There are no bears in the sky: National Parks Trip day 4

I remember attending a party in my super late teens where I drank a bunch and fell asleep on a garage floor, and I woke up feeling the most refreshed and rested. A garage floor. 

In my twenties, even after having had two children, I could part all weekend, doing drugs, smoking weed, drinking booze, and get the best sleep of my life passing out on the stairs of my own townhouse. 

I am 42 now and I am super baby bear about shit. If it isn't JUUUUUUUUUUUUST right, my body...and my mouth....are going to loudly complain about it. That bed at Grant Lodge was fucking heinous, and for 352 dollars a night I expected WAY fucking better bed quality. 350 dollars a night gets me the fucking Mining Exchange and dinner at Mackenzies in the springs. I almost would have rather slept in my car. And to top it all off, we woke up at 5am. In a shit bed. In a nice room. In one of the most beautiful locations in America. I need to grow up. 

A groggy Derek and Drea stumbled through getting gear and clothes and selves collected, and out the door we went to make the hour drive to the grand canyon of Yellowstone. 

Cold cold cold. 

We drove to Lookout point and I was wildly surprised to find the parking lot empty. I was sure we would be joined by one or two photographers. 

Not a single one. Not until after sunrise. 

Oh no! Beaultiful solitude!

Beautiful solitude with bonus handsome companion. 

I was absolutely fucking feezing my tits and tail off, it was I think 30 degrees out. We were weather gear appropriate, but I have Raynaud's Syndrome (thanks, POTS and EDS!) and it makes my hands and especially my fingers HURT and they get all ugly colored and it sucks, but listen. Listen listen listen. It was so worth it. I don't even think I got anything super great from this shoot, but I would do it all over again, with the same quality of photos, in a heartbeat. 

I mean come on. 

At sunrise, Lookout Point was swarmed with a tour of just the nicest people who kept apologizing to Derek and I for being in our way, which they absolutely were not, and apologizing for so politely asking us if we would mind getting out of their way for just a moment. I was like, "girl say less, I don't own this, it belongs to all of us! Take your time!" and they were so appreciative like I had done something super magnaimous when really, all I had done was get out of THEIR way. 

I think we were there for a total of an hour? Maybe an hour and a half? I got "bored" of trying to get a great photo of the falls, I figured I either got it or I didn't, continuously pushing the shutter button for another twenty minutes wasn't going to change that. So I wandered around the viewing area and took a ton of photos of the canyon. It is just stunning. Derek and I drove through the rest of the one way drive and stopped at all of the pull offs to take another look. Each one a winner. We didn't do the North Rim trail because honestly we didn't have the time. Yellowstone is unfathomably large. I had really wanted to do the North Rim trail, though, and I was kind of disappointed that we wouldn't have the time to do it. 

Which is why our next activity is going to sound so stupid. 

A few weeks back, though Derek swears we've known about this for years, I stumbled upon a reddit thread of people talking about National Parks Passports because I wanted to find a way to log all of the parks that Derek and I have been to together, and the parks I've been to in general. More the parks we've been to together. Mortality starts knocking at your door at 42, I don't know, I j ust want to posterity the big time shit we do. So anyway, there are these things called National Parks Passports. You get cancellation stamps each time you visit visitor's centers in any national park, and you collect all of the cancellations for everywhere you've been. Like a regular travel passport, but nerdier. 

Obviously I wanted one. I didn't think Derek would be into it, but he is also into it in a major way. At Badlands, we went to the visitor center to buy our passports, and found them closed for inventory (boo. BOO!), so our first day in Yellowstone, we had to get our passports. We drive to the first visitor's center near us, and while we waited for them to open, we walked into a gift shop. A Xanterra gift shop. This is where we decided to grab all of our stuff for the trip. We ourselves aren't really big on souvenirs, we don't do the tshirts or the hats or the anything like that. I get a magnet from everywhere we go, and we usually grab the kids something of the unusual-er trinket variety. I got Vivi a book, I got Rhyann huckleberry waffle mix and huckleberry syrup...or jam, I can't recall. We didn't get anything for Laurel because her birthday was four days from...then...and we figured we'd just send her birthday cash, and I very validly feared any gift we bought her as a souvenir would just sit unsent in our kitchen. Just like the big wooden postcard I bought for my dad and Caryn that Derek turned into a magnet. It's been sitting, waiting to be sent, for ages. Had we opted to get Laurel a something, she would have been tricky to find a non-typical souvenir for. I would have had to ask her for help, and that's kinda crap. Anyway. One thing Derek and I DO go nuts for is local boozes. If a place we visit has a whisky or a rum or a gin, we usually grab it, especially if it has a nice label. We almost never open them, they're commemorative. We bought Grand Prismatic Run and two Yellowstone shot glasses. All of this pales in comparison to getting our Parks Passports. 

Now. 

The Xanterra gift shop workers were very nice. I asked if they sold the passports, they told me they didn't and we would have to go across the street to Yellowstone Forever. But they did have their own version! And the clerk I was talking to showed it to me. And I LOVED IT. I ended up buying it for myself. But there was only one, so Derek didn't get the cute one I bought. He had been holding out hope for the Colletor's Edition in the big binder, the hugely expensive one that was for the super park nerd with a compulsion for oderly collection units. Unfortunately, all Yellowstone Forever had was the dinkiest version. The introductory version. The craphound one. 

Mine is cuter. 

But it didn't really matter, we finally had a place to put our cancellation stamps!! And boy did we ever get involved in this. It turns out, there are also regional stamps you can collect....Derek went this route...and art travel stamps you can collect....I went this route. 

The stamp may be pretty, but my passport book sucks way less. 

If you've never been to Yellowstone, or never gotten cancellation stamps from national parks, just know there are a lot. So grabbing all of the cancellation stamps was a sidequest of ours that...speaking strictly for myself...I greatly enjoyed. Even now, I'm tickled going into national whatever whatevers and finding stamps. A lady at the superintendent's office of the Rangers of Bridger-Teton National Forest (who had the most chaotic bisexual energy of anybody I've ever met) remarked on Derek and I being cancellation collectors and she's the first person who didn't look exhausted by us stamping our stuff. But that's Drea from the future stuff. 

Derek and Drea of the recent past got busy with seeing as much of Yellowstone as they could. We opted to do the u pper half of the park the first day, so we cut across the middle of Grand Loop and headed upwards toward Mammoth and Gardiner. We stopped at every little pull off of interest to us.

The Roaring Mountain Fumaroles!

This waterfall!

This scenic byway!

After driving that very scenic byway, we saw a gentleman on the side of the road flagging down drivers, and we were the only people who stopped. It turns out, he just wanted to show people a mountain goat on the side of the cliff. Derek saw it, I did not. I sat in the car and ruminated about how the idea of god really cheapens the idea of natural beauty. Like, if some god figure created all of this, well...that's just a great imagination. I have that. God isn't all that special if god is just imaginative. Yellowstone is just me having to marvel at what some other person did if god exists, and like, earth as a kind of curated museum is as boring as any other museum if you think of it that way. Sure it's cool to look at, and incredible to see the breadth of what's achievable, but...it's stuff we're all capable of doing? Looking at any gorgeous scenery and thinking some god made it really cheapend and flattens the impact. But if you look at earth like I do...like no god exists and this all just...happened because cosmic conditions were just so and shit just blammo'ed itself into existance and exploded and collided and died off and lived in different ways to get to the point where I am sitting in my car ruminating on how god makes Yellowstone boring....THAT is something to marvel at. THAT is something that's incredible and amazing. God as designer? Boo. Cosmic and chaotic non-intention? That option is better. 

Derek chatted with the sheep guy for about twenty minutes while I chewed on how many ways it makes everything suck to believe in god(s), and then we got back on our way to Mammoth. We stopped at the Upper Terraces and did the boardwalk.

The absolute strangeness of this specific place is matched only by its splendor. I do love taking strange tree photos, I've got quite the little series going, so as I was taking a picture of the strange trees in the upper terraces, I chatted with a young man named Hasan, sent him to go talk to Derek about camera gear (I am not a gear head), and Derek befriended him and chatted with him and traded info with him, and I have to get some of that info from him so I can send him the photo he took with my camera. 

I think what I enjoyed most about the boardwalks was the signage. 

I read an account...I cannot verify how true this is...about a man who died in Yellowstone after trying to get someone's dog who jumped into a pool. His last words were, "I shouldn't have done that". David Alan Kirwin is the guy I was thinking of, and I was ALMOST correct about what his last words were reported to be. 

Spoiler: we did a very good job at not falling in to anything. 

After Mammoth Hot Springs, we headed to the Mammoth Visitor Center and went to the Roosevelt Arch so I could grab a picture. 

I didn't get out to get a picture of the cornerstone, but I wanted a picture of the arch because I think, out of every single thing the US Goverment has done, national parks are our saving grace. It's the best of what we've accomplished in spite of every nasty thing underneath it. All of the land theft, all of the murder, all of the recklessness with the land and its resources...national parks are a hint that we're not entirely monstrous, and we know some things are sacred and precious and worth preserving. 

And then, you know, we had to indulge in buying Derek's second passport book. Because gravitas never lasts long. 

Derek did eventually find his binder edition once we got to Grand Tetons, but I vetoed that. Two of these is just fine. 

We got our stamps, I grabbed a Junior Ranger booklet (bad news from the future, I did not finish it. They make you do a LOT! But I CAN finish it and mail it in to get my badge, will I fully intend to do), and we headed out to Lamar Valley. For real this time. We stopped at Undine Falls, and as much as I wanted to do that trail, it was ten miles and again...Yellowstone is just so massive that two days is really only enough time to drive to everything and do short little bursts of walking around. Lava Trail to Undine Falls is ten miles, and we did not have that kind of time. 

It was very pretty, though. It would have been great to hike down and see it from the bottom. Well. Oh well. We weren't quite to Lamar Valley, I don't really know where we were, but we saw a huge herd of bison hanging out by a lake, so we stopped to ogle them. 

I have several minutes of video of watching them run by us and congregate further up around the lake, and that's just such a cool, scary thing to experience. Bison are HUGE and they are noisy and their regular bison noises sound threatening and it is just so neat to be around for their natural behaviors. 

I think we hung around here for about thirty minutes before the park rangers cleared them all out to the other side of the road to unstop the traffic (we never did get caught in a bison jam, we always stopped on purpose and stayed to take photos. Lucky us!), and we kept on truckin' to Lamar Valley. But...by the time we had driven through Lamar for about twenty minutes, Derek and I pretty much simultaneously said we didn't really want to keep going through there, we wanted to turn around and drive back through Hayden Valley. 

So we did. 

And it paid off. 

We saw a mated pair of bald eagles hunt, kill, and tear apart a duck. 

Derek got the kill shot:

I got the ripping shot:

and we both got to be in awe of how amazing and brutal animals are. 

A gentleman with a very huge camera lens came up and chatted with us and told us he had been coming for 15 years to Yellowstone for animal photos and this had been his worst fall season yet, and then told Derek and I to come back in early May when babies are out and plentiful. We stuck that little fact in our cap for later. 

Derek and I had talked about going out for milky way photos somewhere on Lake Yellowstone, and I had previously been entirely game, but I said I had changed my mind, would Derek mind taking me back to the lodge? He didn't mind at all, so we went back to the lodge, Derek put on a movie for me on the laptop and left, and within 15 minutes I was out for the night. At 6:45pm. And I didn't wake up until 5am the next morning when we had to leave for sunrise photos at Old Faithful. Derek did get some lovely milky way shots, and he told me how eerie it is to hear elk bugling at night when you're alone in the dark, even when you know what the sound is. I'll have to post one of his photos in the photo wrap up I do at the end of all of my travel blogs. 

A successful day four if I've ever had one! 

There are no bears in the sky: National Parks trip day 3

Future Drea here, still writing from the discomfort of my hostel stay in Moran, Wyoming. I feel like I'm at least 20 years older than Methuselah every morning when I creak and crack my way out of this fucking bed. Derek is sleeping on a side of the bed that isn't snugly on the frame, it hangs over. Like a pot bellied bed. I hope I get a picture before we leave. For posterity!

Today was the day we left for Yellowstone. It was a relatively easy day, we woke up early-ish to get the car packed and headed off to Billings to rockhound in the Yellowstone River. Sunrise in The Black Hills was tremendous. 

It is a little jarring to go from desert landscape to lush hills, but you get over it fairly quickly. Or maybe you don't, but I did.

I think it was only a 5 hour drive to Billings. We got to our first spot, a tiny little boat access point under a bridge, and we interrupted the parade of ennui of a very forlorn looking young person sitting on top of a picnic table, staring off into the bleak forever of Billings, Montana. 

Derek and I cruised the river bank and all we found was the poached carcass of a buck that smelled unmistakably of rot. I smelled it before I saw it and moved upriver, Derek poked around on the other side, down wind, which....was a choice. I found a couple of nice rocks, Derek found a couple, and we decided to head off to a different location. 

We figured that the river being low would give us access to premium pickings, but since we only had 40 minutes, we were mostly disappointed with what was immediately available. We didn't bring any spray bottles, we didn't dig anything up, we just looked for the easiest, most obvious good rocks. Of which there were very few. 

Back on the road! We stopped at Costco, got some gas, I went potty, and we continued heading to Yellowstone. The scenery on the way was top notch, honestly. I took so many more photos than I'm going to end up posting (you're welcome. I tallied up the photos from just ONE DAY at Badlands, and it was 452. From just one day).

 Oops! All scenery!

The drive was only two and a half hours to the gate, and look. Ok. Sometimes I mess things up. I'm not perfect. I had intended for us to come in through the Silver gate. The NE gate that heads straight into Lamar Valley, it was what put us in a time crunch. Get to Lamar Valley for golden hour, sunset, and blue hour for wildlife photography. We entered through Cody. Through the east gate. 

Oh no. 

But thankfully, it didn't stop us from seeing wildlife. 

Drea from the future is bison'ed out.

One thing that you quickly learn about travelling through Yellowstone (the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, by the way, not just Yellowstone the park)...you always stop to see what people are looking at. We had spotted a few people on the side of the road, did a quick scan, and saw them staring at an elk. 

See?

Cool and all, but we didn't deem it worth stopping for. And then we saw our first group of big time lookiloos. We were getting ready to drive by when I looked back and saw what I thought was a wolf on the river bank. I shouted to Derek, "That's a WOLF!" and he said, yup, yup, let's go back! He whipped us around, parked in the parking lot, we got out very excitedly and almost immediately noticed I am not very bright, it was a coyote. But in my defense, it was the healthiest coyote I've ever seen in my life. The tail alone looked fluffy and huge and I can totally vouch for why I thought it was a wolf. No coyote I've seen in all my days looked as healthy as this Yellowstone coyote. 

We posted up and watched the coyote hunt for her dinner (she caught three varmints of some larger variety!) for about thirty minutes, and it was the cutest fucking thing. She pounced up and dove down for her supper, very successfully. 

The goodest girl.

We had another hour of driving to our hotel, we stayed at Grant Village down in the West Thumb Geyser basin area. It was a beautiful drive, we saw another elk with the biggest antlers, I took a horrible photo of it on my camera, we saw....well, smelled it first...a steam vent outside of our hotel area:

Mmmmm, farty earth!

Derek parked at registration, got us our room stuff, and we could finally rest our heads for the night....on what I then assumed were the most uncomfortable beds in existence. 

Our room was really nice, though. Aside from the bed, it was quite cozy and an altogether pleasant place to lay our road weary bodies down for a rest. 

Now because this will become a thing for most of the rest of the trip until tomorrow when we get to Estes, I want to be clear about something. 

I have ARFID (self diagnosed, but I fit almost the entirety of the criterion). I am a vegetarian, I do not eat processed/added sugar. I don't do wheat or tubers. I follow a VERY strict diet. I have learned through years of traveling and going hungry, or eating things I know I shouldn't if my brain says they're ok and feeling sick, or wasting money because I'm TRYING to eat something but my ARFID won't let me. I spent days making food to bring on this trip. All through the trip, it was fine. I knew Yellowstone was in the deep pockets of Xanterra, and they do not want you eating anything but their food in a major way. I told Derek to contact our lodge and tell them his wife is autistic with ARFID and can we use a microwave every night in one of the common areas? He ran out of time to do that and we just rolled the dice on not bringing our small microwave with us. 

Massive mistake. 

Derek texts me while he's checking in that it doesn't look good for a microwave for me. When he got back to the car, I learned that microwaves are seasonal ammenities at Yellowstone, and they remove them from even employee use at end of season. There was ONE place for me to gain access to a microwave, at the service station across the street, but they close every day at 5. 

So all of the food I had prepared for myself, all of the food Derek had prepared for himself, we had to eat it cold. We called our dinners cold slop. And while we complained just the tiniest bit, there was really very little either of us would have rather been doing than eating cold slop with each other in our little lodge room at Yellowstone. 

Cold vegan slop!

We unpacked the car, crawled into bed, and readied ourselves for a 5am wake up call to go take sunrise photos at Lookout Point. 

There are no bears in the sky: National Parks Trip day 2

So it's currently 7:55 pm on day two, still in Wall, SD outside of Badlands, and I am already ready to pack it the fuck in for the night. I am BEAT. It was such a long day, but such a great long day. We'll start with the obvious:

Badlands? Incredible. I don't believe in god or gods or a clever watchmaker or any nonsense that involves some almighty force creating things (because I DO believe in all other manner of nonsense, just not theistic nonsense), but it's almost easier to be like, WOW whoever made this did an incredible job! Because THAT is somehow easier to contextualize than the big bang leading to all of the amazing landscapes I saw today. How do you even get that through your head?? It's so hard while I'm sitting here in this hotel room, but it is actually pretty natural to think about how incredibly small and lucky I am to exist in a place and way where I can know the feeling of the air on my skin as I watch the sunrise over Pinnacles overlook. 

So let's go through the day, because I took a photo every 4.7 seconds. I've been uploading photos for the last hour and I might just have to let daily blogging defeat me, as it always does. I tried my hardest, I really fucking did, but I am just too fucking tired. 

It is now October 4th, and I am sitting UNhappily in our hostel in Hatchet, WY. Somewhere a little voice in my head said, you've never stayed at a hostel before! This is traveling like a European! Give it a try! But I have been in this hostel for two hours and I think that is try enough. I am over it, and we have three nights here before we're back in the safe, loving embrace of budget hotels through Wyndham Rewards. 

Let's catch up. 

We woke up at 5am to get our gear packed up for sunrise. It is miserable getting up that early for a chance at maybe no photos turning out (Present Drea is bitter about none of her photos turning out), but that doesn't stop us from getting up and getting going before anybody decent is awake. 

 The essentials. Part of a balanced breakfast. 

We drove the fifteen minutes to Pinnacles overlook and set up shop right as light started cresting, and even if I didn't get any photos that are printable, just being there was absolutely amazing. 

Look. At. That. 

Derek and I had very different ideas about where we wanted to post up to take our photos, so he went his way and I went mine. I realized pretty early on that this location in general was not where I wanted to be, so I packed my gear up and just ran around enjoying the pinnacles, climbing all over them and generally being a delighted menace. 

Those leggings are fleece lined. Very warm, very unnecessary for this outing. 

Cell phones automatically HDR your images, which is why I like to use my cell to document everywhere we go. I just like to feel bad about my manual camera that I spent literally thousands of dollars to create my ideal kit, and my little Samsung S21 does it more efficiently. 

To spoil the ending, none of my photos look this tonally cohesive. I ran around for about thirty minutes while Derek remained on task, taking photos of all manner of lands that are quite good, actually. 

My partner in crime! 

I did notice that there were far more interesting rocks and shapes out in the distance, so I sat with Derek for a bit and tried to take some pictures of those. I mean, I DID take pictures of those, they just aren't very good. After Derek felt satisfied with his attempts at sunrise photos, we got into the car and headed through the scenic loop. Which was quite scenic, in case you were wondering. Like, the first little pull out after pinnacles was so pretty.

My beautiful Peenalope!

Once the sun fully crested into the little valley pull off we were sitting in, you could see all of the tremendous colors in the rocks. 

Derek wanted to grab pictures of yellow mounds, so he went his way, I went mine, and I wish I hadn't looked at the rocks, because so many of them were rocks I wanted to pocket. But you are very unallowed to remove rocks from national parks, so unfortunately I had to leave them all where I found them. I found a little pinnacle, climbed onto it, and pouted about not being able to take rocks. 

I was boiling to death in those fleece leggings. 

Derek and I drove through to praire dog town (the real name of that section of the park!!) and on the way back to the car, I found a bit of plastic that I couldn't quite reach, so Derek made the valiant effort to swing himself down and get it. Which he did. 

My hero!

There was just so much to see. Thankfully, there is a very helpful loop so it's next to impossible to get lost, but Badlands does have a "walk wherever you want" policy, so like, getting lost isn't impossible. It's just next to it. 

Hm. I thought it was one word? SUSPICIOUS. 

I was pretty bad about taking pictures of each lookout that we went to. They sort of blurred together, if I'm being honest. Not in a bad way, in a "this is all so beautiful, does distinction really matter" and also "I've been up since 5am and I'm tired" kind of way. 

I did make a little friend, though!

When you're driving through the canyon, the only thing you can do is oooh and aaah and punctuate the silences in between with a lot of breathless "fuck"s. Badlands is absolutely stunning. 

Here's where the day started to run off the rails a little. And like, it's fine, really. It didn't run so off the rails that we ended up having a bad day. But it did derail my best laid mouse plans for men or something. We got to...um...this place:

...which is where Door, Window, and Notch trail are on one side, and...uh...I think Castle and Fossile are on the other. I had been desperate to do Notch trail, so when we got here, I wanted to hop to it before the day got too unbearable in my fleece lined pants. And it turns out, Notch tral is closed. C-L-O-S-E-D closed. To me, to everyone. And I was so sad that I cried about it. Did I mention I was super late for my period so I was deeply and without reason emotional? I cried about the trail being closed. And it was the fifth time that morning I had cried. 

No trails for you, stupid!

We checked everything out and decided we would head back to our hotel so I could change, because I was sweltering in the fleece leggings, go to Wall Drug, and then come back to do Door or Window before sunset. We took a little saunter up to see what the beginning of the trail was like:

And then a stranger, for scale:

And then we turned around because I knew if I kept exploring we would just do the entire trail and I would have a heat episode (I had one later in the day, anyway), so we walked back, said a fond farewell...

...and then we never came back to do the trails. Not a one trail in Badlands was explored by us. 

And it's only been 4 hours into the day. We headed over to the visitor's center to find our passport books, and instead found that they were closed for inventory. Drat!!! No passport book! Denied! 

But do you know what they DID have? 

A MOTHER FUCKIN' FOSSIL LAB. An active fossil lab. Where you can see real fossils! And we did! As I sit here in my shitty little hostel, I am wondering if I upload all of the photos I took of the fossil lab (I took 60 images in there), if I just upload my favorites, or if you just take my word for it that the fossil lab is incredibly cool, and seeing a real archaelogist working on the excavation of some sort of rodent hippopotamus was really, really cool. I think I'll do the latter, because I did take far more photos than I should have. 

I'll give you this one. An oreodont. He was working on an oreodont. Which maybe wasn't a rodent hippopotamus, but it was kinda close. 

We didn't get our passport books, but we did stamp the little pieces of paper to put in our books later. The books would become an entire ordeal, but here are our stamps:

These have come to bring me an untold amount of joy. 

We finished out the loop and got out to take a little peek and see if we were at all inspired for sunrise photos.

Tempting, but no.

We got back in the car to drive back to the hotel with a little stop off at Wall Drug, and on the way out of the park was the world's biggest prairie dog.

Eat your heart out, my dad!

It was a little...uh...prairie dog ranch zoo sort of situation? You couldn't pet them, but you COULD go buy prairie dog food and feed them. I imagined little pellets like the sort of things you throw at koi fish in ponds, and I was vaguely disappointed that it was just bags of peanuts. But in the store where you buy the prairie dog food, you can also buy little trinkets, some of which were rocks, and while I was looking at rocks, the clerk pulled out his big, expensive Fairburn agates and while I thought they were overpriced, I DID ask where we could legally go grab some of our own. Derek wandered over and we both listened to the directions on how to get to the best rockhounding location for fairburn and prairie agates, and we changed our whole day around in order to go do that. We ran back to the car, headed to Wall so I could stop into Wall Drug for the quickest visit ever, and then we would go rockhound to be back at Pinnacles for sunset. 

Approximately nothing of that sort happened in that fashion. 

We got to Wall Drug, where I thought I could spend a quick 5 minutes grabbing a photo or two for the blog. That was an incorrect assumption. First of all, Wall Drug isn't a building, it's like an entire town. This strange little tchotchke town that is all facade and cheap delusion, but with the strangest kind of touristy charm that you have to witness to understand. It was cloying and white washed and gross, but I also have such a curiosity about places like this, because it reminds me of what white Americans think America is. This strange, idealized, brave western dream of adventure and grit and love of country, even though it's all fake and none of that is what really lies beneath. It's the truest look at the veil over our eyes, and I think there's definitely something to gawk at there. 

And boy did I ever gawk. I could have gawked for ages longer, had we not been under a time constraint. 

A deeply unserious place. 

Before Derek and I even got out of the car, I was utterly delighted by this young femme walking down the sidewalk. They had on black everything, and TOUGH black. Don't fuck with me black. But like, in the emo punk will-fold-under-the-slightest-pressure fashion. Very 90s mall goth. Fishnets, safety pins, chains, cropped top, pixie cut. Dour look on their face. I watched them as they walked toward a little patch of flowers, stoop down to smell them, and then they took a photo and kept slumping their way through Wall Drug's circus of whatever the fuck it is. That person made my day. 

Here are all of the photos I took at Wall Drug, and you get no explanation because this place is an assault to the senses AND the sensibilities. 

They even have a fucking chapel:

Even Vegas thinks this is gauche.

That was enough of that, even though there really is a ton of stuff to see in there. Most of it is egregiously tasteless, but I do love nothing more than to ogle white american hubris. 

We rushed back to the hotel to change, and decided to fill up the tank before leaving. Derek got so excited about making our sunset location that he just...drove off with the gas nozzle still in the tank. 

I have never ever ever seen that in real life, which is impressive for a latchkey kid that lived at gas stations though her formative years. Derek was so embarrassed, but everybody at the gas station was so nice about it (except for the gas station clerk. They charged us 80 dollars). A young man came up to me as I went to take a photo of Derek's oopsie and said, "I have totally done that, too" and I was like, girl I have never seen that happen in person. He laughed like he felt sorry for me, so I really had to stifle the urge to yell DON'T LOOK AT ME THAT WAY MY HUSBAND DID IT, YOU TWO ARE THE IDIOTS! I didn't, though. Derek was stopped by a much older lady who shared with him the time she did the exact same thing in Winnipeg, and she turned the whole gas pump askew because it was before quick disconnects at gas stations. And as we drove away I thought to myself, what are the chances that the only three real people who have ever done that before to my knowledge are all in the exact same place at once? Big planet, small world, I guess. 

Congratulations, honey, you did it!

We should have asked to keep the gas pump for 80 fucking dollars, honestly. It's an absurd price to charge, they just pop it back on and it's made to disconnect for a reason. But off we went, back to Badlands for sunset. 

We stopped at Yellow Mounds proper:

Which is very yellow, and very mound-y. Excellent naming schema at Badlands, no notes. On the way back to Pinnacles, we saw a turkey that we had seen earlier that day, and this turkey had made us curious enough about its behavior to have Derek wonder aloud, "Is that turkey that guy's pet?". The turkey in question had been VERY close to a man unloading his car, and we were perplexed at the closeness. So when we saw the turkey at the same parking lot harranguing a different vehicle, we had to see what the turkey's deal was. 

Turns out it's just annoying, possibly longing for a companion. There is a video of me sounding very threatened by this turkey where I shout at it, "I'm a vegan!" as if that would stop a turkey uprising. We had to wait for another car to shuffle her off to, like It Follows. 

Derek wanted to shoot pictures at Pinnacles again, but I didn't. I knew there were better locations to shoot. So I dropped him off and headed back the other way until I found a place that caught my eye. 

This will do nicely. 

The only thing that sucks about being alone in a national park is being alone in a national park. I wasn't all that bothered by the idea of being murdered, but for someone unbothered by that, I sure texted every single person I know about my impending death at the hands of a serial killer. 

The hairy legs of the soon to be murdered. 

I did not get murdered, but I did get bored and impatient with the way sunset was shaking out. I kept messaging Derek that I was sure this was going to be a dud of a sunrise for photos, and after about an hour of sitting alone, I packed it all in and headed back to Derek. 

Sunset did get good, though. 

Look at that light! I was on the wrong side of the rocks for it, so I'm glad I left where I had been posted up. 

The sexiest gas pump murderer this side of the Mississippi

And the colors only got more intense after that. I took a few, but my heart wasn't really in it, because there wasn't much to make it interesting. Don't get me wrong, the colors are enough to be interesting, but anybody who takes landscape photos will know what I mean. 

We stayed until the sun had completely disappeared beneath the horizon, and then we headed back to the hotel. Not before saying goodbye to a parking lot friend:

And that was a wrap on that day. The drive to Yellowstone is next, which was fairly exciting, as long travel days go. 

Because I am writing this several days in the future, with several days under my belt, I do not know how long it will be before I get all of these written up. I suspect it will take a long time, because our days are packed, I take lots of editorial photos on my cell phone to upload, and I have to stitch the days back together and that is hard on my little AuDHD brain. Anyway. Next stop, Yellowstone!