We're On the Road!

I had hoped to post more about our trip preparations and packing strategies and whatnot in the weeks leading up to our trip, but turns out that I really don't have a whole lot of spare time for blog posting!

We are really going to make a solid effort to keep up on the daily blog posting while we are traveling though, mostly for our own scrapbook to look back on, but hopefully a few people will read and enjoy as well.

Katy had her final ballet class and recital yesterday and our plan was to have everything packed up and ready to go so that we could leave right after, around 7pm. I also really wanted to be mindful about keeping calm, avoiding having anyone yelling, and getting off to a pleasant start. For the most part we were successful. Joe and I not only had to have everything packed and planned for the road trip, but also had a lot of work to do for our real estate business before we left. I put in a 10 hour work day on business related stuff, including some last minute unexpected surprises, but we still managed to leave at 7:30pm.

In our driveway, just before departure!

Shortly after leaving the house, I made the mistake of handing Katy some dry erase marker activity cards, and she accidentally made a black mark on Mary's new Squishimal, and then felt so horrible about it that she threw a screaming yelling tantrum and tension in the van was definitely running high for everyone. We worked through it though, and here's a trip log of our first night:

• Left our house in Waukesha yesterday at 7:30pm. 
• 8:05 pm - first pit stop at McDonald’s, seeing as we had been too busy getting everything packed and loaded in the van to have time for dinner at home (probably would have helped with that tantrum if everyone wasn't STARVING!)
• 8:20 pm - back on the road
• 9:32 pm - second pit stop at Walmart (bathroom break, and picked up a few essentials we still needed, including ice for the coolers), total miles traveled: 114
• 9:58 pm - back on the road
• 11:15 pm - crossed the Mississippi River and entered Minnesota! Thought about stopping to take a photo at the “Welcome to Minnesota” sign, but some of the kids were sleeping
• 1:15 am - third pit stop at a gas station. Filled up the tank, 26.583 gallons, $68.03 ($2.55/gal). Total miles traveled: 337
• 1:50 am - final stop of the day, Blue Earth Rest Area, Total miles traveled: 366

Admittedly settling down for the night at 2 in the morning was not ideal, but there were not many rest areas to choose from on the route so we decided to push through. It was our first successful night of “boondocking”! Here’s a little video I took this morning showing our sleeping arrangements.

Joe and I slept on our comfy bed in the back of the van. Lily and Katy laid down on the two benches. Joey slept in a hammock that we strung up diagonally towards the front of the van. Joe cut a piece of plywood to fit across the front seats and Mary slept here since she is the tallest. We purchased self-inflating camping mats at Aldi she said it was pretty comfy. 

Everyone started to wake up around 6:30 am. It was surprisingly chilly, in the 50s. The forecast for where we are headed later today is in the 90s though!

I brought along some “surprise” road trip activities and handed out the first one this morning - a new notebook for each kid to use on the trip. I pasted in the back cover of each one a United States map so they could color the states on our route, or cross of license plates, or whatever else they want to do with it. Katy proceeded to color in Wisconsin, and then Alaska and Hawaii - ambitious goals! 

Mary's been practicing drawing figures from the side; here are some of her road trip sketches.

Here's our trip log for today:

• 7:20 am - Left the rest area and headed out on the road again
• About 9am - Finished crossing Minnesota and entered South Dakota
• 11:29 am - Pit stop in Presho, SD to get gas and eat a picnic lunch from our van (groceries we bought at home), and also let kids purchase a small candy treat for the road - Gas was $2.79/gal, we got 19.846 gallons for $55.55. Miles traveled so far today: 311

  

  Road Trip CANDY!

• 12:03 pm - Back on the road again!
• 12:34 pm - Arrived at Badlands National Park!

We purchased an annual National Park Pass for $80 since we are visiting so many national parks on this road trip - it will definitely be a savings in our case. 

We drove to our campground just outside the park to check in. We hoped to get our whole campsite set up, and then spend the rest of the day in the National Park. Unfortunately when we tried to set up our two tents for the kids (we were planning on two kids per tent), we discovered that one of them was completely broken. It must have gotten stepped on or something at home, and was so bad that we just threw it in a dumpster. Maybe we'll pick up another tent on the road, or maybe we'll keep sleeping a couple kids in the van. It was pretty windy, so we decided not to set up the sleeping tent, but we did set up our screen tent over the picnic table.

Our first stop in the park was the Ben Reifel Visitor Center. We filled up all of our water bottles because by now it was HOT and SUNNY, and everyone took a bathroom break. The visitor center was actually pretty neat - they had a Paleontology Lab where you could see scientists actually working on fossils, and some cool displays on fossils found in the park. They have a huge wall with photos of people who have found and reported fossils so far in 2019 - so many! We all decided we wanted to find a fossil and make it up on the wall. 

We decided to hike the "Door Trail" first, because it was the easiest. 

Ready for our first hike! We went to an REI garage sale the week before we left and picked up six "Kool Ties" and I'm glad we did, because it was very hot and these helped a lot! They are neck ties filled with absorbent crystals of some kind - you soak them in water and they fill up and become a gel-like substance and it stays wet and cool around your neck for several hours.

It was hard to stop taking photos of the Badlands because everywhere you look the landscape is amazing. The kids were so excited to get out and explore! One cool thing about this park is that off-trail exploring is permitted, and you can climb around everywhere. The Door trails started off with a super easy boardwalk hike, but then there was a section at the end where you could continue beyond the boardwalk for a more adventurous experience. Of course we went for it, and it was super fun, but on the way back everyone was really hot and tired and hungry.

Joey was the most excited about being allowed to go off-trail and climb up on things. We have SO MANY photos of him on top of things! People were exclaiming, "Look at that kid up there!" multiple times today. He had a blast!

Walking back to our van after the Door Trail, Katy noticed this butterfly on the grill of another vehicle and wanted me to take a photo of how sad she was. She proceeded to examine the fronts of all the vehicles and found a lot of them. 

For lunch we again did a picnic, this time at a table outside the visitor center. We are trying to minimize restaurant food purchases to keep our expenses down. Here we had cut up apples, cheeses, deli meats, crackers, and baby carrots. Plus drinking lots and lots of water.

Again Joey could not keep off the rocks. He's the tiny speck in between Mary's fingers up on those rock hills in the distance!

After we finished eating, we decided to investigate the rest of the Visitor Center. They have a lot of interesting exhibits and a nice gift shop. The kids got booklets for the Junior Ranger program, so maybe we'll fill those out tonight so they can earn a patch. We also watched a film in their little theater about the Badlands. Turns out we were all pretty exhausted from our low amount of sleep last night though, and we were all nodding off during the movie. So we decided to head back to the camp site and rest for a bit, maybe go swimming in the campground pool, and head back to the park for another hike when it was cooler. Did I mention that it was SUPER HOT? Must have been in the mid nineties.

We have a great view of the Badlands from our campsite!

Unfortunately when we got back to the camp site we found that strong winds had kind of pushed over our screen tent and bent it a little bit. We also learned that there was a tornado watch and thunderstorm warning just issued, so we decided to pack up all the tents and load everything back into the van. The kids were also disappointed that they were now unable to go swimming, but on the plus side the temperature dropped about 20 degrees so it was now in the 70s. It also seemed like the worst of the storm was going to miss us. I took this short time lapse video of the storm going by.

Shortly after this it did start raining, so we were especially glad we had packed everything up in the van. The kids were happy to learn that our campsite had free Wifi, and so they started to zone out on tablets after a very hot and exhausting day with lots of driving and hiking in the sun. Joe and I were itching to get back into the park though, we didn't want to spend all evening cramped in the van. The rain didn't last very long, but even after it stopped the kids were all a bit whiny and saying they just wanted to stay in the van for the rest of the night. Fortunately we had a miraculous sign from above that we needed to drive back into the park - an intense rainbow that ended RIGHT back in the Badlands! We drove off on in hot pursuit of the treasure at the end of the rainbow.

The girls all wanted to pose with the rainbow. You can guess what Joey was off doing.

It was at this point that Joe realized that Lily was no longer wearing her glasses. We searched everywhere in the van and came up empty. Tears were shed. We reviewed all of our photos and saw that Lily last had been wearing her glasses on the Door Trail. She remembered that she was so hot and sweaty at the end that she hooked them on her shirt collar and that's the last time she saw them. We decided to go back and look for them, even though the odds seemed low on finding them. Then I remembered the girls had all been laying down in one shady spot along the boardwalk, moaning about the heat and exhaustion and hunger, while Joey scampered around on the cliffs like a mountain goat. We headed for that spot, and I was thinking of my Grandma Diane and how she prays to St. Anthony for help in finding lost things ("Tony, Tony, look around, something's lost and can't be found!"). Mary climbed down below the boardwalk and found Lily's glasses! Whew!

It was now getting to be later in the evening, but the air was so pleasant and cool and we were already at the Notch Trailhead, so we decided to hike it tonight instead of first thing in the morning like we originally planned. We all had gotten a second wind anyway. 

Warning sign at the start of the Notch Trail. There are lots of warnings, but we haven't seen any rattlesnakes yet.

We did see lots of tiny toads though.

The Notch trail hike was AMAZING and the weather was totally perfect. We ended up having to hustle a little bit because darkness was falling fast, but this was a great hike. We took a lot of pictures and here are the best ones.

Probably the coolest thing that happened was that I said out loud, "It's my dream to see bighorn sheep" and then about 30 seconds later a family of them came scampering by quite close to us!

We made it back to the van just in time - would not have wanted to get caught out there in the dark! We headed back to the camp site and it was pretty buggy and everyone was tired and our van is not quite as organized as we would like but we managed to get everyone to sleep and then I pulled out my laptop and took advantage of the campground Wifi to do some business work and create this blog post. Good night!