July 20 Day 20

Hot and windy today. Yup, another day with highs in the 90's.... I know, it's hot at home too.

A new issue today was the wind. There was actually a NOAA high wind warning for a 150 mile stretch of our drive today. The NOAA report indicated sustained winds of 25-40 with gusts up to 50 mph. We basically had to drive 150 miles today while leaning into a side wind (wonder if we need to find winds from the other direction to even out our tire wear) :) Overall, not too bad, but the gusts really push you around and you have to be alert to stay in your lane.

The route back home is familiar, as it is the same route we traveled back in 2009 when we visited this area. We are traveling route 90 to Sioux Falls, SD today. Tomorrow we will drop down route 29 along Nebraska and into Iowa, then route 80 all the way home.

All along route 90 in South Dakota you will see hundreds of billboards for Wall Drug. Cute store if you have never been, but basically a tourist trap, so we decide to skip it this trip.

We did spend some time off the highway driving through the Badlands National Park.

We have been in the Badlands before, and really enjoyed the views. The rock formations and their location in South Dakota are pretty strange considering the surrounding areas are pretty much flat corn fields.

Here are a few photos from the Badlands.

Lots of red color banding in some of the rocks.

You can really see the color banding in this shot.

After the Badlands, it was about a 300 mile highway shot to Sioux Falls South Dakota. On the way we passed this fellow. It was interesting because earlier in the trip, we noticed a huge number of farms out west had large bee hive setups. There were so many out this way, that Lennie and I joked about a savvy bee hive salesman making his way across the west conning the locals into buying into the honey business!! :) You can't see it very well, but the side of this truck says Adee Honey Farms, and those are bee hives he's hauling, hmmm, perhaps we found our guy.

You run into all kinds of things when on the road. This guy was out toting his jet helicopter around for some fuel :) I poked fun at him... when I see motorcycles on trailers I say, real bikers ride to their destination, they don't trailer... same goes for helicopters, why trailer when you could just fly the thing in for fuel? :) Actually, it looked brand new, and I would assume they where out delivering it to some new owner.

Tomorrow we make another boring highway trek and will end up in Iowa City Iowa. The weather forecast is for continued heat, and some scattered thunderstorms. Hopefully we can dodge the storms and stay dry.

Our stats for today indicate that we covered 372 miles, bringing our trip total to 5676 miles. Below is a map of our route from today.