Badlands V

After Chris and Brooke headed out, I took off to explore more of the park. I headed down to the Southern section of the park to check out this several mile dirt road that goes up onto one of those big mounds of dirt with a prairie on top. As you will see in the pictures, the dirt road was pretty rough, and at times was just two ruts about 8" lower than the dirt in the middle, but the van handled it like a champ. I can see why the people that own the 4WD versions say it is the best off road vehicle out there, because mine tore it up. At times I felt like I was on the moon, the landscape was so crazy, and once I got on top ( I guess they are called Buttes), and was driving along a cliff, the scenery was amazing. Here's a look, although most of the pictures I took were on the real cameras....

After that little adventure I headed up the road, hoping to get some better pictures at the front of the park than when I came in, stopped for gas, ice, and what I was quickly realizing to be THE most important supply (with coffee a close second)....Beer. Not only is a cold beer at the end of the day a beautiful thing unto itself, but it is worth its weight in gold in the camping community. I could probably throw out all of my food, fill the van with beer and ice, and trade for food cooked by other people. Made it to the front of the park and was getting some amazing light from the sun so I stopped to take some pictures. As I was getting out of the van, this guy walked up to me and started talking about Vanagons. He has one, and it turns out he recognized mine from the campground. He and a friend of his were from Michigan and were traveling out West for about 3 weeks. He invited me over for some sort of gin concoction they were having that night. As I was getting to my prime location for pictures, some clouds started rolling in, so I set up and waited for about an hour for the light to come back. Never got the light I wanted, but I shot about 2 1/2 rolls of film trying to get a shot of lightning. I think I got one good one, and maybe one ok one. We'll see whenever I get my film developed.

I had been thinking about having a relaxing evening, but my two new friends from Michigan wandered over with a beer. Turns out that in their haste to leave, they forgot a stove, and had some hotdogs sitting in their cooler. I offered up my stove, and in return they offered up some hotdogs. Damn those were tasty hotdogs. In the end, they gave me all the leftover hotdogs since they had no way to cook them. MMMmmmm hotdogs for lunch for the next three days. So I sat around with my new friends drinking beer until bedtime. The one guy was pretty funny, after quite a few beers he got into this huge argument with his friend (who had just been laid off from one of the Big # accounting firms) about the uselessness of what his chosen career was. When they got into what was apparently a very old argument, I decided to go to bed, at which point he settled down and told me how cool my trip was and gave me a hug.