Deadwood and Badlands

Hi again everyone.
Sorry it's taken a while to update the blog but we have been pretty busy and we're also getting organised for Jess to arrive. Unfortunately that was supposed to be today but she arrived in LA on time this morning only to find that all flights to Denver had been cancelled because of a blizzard. The lucky girl gets to spend a night in the Hilton in LA, unfortunately she had to do it on her own.
Hopefully we will be able to get her here tomorrow although we have had to buy her another ticket via Salt Lake City and Casper. People over here are beginning to think they shouldn't travel with us.

Last weekend we took off for the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. It's about an hour east of Rapid City so we decided to stay in Deadwood on Friday night and have a look around before heading over to the park on Saturday. Deadwood was the place where Wild Bill Hickock was killed and also where Calamity Jane and other well known western characters came from.
We were there with another couple from the project and it was good fun to go and visit some of the night time attractions of Deadwood.

We have couple of photo's of Wild Bills and Calamity Janes graves, they are buried side by side.







After leaving Deadwood we headed across to a town called Wall. A tiny town not far from the national park but known world wide for it's drug store (chemist). It sells everything you can possibly imagine, has a small theme park out the back and is a great place to get souvenirs. We had a great time just wandering about.






After leaving Wall we took off into the Badlands. We didn't see any rattle snakes but Gae managed to continue her survey of toilets of the world, that she began while we were on the cruise.






It was very interesting and quite sad to read what had happened to the indians. This whole area of Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana is full of history about how the whites took over the land and pushed them all onto reservations.



After the Badlands we went west again and into the Black Hills. We'd been there a couple of times before - Deadwood, Spearfish Canyon etc - so this time we went a bit further south into the Custer State Park. This is probably somewhere that gets really busy in summer but we were lucky enough to have most of the park to ourselves. There were lots of deer and Bison wandering about the road.




After leaving Custer State Park we were on our way home when we came across this frozen lake. The ice was about 8" thick and quite safe to walk on (after we had watched a local). There was a guy out there ice fishing but not catching a lot. It looked like a hard way to catch fish, I think I would have waited until summer and thrown a line in from the edge.




As another update to our blogging capabilities I've added a link to a photo album that gives a few more pictures than you can see here.I hope it works ok, try and let us know. Just click on the picture below and then select the 'Slideshow' button.

Badlands Weekend 17122006