Adventures, adventures!
Alright, for those who may have missed the memo - I am on vacation along with my parental unit, bearmum, and her parental unit, Gran'mama Phyllis, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Tomorrow morning we go home, but I made the singular error of showing Gran'mama my last Livejournal entry, and now she wants the whole thing.
So - the continuing story of Evil Fi and her predecessors, running around Rapid City and points outward like crazy people.
Tuesday - more or less a day of rest, we decided to stay in town and hit the local museums. Gran'mama was not feeling especially well in the morning, so Mum and I siezed the opportunity to run off to the Reptile Gardens - a local roadside attraction which boasts the "largest reptile collection in the western hemisphere", a pretty preposterous claim.
That turned out to be true.
The Reptile Gardens are great. They have three galapagos turtles for petting, and a prodigious collection of reptiles, birds and amphibians. Some of the larger animals are in rather small cages, which is a little sad, BUT they have venomous snakes in captivity that are the only samples of their species outside of their native habitat - rare australian elapids and a komodo dragon and other fascinating creatures, which are all beautifully displayed.
Mum, of course, is not p'ticularly good with snakes, but she can admire them behind glass aesthetically, so she bravely stuck with me as I reverted to my inner eight-year-old and ran around gleefully exclaiming over gaboon vipers and mambas and monocled cobras. She was perfectly fine with the "Alligator show", where the nice man threw chicken thighs to the gators (in a small enclosure with more than thirty of them) and showed the correct way to close a gator's mouth and/or immobilize a gator - handy for those times when you are stuck in a bad B-Movie. She was good right up to the Snake Show, when the handler took out the venomous mangrove snake and started showing it around. Then she had to go outside and hyperventilate for a while. Really, I have the bravest Mom in the entire world. I mean, she's phobic and she's still willing to go to a snake show just to hold my hand and watch my face light up in delight.
Anyway, she missed seeing the cottonmouth and the monocle cobra and the prairie rattlesnake out of their cages, which were awesome, and she missed out on petting the giant albino burmese python (named Marilyn, of course), but afterwards (with all the snakes safely put away) we talked to the handler a bit and generally had a good time.
After that, we swung back to the hotel and picked up Gran'mama for the museums. We went to the Museum of Geology, which had a really wonderful selection of fossils, and the Journey Museum, which is arranged chronologically for the local area history from mosasaurs to the great flood of '77.
After that we were, by the gods, tired. But we still went up to the top of the hill and saw the life-sized brontosaurus and his friends, iron-and-concrete painted sculptures that dated from the thirties (their morphology, alas, was woefully out of date - tails dragging and everything) and said hello, before retiring in utter exhaustion to our hotel room for a nap before dinner.
Edit:After dinner, we went and caught a 7:00 showing of 3:10 to Yuma, which was excellent. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, yum. THEN we went to bed.
Wednesday: Gran'mama had announced she was too tired to go to the badlands with us, so Mum and I got up at the very crack of dawn and hit the road early. We got to see the sun rise over the prairie on the drive west, and hit the town of Wall (no, I'm not making that up) just in time for breakfast at Wall Drug, an infamously wierd place that's mainly known for being loud and full of tacky things.
I'm not going to go into the many, many virtues of Wall Drug - they have, in with the tourist glurge and hideous tchotchkes that no sane person would want, one of the finest collections of western illustrative art (magazines and book covers and such) IN THE WORLD - Wyeth, Dunn, etc - open to the public. I'm talking original oils here, just hangin' in their restaurant. They also make a damned fine donut and their coffee is 5 cents a cup. I'm just gonna say, go there. Seriously.
So we had breakfast and goggled at Wall Drug's art collection and then - THEN - primed and ready for wonder - we drove into the Dakota Badlands.
I heartily recommend this activity.
Also, take your time and stop a LOT, primarily so your driver will not roll you quietly over the cliff while ogling the landscape, which defies description. The Badlands are beautiful, especially after a wet year, like this one, where the prairie is still blooming, green and gold grasses falling wildly across striated rocks in every conceivable color combination - reds and ash-white and purple and orange, arranged in fairytale spires and sphinxes that go on for MILES and MILES, into the purple distance. On top, of course, is an impossible layer-cake sky of cloud layers with gods-eyes poking through and long caravans of crepuscular rays marching across the land. It really is a wonder that Mum didn't just drive us off a cliff in the first ten minutes of it, we were so amazed.
We made the obligatory stop at the Visitor's center to watch the movie and pick up supplies, but tried to push on a little further before Lunch. We dropve south through the park to the White River Visitors' center, which is maintained within the Pine Ridge reservation by the Lakota Sioux, but by the time we got there we were so tired from the drive we didn't want to go anywhere else - we could have gone to Wounded Knee, but we were feeling a little emotionally vulnerable, so we declined.
So there we were with our maps, looking at roads out of the Badlands.
"Well, look at this one", I said. "It's a straight shot over to Wind Cave, which you wanted to see."
Mum looked at the map. "That", she said, "is a gravel road."
"It's a state highway, and it's on the Rez. Surely it's a very well-maintained gravel road." I said, coaxingly.
Mum looked dubious. I looked cheerful. "C'mon, it'll be an adventure...." I said.
To be continued!
So - the continuing story of Evil Fi and her predecessors, running around Rapid City and points outward like crazy people.
Tuesday - more or less a day of rest, we decided to stay in town and hit the local museums. Gran'mama was not feeling especially well in the morning, so Mum and I siezed the opportunity to run off to the Reptile Gardens - a local roadside attraction which boasts the "largest reptile collection in the western hemisphere", a pretty preposterous claim.
That turned out to be true.
The Reptile Gardens are great. They have three galapagos turtles for petting, and a prodigious collection of reptiles, birds and amphibians. Some of the larger animals are in rather small cages, which is a little sad, BUT they have venomous snakes in captivity that are the only samples of their species outside of their native habitat - rare australian elapids and a komodo dragon and other fascinating creatures, which are all beautifully displayed.
Mum, of course, is not p'ticularly good with snakes, but she can admire them behind glass aesthetically, so she bravely stuck with me as I reverted to my inner eight-year-old and ran around gleefully exclaiming over gaboon vipers and mambas and monocled cobras. She was perfectly fine with the "Alligator show", where the nice man threw chicken thighs to the gators (in a small enclosure with more than thirty of them) and showed the correct way to close a gator's mouth and/or immobilize a gator - handy for those times when you are stuck in a bad B-Movie. She was good right up to the Snake Show, when the handler took out the venomous mangrove snake and started showing it around. Then she had to go outside and hyperventilate for a while. Really, I have the bravest Mom in the entire world. I mean, she's phobic and she's still willing to go to a snake show just to hold my hand and watch my face light up in delight.
Anyway, she missed seeing the cottonmouth and the monocle cobra and the prairie rattlesnake out of their cages, which were awesome, and she missed out on petting the giant albino burmese python (named Marilyn, of course), but afterwards (with all the snakes safely put away) we talked to the handler a bit and generally had a good time.
After that, we swung back to the hotel and picked up Gran'mama for the museums. We went to the Museum of Geology, which had a really wonderful selection of fossils, and the Journey Museum, which is arranged chronologically for the local area history from mosasaurs to the great flood of '77.
After that we were, by the gods, tired. But we still went up to the top of the hill and saw the life-sized brontosaurus and his friends, iron-and-concrete painted sculptures that dated from the thirties (their morphology, alas, was woefully out of date - tails dragging and everything) and said hello, before retiring in utter exhaustion to our hotel room for a nap before dinner.
Edit:After dinner, we went and caught a 7:00 showing of 3:10 to Yuma, which was excellent. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, yum. THEN we went to bed.
Wednesday: Gran'mama had announced she was too tired to go to the badlands with us, so Mum and I got up at the very crack of dawn and hit the road early. We got to see the sun rise over the prairie on the drive west, and hit the town of Wall (no, I'm not making that up) just in time for breakfast at Wall Drug, an infamously wierd place that's mainly known for being loud and full of tacky things.
I'm not going to go into the many, many virtues of Wall Drug - they have, in with the tourist glurge and hideous tchotchkes that no sane person would want, one of the finest collections of western illustrative art (magazines and book covers and such) IN THE WORLD - Wyeth, Dunn, etc - open to the public. I'm talking original oils here, just hangin' in their restaurant. They also make a damned fine donut and their coffee is 5 cents a cup. I'm just gonna say, go there. Seriously.
So we had breakfast and goggled at Wall Drug's art collection and then - THEN - primed and ready for wonder - we drove into the Dakota Badlands.
I heartily recommend this activity.
Also, take your time and stop a LOT, primarily so your driver will not roll you quietly over the cliff while ogling the landscape, which defies description. The Badlands are beautiful, especially after a wet year, like this one, where the prairie is still blooming, green and gold grasses falling wildly across striated rocks in every conceivable color combination - reds and ash-white and purple and orange, arranged in fairytale spires and sphinxes that go on for MILES and MILES, into the purple distance. On top, of course, is an impossible layer-cake sky of cloud layers with gods-eyes poking through and long caravans of crepuscular rays marching across the land. It really is a wonder that Mum didn't just drive us off a cliff in the first ten minutes of it, we were so amazed.
We made the obligatory stop at the Visitor's center to watch the movie and pick up supplies, but tried to push on a little further before Lunch. We dropve south through the park to the White River Visitors' center, which is maintained within the Pine Ridge reservation by the Lakota Sioux, but by the time we got there we were so tired from the drive we didn't want to go anywhere else - we could have gone to Wounded Knee, but we were feeling a little emotionally vulnerable, so we declined.
So there we were with our maps, looking at roads out of the Badlands.
"Well, look at this one", I said. "It's a straight shot over to Wind Cave, which you wanted to see."
Mum looked at the map. "That", she said, "is a gravel road."
"It's a state highway, and it's on the Rez. Surely it's a very well-maintained gravel road." I said, coaxingly.
Mum looked dubious. I looked cheerful. "C'mon, it'll be an adventure...." I said.
To be continued!