Road to Nowhere

I got back from the UK a couple of weeks before Andy and the kids so that I could get on with a few things around the house and not use up all my leave - as it turned out I had even longer than that. The day before Andy was due to fly home she phoned me up in a panic as both of us had the wrong date and she had just missed her flight :-( That flight was also full for the next week so they couldn't even reschedule her. After much frantic phoning we got a flight via Iceland a couple of days later so I really has no excuse for not having the house tidy.

As it turned out we had a ton of issues with our system at work (or rather one of the systems that ours relies on) so most of my evening were spent at work rather than doing the jobs around the house I'd been planning. I did manage to get out for a couple of really nice cycle rides though, there are hundreds of miles of great bike routes from where the city decided in their myopic wisdom to get rid of the railroads. Still it makes for great cycling and I took off early a couple of mornings on a ride that took me around 5 of the lakes in the city. On the first ride I actually managed to run over a squirrel which was a bit of a surprise!

When the gang returned from England we had a day to unpack and day to pack and we were off on our first decent sized cross state roadtrip - to the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota - but first we had to traverse (as is so often the way in middle America) a whole lot of nothing. Here is our journey on the map, from Edina, Minnesota to Hill City, South Dakota - 624 miles of plains.
First stop for a trip southwest of Minneapolis is the town of Sioux Falls, so named for the falls
One nice surprise was that you could get to the falls from the town via a free trolley bus.
Rather than do the whole trip there in one go we decided to stop just before the Badlands so we could see them without having to double back on ourselves (the badlands is marker A on the map below) so we spent one night in the town of Murdo.

I'm not sure if the town has a slogan, if not may I suggest 'The Town That Cuisine Forgot' - which was just to the right of point A. My 'dinner' was evidence enough that we were in a culinarily retarded zone, frozen breaded fish with tinned sweetcorn (tinned - in the land of sweetcorn), mushed potato (not mashed) with gravy! The deal was sealed however by a lady who was served after us and had been kept waiting for ages: when she asked what the hold up was the waitress answered that it took the kitchen a while, and I quote 'to heat the food from frozen to fresh'.

I am never going back to Murdo.