It was a pleasant drive from Theodore Roosevelt National Park near Medora, North Dakota to Badlands National Park, about an hour southeast of Rapid City, South Dakota. The countryside was a living palette of green prairie, golden wildflowers and vivid blue ponds. Every mile showed vast rolling fields peppered with enormous cylindrical bales of hay or fallow fields covered in the fragrant long-stalk yellow sweetclover, fescue, bluestem and various prairie grasses that bowed in gentle waves to the constant wind. There were countless herds of cattle lazing under the hot July sun, and walls of pines and cottonwoods behind which simple farmhouses and barns stood protected against the winds. The endless convoys of semis and one-ton dualies, the boom and rumble of the fracking industry in North Dakota, turned more toward agriculture as we entered South Dakota and eventually to tourism as we neared Rapid City.

Around Spearfish, golf carts zipped around as men hurried to finish their rounds before the impending storm. At Sturgis, final preparations were underway for its eponymous motorcycle rally and we saw construction workers prepping RV parks, hotels, bars and restaurants. Above Rapid City, the dark yellow-gray clouds set an ominous mood as we stopped for groceries before heading to the camp another 60 miles down the road.

We saw lightening and heard thunder and had to soothe Timber who had never heard such weather in the Bay Area.  As the rain started in earnest, we pulled into the Cedar Pass Campground near the interior entrance of Badlands NP and again set up camp in the midst of a storm. We sat and languished over dinner as the coach inhaled the cool, wet air from the prairie outside.