate of a mile or two a day, exposed to the heat, the cold, the bugs, the mind numbing tedium that drove many people crazy, the disease, the impassable trails, and if you lived through all that, the indians, who were not all that happy about your being there. Having travelled extensively through some of the most inhospitable parts of the USA, it has always astounded me how these early pioneers did it. Many, many didn't however and were buried along the way, so there must have been some sort of natural selection in which only the fittest and luckiest made it west.
Vaguely apropos to our disconnect with the landscape of the Badlands and all of the terror and misery it once held, was a vaguely poetic thought I had when I was having poetic thoughts.
Middle age, when life starts to seem
like a long series of wrong turns and
missed opportunities, New York to LA
at 65 miles per hour and coming up on the left,
the last chance to fill up for the next hundred miles.
Its now or never!#&@@!
As long as its more important to be right than happy,
There can be no hope....
This was about as close as we got to anything remotely dangerous, and having spent a great deal of time in the barren expanses of the south west, the bad lands did not seem all that new or awe inspiring to us, but not uninteresting either for that matter. I don't know, maybe I was expecting something badder, or maybe I should have gotten out of the car a little more at that point. But I seemed fixated on the ghost towns of Nebraska at that point, and I had already done my southwest thing (refer to the blog entry "Seeing") so it was hard to get enthusiastic. But in case you were curious, here you go.
So after our visit to the badlands, we were off to Mount Rushmore, which it turned out was quite an inspiring sight. In spite of the millions of times you've seen it in photos a, movies, and postcards, it was kind of breath taking to be there. I was quite surprised by my reaction!!! I guess I'm not as jaded as I thought.
In preparation for our pilgrimage to Mount Rushmore, we watched North by Northwest which was shot there in the late 50's or early 60's. Much to our disappointment, the evocative visitors center/restaurant in the movie was gone and replaced by some oversized, overwrought, stone extravaganza with promenade, 50 state flags and an overkill that would have made the Disney people proud. Luckily, when viewing the mount, it was to your back and easily forgotten.
But all in all, the reviews here are 4 thumbs up. Glad we did it. Onto Rapid City, SD to spend Saturday and Sunday morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment