Day 28

States: South Dakota

Sites seen: Ranger Talk and Dark Sky Presentation and our campsite

You guys! Last night was incredible. Ever since we’ve been in the western United States, Josh has wanted to go somewhere and see the stars. This is easier to do out here because there isn’t as much light pollution as where we live. So yesterday we decided to stay in the Badlands and hear a ranger presentation at 8:30 followed by the Dark Sky presentation.

The ranger talk itself was great! He has degrees in geology and paleontology and did a presentation on the different fossils you can find in the park and what they mean and how they are connected to today. It was pretty geektastic!

After that, they turned off all of the lights and showed us different constellations and planets and things. At most, five planets are visible to us with the naked eye. They are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter: the only one we couldn’t see last night was Mercury.

The best parts of the evening were that we all saw the Milky Way for the first time which was very very cool. And, they have a super duper telescope there that they set up to see Jupiter (and several of its moons!) and Saturn (YOU COULD SEE THE RINGS!)

This was sooooo neat and I’m so glad we had the experience.

Today we are just hanging out at our KOA. This KOA is a corporate owned, resort KOA. There are two pools, a water slide, a fun zone area (basketball, putt putt, splash pad, jumping pillow, bouncy house, etc), tons of food places on site and much more. The girls love the campsites and to be honest, would have been happy if we did nothing but drag them from KOA to KOA. So they are excited for a chance to hang out, play games, and make friends. And Josh and I are happy to not have to plan anything or do much before we start the next few days of mega driving as we head for home. The only thing they don’t have here is internet or phone service…

Tonight, there is a rodeo at our campsite and I believe we will be heading to that. I’ll post more on that tomorrow.

Talk to you soon-

Deanna