The Badlands and Beyond with Mustard On Top

September 8-15, 2011
After a couple weeks of beautiful Rocky Mountain scenery, we were ready for the Badlands. At US Customs, an agent went into our trailer and came back with a bag of red bell peppers and green onions. He said that the peppers were grown in a hot house in Canada and could have a fungus or something else. He didn’t explain about the onions.
Then we were in Montana. We drove all day, first through mountains, then hills, then ranches with cattle and horses. It got up to the low 90’s. The landscape got flatter with fewer and fewer trees until it was almost a blanket of golden yellow grasses and grains with ranch houses and barns few and far between.

The next day we drove to Fort Peck. The scenery was mostly flat or gently rolling hills covered with farmland or prairie with low mountains in the distance. I saw a few antelope at one point. When Louis and Clark came through here, the area was teeming with bison, elk, antelope, beaver and other animals. The settlers and buffalo hunters took care of that. Many of the towns we passed through had grain elevators beside the railroad along the main road. We also saw grain elevators off in the distance. It was a nice, hot, sunny day, a bit hazy.

We got to Fort Peck just as the last tour was starting at 1:00, so we took it. The guide showed us the dam’s powerhouses, explained the construction and mechanics and allowed us to touch the rotating shaft of a generator. As we gazed at Fort Peck Lake, the 5th largest man-made lake in the U.S., we could see huge paddlefish swimming around.

After that we checked in at the nearby campground with its spacious sites, big grassy lawns and nice old trees. The cats had a blast chasing bugs in the grass.
We returned to the interpretive center and looked at its extensive displays on the dam, the ecosystem and dinosaurs. Then we drove to the spillway.

The following day we drove about 4 hours to Medora, North Dakota. The topography varied from bumpy with buttes to flat farmland with a few small towns here and there. Mostly it was empty-looking land with far horizons under clear skies, restful to the eye. As we got closer to Medora, the badlands predominated.

Medora is small and touristy but quaint. The campground wasn’t particularly appealing to us or the cats, just a bunch of RVs packed in tightly. We were in a spot with no trees or bushes, just some grass and nothing much for the cats to look at, but we did get full hook-up for a change.

After set up, we went to the tourist center and then the ticket office to see if we could get discount tickets to the long-running, outdoor Medora musical, for which Medora is famous, but the tickets were too expensive for our budget. Instead, we watched a free “cowboy shootout” in town later. It was a hokey skit with a flimsy “plot” in which a bunch of cowboys get shot for no good reason. We went to a museum and learned about Harold Schafer, who founded the Gold Seal company and sold “Mr. Bubbles”. He used the money he made to buy and refurbish most of Medora and start the musical.  On the way back to the campground, we watched about 6 hot-air balloons being inflated.

In the morning we spent 4 hours on the 36-mile scenic loop through the Theodore Roosevelt National Park South Unit.
We saw prairie dog towns,
lots of bison, a small herd of feral horses on a hill and

expansive views of badland buttes.

We stopped at all the viewpoints, hiked several fairly short trails and enjoyed the hot weather.

In the afternoon we viewed the exhibits in the visitor’s center, learned about Teddy Roosevelt’s visits to the badlands, toured his cabin and looked at ruins of an unsuccessful meat-packing plant.

The following day we left, stopping at the Painted Canyon Visitor Center on the way out of the park. It has a trail and great views, but the weather had turned cold, windy and overcast, and the grey skies dulled the colors of the normally colorful badlands.

We continued on to Bismarck, passing mile after mile of cornfields and sunflowers. In Bismarck we caught a tour of the state capitol, a tall, skyscraper building with a marble and art deco interior.

From there we walked over to the ND Heritage Center, a comprehensive museum about the history and peoples of ND with an intact mastodon skeleton to boot.

The next day we drove by more sunflowers and cornfields and other crops we couldn’t identify. We entered Minnesota where the landscape got hillier with more trees, lots of small lakes and picturesque farms and farm buildings. Long straight rows of yellow corn with red barns in the distance were set off by a baby blue sky with “boat” clouds floating by. Picture-perfect scenes of which I have no photos continued the next day through Wisconsin. The woods thickened as we approached Maple Grove. We shopped at Trader Joe’s in a huge outdoor shopping area, then CostCo, then Lowes and drove a few more hours to our campground in Lodi.

We spent the next morning at the National Mustard Museum in Middleton. The drive there was so pretty and scenic, I could have stopped every few miles to take photos, but we were towing the trailer and didn’t stop. The museum had videos about mustard, historical exhibits and dozens of mustard jars and serving pieces. We tasted at least 25 mustards and bought 9 jars. You would be amazed at the variety.
After that we went in search of lunch and turned into a small shopping center before realizing we were stuck, with no place to park or turn around. Fortunately, a parked truck left, leaving us room to park. We bought our sandwiches and then David backed the trailer out of the tiny congested parking lot with a right angle turn while people watched. He did so quickly and without incident except that one of the casters struck the curb and came off. I ran back and got it.
The campground was about 12 miles away, but when we got there, we found a few RVs in a mobile home park but couldn’t find the office. No one answered when I called. We drove around and eventually found the office, but a note on the door said the manager was out sick, and there were no instructions for self-registering, so we left.
We went to the only other campground I knew about in Madison and self-registered but we were a bit far from downtown. It was late, so we ended up shelving other Madison sightseeing for another time since we were leaving the next day.