Day Nine: Friday, June 23, 2017
Thankfully, no bears visited our Colter Bay campsite, but I will say that as I was falling asleep that night, every snap of a twig or crunch of gravel made me wonder if a bear was on the other side of our tent. In hindsight, I‘m not sure it was worth it to camp in the park instead of getting further down the road a bit, but you just don’t know these things until you do them and find out.
We were up and on the road early, with the plan of getting home that night. I cringed at the thought of buying gas at a gas station inside of a national park, but was pleasantly surprised that it cost about the same as anywhere else! I was also pleasantly surprised to find some red rocks along the route. I wasn’t sure what to expect after leaving the mountains.
Our morning passed fairly quickly with the changing landscape transitioning from the mountains to the plains. Our afternoon route, however, took us through the national grasslands of Wyoming, which felt like they went on forever. I don’t have a photo, but picture tall grass and clear blue sky. That’s it…as far as the eye can see! I’ve grown to appreciate small doses of grassland, but it’s definitely not the afternoon pick-me-up of driving scenery I needed.
Mount Rushmore
We decided to stop at Mount Rushmore again. I figured we may as well get another use out of that $10 parking pass, since who knows when we’d be back. For a mountain with faces carved into it, it looks a lot better with some pretty blue morning sky in the background, but early evening sky works too. The Presidential Trail gave us a nice view from below.
Evening in the Badlands
Having been on the road all day already, I decided I needed another “break” on the way home so we took a detour through Badlands National Park. It’s really only a break from driving 80mph in exchange for driving 45mph so it wasn’t much of a break…and it made the drive take that much longer. But the views…
I really shouldn’t let this cat out of the bag, but evening in the Badlands is the absolute best time to visit the Badlands! The formations have colors you’ll never see in the midday sun, plus it’s not hot and nobody else is there but the wildlife. An evening drive through the Badlands is pretty much the only way we visit anymore.
I prolonged the inevitable long enough and we departed the other end of the park in the dark. “Only” four more hours until we were home. I don’t remember much of the rest of the drive since we have done this particular leg so many times, but I know I stopped multiple times for short naps and jumping jacks to wake up a bit. It had been such a long day and long drive already. We stopped to admire the stars and learned that you could see the Milky Way Galaxy in South Dakota, something I had not known before! Finally, we made it home, in the wee hours of the night, exhausted and ready to sleep in our own beds for the first time in a week!
Looking Back on Our First Big Trip
When I look back on this particular trip, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, pretty much every day. We sampled the mountains, the desert, a cave, and more mountains. If I were to do the trip over again, would I change anything? Sure, but then it would’ve been a different experience and we have this experience. We didn’t spend long in one spot, but we didn’t know that we’d love camping in the Utah desert. You don’t know what you don’t know!
I learned a lot about road tripping, tent camping, and our travel style on this trip. Now, I plan for fewer road miles each day so there’s more time for exploring. I spend more time researching. (It’s become like a hobby to find all the places with pretty rocks to visit. Ha!)
I still don’t plan trips that “dig deeper” into one location for a week, but I love sampling bits and pieces of a place and moving on. That has allowed us to experience more places. It also leaves room to revisit places and have new experiences at different times of our travel journey…peeling back the layers, as they say. We’ve been savoring different corners of Utah and the southwest ever since!
The Route and Stats
I’d like to end this series with a graphic of the route and stats. I’ve also included the itinerary with links to each day.
The Itinerary
Day 1: Wall Drug, SD Air and Space Museum, Mount Rushmore Lighting Ceremony
Day 2: Visit SD School of Mines, Drive to Cheyenne, Wyoming
Day 3: Rocky Mountain National Park, Trough Road, Drive to Moab
Day 4: Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Moab
Day 5: Arches National Park, Moab, Goblin Valley State Park
Day 6: Drive to Salt Lake City Area, LEGO Shopping
Day 7: Timpanogos Cave National Monument, Alpine Scenic Byway, Drive to Wyoming
Day 8: Grand Teton National Park
Day 9: Drive to South Dakota, Mount Rushmore, Badlands National Park