Vacation Monday - Badlands and one more long drive

Monday morning we woke up in lovely Wall South Dakota, exhausted from our day of hiking and driving the day before.  Food was our top priority so we headed over to Wall Drug to meet our food and tourist entertainment needs.

Then we headed into the Badlands, which really defy words.  We saw jackelope Big Horn Sheep, Buffalo, Prairie dogs and probably some other stuff.  We did not see Rattlesnakes.  Thank god.  We also saw an inordinate number of motorcycles, coming a week early to the Sturgis rally.  They were fine but I'm so glad we were heading the other way.

I wasn't exaggerating when I said every exit in South Dakota promised dinosaurs or free ice water or some other kind of tourist hilarity.  They're all trying to compete with Wall Drug.  We stopped at Big Al's Oasis for lunch and Qat Lady finally got her buffalo burger.  She was also finally done driving and handed over they keys.  We put on Harry Potter (excellent for mindless entertainment) and I drove and drove and drove.  It was around 7pm when I was finally like "I've been driving for the past 5 hours".  We were pretty close to Qat Lady's mom's house (where we would take on the actual cat) at that point.  We stopped for dinner with Qat Lady's mom and stuffed a crying cat into the backseat for the last two hours of the drive.

When we got home, I immediately took all my bags into the laundry room (seriously, there's another person doing laundry at 11pm on Monday?), unloaded them into the machines and got that taken care of straight away.  Good thing I didn't have to work on Tuesday and didn't care how late I stayed up!

All in all, the trip was a blast and I can also report the Qat Lady and I are still speaking, although we may need a break before we really want to hang out with each other again.