South Dakota: The Badlands: Who Knew How Good They Would Be?

 At breakfast, in Chamberlain, on the Missouri River, we met a hale and hearty octogenarian who'd grown up on a farm in northwestern South Dakota. (To complete my round of the compass points, I should add that she has spent her adult life in the East.) When she heard our praise of the part of the state we'd seen and our  plans to cross the rest of her native state that day, she asked whether we'd ever seen South Dakota west of the Missouri. "It's an entirely different place, she said, and so it was, we found, and spectacularly so.

 What a setting for a picnic!

Dry, rolling hills, dotted with black Angus, then the apparition of some rosy land mass in the distance, as we drove our 2,000th mile and entered Mountain Time. That mass was the first hint of the Badlands, where strati of vermilion stone are interlaid with yellow, gray, brown, in cliffs, bluffs and spires that one friend has compared to the domes and spires of Angkor Wat.

We loved the surprising encounters with Badland critters. The first prairie dogs we saw were lined up along the road like sentries, perched on their behinds. A solitary bison --- then a whole throng ---   curly horned sheep and herds of pronghorn antelopes.

Onward to Rapid City! After checking in, we promptly abandoned our latest residence in Big Box Nowhere'sville to head downtown to Le Bistro, a delightful Bistro restaurant, where we enjoyed a most fabulous dinner and Tom inspected the map of French cheeses.