Home

Home.

Sweet Home.

I can crap in my pot.
Wash in hard water.
Sleep in my bed that has no tucked corners.
Home.

Sweet Home.

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Sorry, I watched "So I Married An Axe Murderer" recently.

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But, yes, we are home. We packed so much in to 5-1/2 days. We left Friday but didn't get out of Joplin until almost 6:00 in the evening. We drove and drove and drove and drove until we finally stopped somewhere in Iowa. 40 miles south of Sioux City. That was a long haul. The next morning we made it to Rapid City, SD somewhere around 9:00 Mountain Time. On Sunday, we got up and crammed a bunch of stuff into one day. Monday, we crammed more stuff into one day and headed back toward home in the process. We didn't make it far. Tuesday we did more stuff and didn't even leave western SD until 2:00 in the afternoon. We drove off toward home in a different way than we'd come. We stopped somewhere in Nebraska last night then got up early this morning and drove the rest of the way home. We got home around 6:45 this evening. Here are the highlights of our trip.

• Mt. Rushmore
• Crazy Horse Monument
• Deadwood
• Sturgis
• Pioneer Auto Museum
• Badlands
• Grasslands
• Wall Drug
• 1880 Town

And here are some of the other highlights that were just chance happenings along the way.

• watched a stealth bomber fly maneuvers
• took a wrong turn that turned out to be the most beautiful drive
• ran into a pack of wild burros and fed and pet them (seems they love Oreos and bananas)
• did some minor rock climbing on the wrong turn road
• did some more climbing in the badlands, but that was dried mud
• watched a "town" of black footed ferrets (kind of like prairie dogs)
• watched many towns of prairie dogs
• fed prairie dogs (they like Oreos, too. And jelly beans)
• saw wild goats
• saw a buffalo
• stopped at Al's Oasis (nice tourist trap)
• got to pet Buck, AKA Cisco, from "Dances With Wolves" (very cool, btw)
• drove through Rosebud Indian Reservation
• watched a "gun fight" in Deadwood
• Mike and Daddy gambled in Deadwood, but Mom and I walked through downtown with Shael
• saw a ghost town
• stopped at the geographical center of the continental United States, near Lebanon, KS
• and last but certainly not least, paid outrageous amounts of money to stay in motels, some of which were dumps.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few things and I'll think of them later. But for now, that's all folks.