Travelogues
2017 Summer Trip

Thursday, June 22

Rapid City

We drove into Rapid City this morning to pick up the part we ordered for our Evenbrake system. The monitor in the motorhome suddenly stopped functioning while we were in Casper. I ordered the part immediately, but it took nearly a week to get here. That meant driving 80 miles back to Rapid City to pick it up at a Camping World. Fortunately, the speed limit in South Dakota is 80 MPH, so it took only an hour to get there. The Camping World was right along Interstate 90 but there was no exit anywhere near it. We had to get off on an exit two or three miles from the store and then drive through a housing project to reach it. They have lots of room to expand, but it's one weird location for a Camping World.

We hit Famous Dave's Barbecue for lunch. That was a good choice. It wasn't very busy, so we could enjoy a leisurely lunch. There was a shopping area across the street, so we bought a couple of things for the motorhome before returning to camp. We drove back through the park to get back to camp, but it was too hot for any wildlife to be out and the lighting was too flat for landscapes.

After a brief respite and a drop in temperature, we climbed back into the Explorer to shoot sunset. It looked promising with clouds in the west. We stopped at White River Overlook, but the clouds never parted enough to light up the formations in front of us. We finally gave up and drove to Quinn Road to shoot the Prairie Dogs. There were far fewer prairie dogs, but the few that were there were very friendly and came right up to the Explorer to feed. The entire area is nearly covered in morning glories, so they had plenty to eat. I had no luck repeating my success from last night in capturing the prairie dogs doing their pop-up behavior. They weren't doing it as frequently, and I was always looking in the wrong place to capture them. I did get a video clip of two prairie dogs and their ritualistic cleaning behaviors.

Prairie Dog

As sunset neared, we drove to Pinnacles Overlook. We enjoyed watching the sun set across the flat prairie, but the formations below us never lit up.

Prairie Sunset

The good news was that we hadn't taken many pictures, and it didn't take long to do the downloading tonight. The bad news was that we didn't have many good pictures today.