△ Wilderness Voices △

Jurassic Park was a lie. There were never any dinosaurs at Badlands, the park was an ocean when dinosaurs were around.

Badlands was the first park on our trip. After driving aimlessly down I-90 for the better part of two days, Badlands seems to come out of nowhere. Just miles and miles of prairie and farmland and then all of the sudden the landscape turns into outer space. It’s wild. We camped a pretty decent ways into the park on our first night at the park, right in with the bison, prairie dogs, and coyotes. It was amazing.

The next morning we explored the park, which is pretty marvelous in how desolate the landscape seems. We watched a coyote attempt to catch prairie dogs, and watched tourists get too close to bighorn sheep.

However there was a high of 106 that day, and Badlands does not have much to offer in terms of shade. So we spent the better part of the afternoon trying to beat the heat at a couple local watering holes. The next morning, it was off to the Black Hills.

We spent the past couple days in Chicago. We arrived in the late afternoon on Thursday and got a great walking tour of parts of downtown by my Aunt Tina, who graciously let us stay at her apartment.

On Friday, we walked to the shore of Lake Michigan and around the Navy Pier. We then took the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s boat tour, which was excellent. We popped up to the rooftop bar at the London House (a tip from Tina) before the afterwork crowd mobbed it to scope more views of the buildings we had just seen from the river tour. We then hopped over to the Spy Bar, which was….  interesting (better suited for kids?). Then we were able to score some last minute tickets to the “Fantastic Super Great Nation Numero Uno” show at Second City. To top off the night, we got some deep dish pizza at Lou Malnati’s. We both went in with low expectations, but were pleasantly surprised.

After a late start this morning, we hit the road again, heading toward Badlands National Park. We stopped for an early dinner on the banks of the Mississippi in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and then stopped for the night in Fairmont, Minnesota.

After driving all day yesterday, we arrived at Four Mile Creek State Park just in time to catch the tail end of the sunset over Lake Ontario. It was just after 9PM, so we opted not to cook dinner and found a little place down the road to eat called Bandanas. If you ever find yourself in Youngstown, NY, I highly recommend stopping in at Bandanas.

Today we headed out to see Niagara Falls, and it was just as impressive as we had imagined. So. Much. Flipping. Water. We spent most of the morning walking around, checking out the park, and scoping different views of the falls.

My last day at work was this past Tuesday. Ashley quit her job a few weeks ago, so she was able to get a lot done in preparation for the trip. I think that preparation lulled us into feeling like there wasn’t much left to do, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. The past four days have been a mad scramble to move out of our apartment while also packing and preparing for a three month trip.

But we’re out now, with most of our belonging spread around Lowell, and the essentials packed into the van.

And here’s a peek at the inside of the van. Things are a little messy, as some of the packing was done in haste, but we’ll get things ironed out as we go.

We made a quick pit-stop in Lowell, MA to say goodbye to some family, and then traveled north to Durham, ME to say goodbye to even more family.