T&C's Adventures in the T42

Here's the fifth in our series of "where we really are now" trailers (posted Sept. 19). (P.S. As with the past few trailers, we're working around Blogger's 100 MB file upload limit by linking to a larger video uploaded to YouTube instead.  For the highest quality video viewing experience, you'll probably want to click the little gear icon under the video once it starts playing, and make sure that "Quality" is set to "1080p".)

Our plans for the Starved Rock area included spending some time in nearby Matthiessen State Park, which was just a few minutes down the road.  We had asked about hikes there at the Starved Rock SP Visitor Center the day before, and the volunteer had drawn us a route on a map that went through a residential area and down a narrow one lane, pothole-filled dirt road that runs along a golf course to a small little dirt lot with limited parking.  We're not exactly sure why she sent us there, since we found out later that the official/main parking lot is much larger and easy to access, with its only apparent possible downside being that the path from it puts you "in middle" of the canyon instead of at one end.

Starved Rock State Park served as "home base" for our few days in Illinois, as we visited both that park, and nearby Matthiessen State Park as well.

Here's the fourth in our series of "where we really are now" trailers (posted Sept. 8). (P.S. As with the past couple of trailers, we're working around Blogger's 100 MB file upload limit by linking to a larger video uploaded to YouTube instead.  For the highest quality video viewing experience, you'll probably want to click the little gear icon under the video once it starts playing, and make sure that "Quality" is set to "1080p".)

Here's the third in our series of "where we really are now" trailers (posted Sept. 2 - Happy Labor Day!). (P.S. As with Trailer 2, we're working around Blogger's 100 MB file upload limit by linking to a larger video uploaded to YouTube instead.  For the highest quality video viewing experience, you'll probably want to click the little gear icon under the video once it starts playing, and make sure that "Quality" is set to "1080p".)

Who doesn't like a good cave?  We certainly do, so we couldn't pass up the opportunity to explore the Maquoketa Caves while passing through Iowa.  Maquoketa Caves State Park claims to have 13 caves in total, but a number of them are tiny and require crawling or wriggling through; we planned to just explore the ones you can stay relatively upright (and clean 😉) in.

As we drove toward Pikes Peak State Park yesterday, Tom asked "Haven't we already been to Pikes Peak?  And wasn't it in Colorado ?"  The state park in Iowa is named for the same man, but unlike the much higher peak in Colorado that ol' Zebulon Pike never actually ever made it to the top of (but is named for him anyway), the Iowa site was actually visited by Pike himself in 1805 when he was sent by the government to select a site to build a military fort.  Although Pike selected the site of the current park for the fort, the government chose to build the fort across the river instead.  Your 1805 tax dollars at work!

Here's the second in our series of "where we really are now" trailers (posted August 16). (P.S. We're pretty sure we've found a way around Blogger's 100 MB file upload limit - by linking to a larger video uploaded to YouTube instead.  This trailer is our first attempt at using this mechanism - so it may behave a little differently than the previous videos on our blog.  Let us know if you have problems / issues viewing it.  One tip : for the highest quality video, you'll probably want to click the little gear icon under the video once it starts playing, and make sure that "Quality" is set to 1080p.)

For our first day in Iowa, we continued our recent trend of "taking a break from hiking out in nature" to see something rather unique - and unexpected, for Iowa.

It's come to our attention that our being so behind in keeping the blog up to date (it's really August 8 today) is making it hard for those of you who are trying to keep up to date on our travels to do so.  While there's no way to "catch up" the blog any time soon, we thought we'd try to mitigate this shortcoming by producing movie-style trailers, covering our more recent adventures.  Here's our first attempt, with highlights from the past 3 days (it doesn't get any more current than that! 🙂). Let us know how you like this format.

Ok, to set the record straight our original itinerary had us visiting only one Laura Ingalls Wilder site on our trek.  But we enjoyed our visit to the home and museum at the old Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, MO (covered in  "Missouri, Part 1" ) so much - and our route south could so easily pass through De Smet - that we just couldn't help ourselves.

Having seen most of the accessible parts of the South Unit our first day, we spent our second day exploring the nearby area before moving on to the North Unit and beyond.

Our main reason for visiting North Dakota was to spend time in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which is divided into three "units" - only two of which are easily accessible and commonly visited.  We split our time between those two units, spending three nights in the South Unit and one in the North Unit. To get there, though, we took a somewhat unusual road.

Wyoming didn't originally make the "East of the Rockies" cut for this Trek, since the Rockies go through Wyoming and we've already visited the two national parks there.  But when we discovered how close Devils Tower was to the Badlands, we couldn't resist making a small foray in Wyoming to visit it while in the area, since neither of us had seen it before.  On the way, we made a point of driving through Spearfish Canyon - on the recommendation of the camp host we had met in Johnson's Shut-ins State Park back in April.

On our final day in the Badlands, we explored parts of the Park that we hadn't been to yet.

Thursday was another "early morning", since we set our alarms for 4:30 a.m. in order to try to catch the sunrise on the Badlands (at 5:20).

We had lots of fun in the Custer State Park area, but it was time to move on.  Our next adventure had us based out of Badlands National Park for a little over three days.

Although we had been in Custer State Park for close to a week, the park had a couple more animal surprises in store for us for our final two days there - and some additional areas to explore still, too.

We had been watching the weather forecast all week, looking for a day with clear skies at both sunrise and sunset to visit Mt. Rushmore for photos.  Saturday was that day.

Sylvan Lake, in the northwest corner of the park, served as our parking place for two days' worth of adventures.  The Needles Highway was our adventurous way of getting there.

We spent the bulk of our time in South Dakota based out of Custer State Park, since it contained a number of sights to see of its own and was also centrally located to a couple other points of interest.  We actually ended up arriving a couple days ahead of schedule, since some of the activities of the previous days hadn't taken as long as allotted in the itinerary. Custer State Park has turned out to be one of our favorite places on this Trek so far.  It rivals many national parks in both beauty and facilities (actually beating many national parks facility-wise) and would've been worth a trip out to visit all on its own.

Since we embarked on our Trek on April 3rd, our time in Nebraska crossed over the one month mark.  We thought you might enjoy some facts and figures from our first month on the road. States traversed: 9 (only the last 6 shown on the map above, since it "starts" in Lampasas, TX - where one of our new friends from the Eclipse Meet-up introduced us to the "Find Penguins" app that we've been using to generate it). 

After starting our Trek at a very fast pace having some very long driving days and then finally having some slower relaxing days in the Ozarks, we somehow managed to start running “ahead of schedule” a bit in this next phase.

We spent about 5 days touring Nebraska, two of which were spent touring "The Sandhills Journey National Scenic Byway" - a 272 mile stretch of Highway 2 - with the help of the audio tour provided through their free app.