29 Oct 2011 - Ozark Colors

I was released from the South Dakota FEMA assignment on Tuesday. I left Pierre, SD, around 4 PM. It was cold. But colder weather was on its way - they had even mentioned the dreaded "s-word" in the forecast ("snow"), so I felt like I was leaving town at just at the right time.

I drove to the eastern part of the state, and spent the evening with my cousin Curt, who had lots of information and some old photos, from my mother's mother's side of the family. I got to meet his kids, though his wife was out of town on business. Back when my grandmother, her sister, and her brother were alive, Curt made the effort to ask them questions about their family, and they responded with all the information they had. I wish I had been so smart. He and other family members have done more research and he's gotten additional information on that side of the family, since then. This was the first real information I'd gotten about my Grandma Edith's family, so I was very grateful that he was willing to take time away from his field work to share with me what he has. (He said he could afford the time because he's ahead of schedule.)

I drove from barely South Dakota (Iowa was across the river) to Independence, MO, on Thursday. I had a lovely visit at my cousin Joan's in Independence Thursday evening. I finally got to see the mantel clock she inherited from Grandpa Hansen (my dad's mother's great-grandfather). She served a family recipe cassarole that was a real treat for me - good old North Dakota comfort food. :-) And I got to meet her two daughters, and got to see three of her grandchildren again.

Then on Friday I drove from Independence, along the far western edge of Missouri and Arkansas, through the Ozark Mountains. The colors were definitely past their peak in Minnesota and South Dakota, but the further south I got, the more fall colors I saw. I got off the main road and wandered over to Devil's Den State Park in Arkansas, to see the colors up close. The whole drive was like one long scenic byway from South Dakota through Arkansas.

23 Oct 2011 - Minnesota Weekend

I headed up to the Fergus Falls area in Minnesota for the weekend. This is my last weekend up north, as I will be released on Tuesday and will be heading to Texas soon.

As always, I enjoyed driving through the countryside. The rising sun suffused the fog with a pink glow, which made for a fantastically beautiful morning on Saturday. One of the "hidden" effects of all the flooding in this part of the country this year, and in recent years, is all the dead trees. So sad.

My Aunt and Uncle Marcy and Phil had some folks over to their house on Saturday, to celebrate my Aunt Leona's 90th birthday and I wanted to be there. It was a very nice day. I'm glad I got to share it with Leona and the family. Besides getting to wish Leona a "Happy Birthday", I got to see some relatives I hadn't seen in awhile.

I got to visit for awhile with more cousins, Jack and Joyce, and they helped me fill in some blanks in the family tree.

Another purpose of the weekend trip, was to pick up my new dog. :-) I'm calling her Joey. She's a love. She's a beautiful copper-colored poodle. She has a very laid-back, relaxed personality. I've only heard her bark once so far. She is a sweet, very affectionate dog. She loves traveling (that's a good thing!) and going for walks. I think we are a good match. She is used to cats and keeps trying to get the cats to play with her. The cats are not used to dogs, and they don't understand what she wants. But they are getting more and more relaxed with each other as we go along. It's going to be okay. It's wonderful to get greeted so warmly and enthusiastically when I come in the door!! I've missed that.

16 Oct 2011 - Last Days in South Dakota

I took a drive northeast of Pierre this weekend. Mostly I was heading to Gettysburg (settled by 200 Civil War veterans) to see Medicine Rock, but I took a wrong turn, and ended up wandering all around the country for the afternoon. :-) Not a problem, though. I stopped at several marshes and enjoyed watching the birds, including a group of beautiful Northern Pintail ducks. They were too far away for me to get any good pictures. :-( And I saw some juvenile cattle egrets for the first time.

Medicine Rock was a disappointment. It's a prehistoric rock that has human footprints in it. It's been sacred to the Lakota forever. Legend has it that the Great Spirit saved a young Indian boy who was being chased by a bear, and their footprints are embedded in this huge rock. It was moved to Gettysburg from its original location near the river, when the water from the dam would have covered it. The problem is that I asked three people in Gettysburg for directions to the rock, and was given bad directions three times. I finally found it - in a museum, that had closed at 5 PM, while I was wandering around town, trying to find the rock! You could see the rock through the front window of the Dakota Sunset Museum, but I couldn't see the footprints real clearly. I will have to go back some time, and make it a point to get there when the museum is open. It looked like there were two dinosaur eggs out front of the museum, which also intrigued me.

I just tried to ignore the pheasant hunters, but they were ubiquitous, as my friend Nancy would say. I saw almost no pheasants; I think they were hiding. :-)

I have so enjoyed all the different kinds of sunflowers. This late in the season, they have all lost their brilliant yellow petals and are all brown and/or green, but the variety! Some have very full, heavy heads, that hang way down. Others have turned a dark chocolate brown.

As I drove past the sunflower fields and cornfields, I couldn't help thinking how much my interests have changed. When I was a teenager an afternoon of "sightseeing" would have bored me to death. But now there are few things I enjoy more than wandering around the countryside, stopping at marshes, watching birds, keeping an eye out for deer, muskrats, hawks, and ducks and other water birds. You never know what's going to be around the next corner!!

This is my last week in South Dakota. I am heading to Minnesota this weekend, to be there for my Aunt Leona's 90th birthday party. And Tuesday, the 25th, I will be released from this assignment, and I will be heading south, toward warmer climates - to Texas, specifically. I'm ready to go. Although we've had wonderful fall weather here, the highs are only going to be in the 50s this week, and that's too cool for me. I'm glad it's only for a week.

8 Oct 2011 - Black Hills

I've been on a high for the past three days. Since we had a three-day weekend (Columbus Day is still a Federal holiday), I decided to drive Carri to the Black Hills area. I think this is about my seventh trip here, yet most of the roads I've taken, and most of the places I've been, have been new to me. I knew I was in the West, when I saw antelope herds and magpies flying across the road, flashing black and white, with their unbelievably long tails. There is so much to see and do in this part of South Dakota. South Dakota has five scenic byways, four of which are in the Black Hills area. I've driven three of the ones in the Black Hills area so far. I'm not sure I can take my RV on Iron Mountain Road, because of the narrow tunnels. But, really, every road you take in the Black Hills is a scenic drive. Especially this time of year, when the oranges, reds, and golds, are everywhere. The Spearfish Chamber of Commerce told me that the colors would peak last weekend. I decided to wait a week, to take advantage of the three-day weekend, gambling that waiting five days off peak wouldn't make much difference. Usually that would be true, but not always. Not this year. Last weekend was warm and sunny and beautiful. Early in the week the temp in Pierre was 91 degrees - unusually warm for this time of year. Then a cold front came through, with really high winds. I can see that maybe 80% of the aspen leaves are gone. :-( There is still a lot of beautiful color, but I can tell that there would have been significantly more last weekend. My first day here the weather was cold, windy, overcast, rainy. The second day there was no wind, less rain, it was cool rather than cold, but it was still overcast. Not great for taking pictures of fall colors.

My first day here, the first thing I did was visit the Chapel in the Hills in Rapid City. My Norwegian cousin Jartru's daughter was confirmed there when they were living in Rapid City years ago, and I've wanted to see it ever since (I was living in Texas at the time and missed the confirmation). The building is a replica of a stavkirke - an old Norwegian church. I've seen an old stavkirke when I was in Norway. There are very few of them in the US. (I know of one other - in Moorhead, Minnesota, in the Hjemkomst complex.) They are beautiful churches, made of wood, so old that they have Viking and pagan influences in the design.

Then I drove to Wind Cave National Park, but got there just ten minutes after the last cave tour. It was my own fault; if I hadn't stopped so many times to take pictures along the way, I wouldn't have made it in plenty of time. :-) I decided I would have to come back the next day for the tour. Then I drove the Wildlife Loop in Custer State Park for the first time. I have seen more wildlife up close on this trip than any other trip here before: buffalo, deer, prairie dogs, antelope. Three bighorn sheep were walking down the road toward me, then ran up on a nearby hill and stopped and looked back and posed for some pictures.

I spent a good chunk of the morning wandering around Custer State Park, enjoying the solitude of the morning lakes. It was cool enough that the mist was rising off the surface of the lakes. One of the advantages of being here post-peak, and off-season, is that I pretty much had the lakes to myself. Just me and the ducks enjoying the beautiful morning. Such peacefulness and serenity.

I almost didn't drive back to Wind Cave NP for the tour on my second day, but I'm sure glad I did. I've been to a number of cave tours in my life, but this was one of the best. Part of that was because our tour guide was excellent. The first thing she showed us was the natural opening, about 14 inches in diameter. She put a ribbon in front of the hole, and you could see there was quite a bit of wind blowing out of the hole. She told us that the cave "breathes" in and out, because of the changes in barometric pressure, with the cave constantly trying to equalize the pressure with the outside. Although the hole was "breathing" out at a brisk pace when we were watching, she said that it was "breathing" in at about the same velocity during the morning tour!! The cave's "breath" has been clocked at 70 mph! The Lakota people consider this a sacred site; their creation stories talk about everything coming from the hole that breathes. So we were in a sacred place. I felt like I'd already gotten my money's worth, and then some, only ten minutes in, before we'd even gone into the cave!! Wind Cave is ranked as the fifth longest cave in the world, at over 130 miles. It appears to be kind of like a "honeycomb" - all those miles of cave are below about a one-square-mile of land surface!! The experts estimate, however, from the amount of wind that blows in and out of the hole, that Wind Cave may be the largest cave in the world. They estimate that only about 5% of the cave has been explored. Every year another 2-3 miles is explored and added to its known length. Wind Cave has no stalactites or stalagmites, but lots and lots of boxwork; in fact, 95% of all the boxwork in the world is in Wind Cave. That was one of the main reasons I wanted to see this unique cave. I didn't count the times I said "Wow" on this tour. I'm so glad I drove back for it.

On my drive to Spearfish, I saw something I'd never seen before: a pile of old bikes. :-) And I'd just been thinking I needed to trash my old rusty pink bike that is in such bad shape and that I never use anymore and won't ever use again....so I added it to the pile! :-) Serendipitous! :-)

I stopped for a leisurely old-tyme breakfast in Cheyenne Crossing before I took the short hike to Roughlock Falls in Spearfish Canyon. The path allowed me to indulge my love affair with birch trees some more. One of the best things about the hike was getting a good look at an American Dipper. They're a small bird, smaller than a robin. It's amazing to watch them bob their head up and down, and then just hop over to the creek and disappear under water! This was only my third sighting of a dipper; the second time I saw one, was also at Roughlock Falls. It was a lovely weekend - lots of beauty and solitude. Lots of beautiful fall colors. Up close and personal experiences with nature of all kinds. Just the kind of break I needed.

28 Aug 2011 - South Dakota

I did a short special project for a couple days in the Yankton area when I first got here; other than that I've been working in Pierre. Pierre is a small town; only one other state has a smaller capital city. ← But the capitol building and grounds, complete with Capitol Lake, is beautiful, and I've walked there many times. There is a small flock of nine wood ducks living on Capitol Lake, and I've sure enjoyed watching them ↓.

This is a small disaster, as disasters go. Though we're working long hours (7 to 7 to start, as usual), we've been getting some time off on the weekends since the beginning. And I've taken the opportunity to see a bit of this part of the state. Mostly I've driven up and down the Missouri River, both east and west, but one weekend I drove the 175 miles to Rapid City. I took the opportunity to drive the Needles Highway, since I won't be able to drive it with my RV because of the many hairpin curves and the too-small tunnels. I drove up to Sylvan Lake, and saw the needles, of course, and the view of the beautiful Black Hills from the top. I was disappointed to see so much damage to the fir trees due to the pine nut beetle, but that is typical of most western forests these days.

On my jaunts around the countryside, I've seen lots of birds, including a kestrel, a golden eagle, a wood duck, a black-capped night heron (first time ever!), turkey vultures, Hungarian partridges, a ruddy duck (with its bright blue bill), lots of grebes, lots of pheasants of all ages [↑ and ↓] , pelicans, lots of ducks, Inca doves, and lots of hawks. I got close to one hawk because it didn't want to leave its prey behind (a rabbit, I think), and I got close to another hawk that had just caught a mouse [red-tailed hawk ↓]. I've seen lots of prairie dogs, some antelope, deer, and a coyote.

The rivers, the lakes, the grasslands, the dunes, the dams - this is all beautiful country here. And much of what I've been exploring is part of Sioux reservations. The Sioux lands have few people living on them. I see lots of beautiful horses, though. One of my drives was to the Narrows, the land inside a large loop of the Missouri. Another drive was through Cheyenne Sioux territory and the Cheyenne River, where I discovered one of my favorite places so far, an out-of-the-way place called Foster Bay →. Another was through the national grasslands and dunes south of the Missouri River. I've learned that traditionally there were three Sioux dialects - the Dakota, the Lakota, and the Nakota!!

I take the kitties with me, so they get a break from the hotel room [↓ Cleo "hunting"]. They must go stir-crazy in the hotel room all day while I'm at work. I'm still looking for a home(s) for them, though I haven't been very diligent about it so far. :-) They love being outside on our weekend jaunts.

I never knew before that there were so many different kinds of sunflowers. One afternoon, on my explorations, I found a field of sunflowers back-lit by the sun. I didn't think that was possible. Sunflowers' heads follow the sun - hence the name - and I didn't think I'd ever see a field of sunflowers facing me, with the sun behind them. But that's what I found. I walked around in the amazing sunflower field, with sunflowers all around me, for awhile. Amazed at their beauty. It's late in the season, and the heads are very heavy. I'm guessing maybe the heads were too heavy to turn toward the sun, but I really don't know.

I am so enjoying the lovely weather we've been having while I've been here - sunny and warm (70s and 80s) almost every day. Now that it's October, the leaves and grasses are turning colors and it's even more beautiful than it was when I got here. I've learned that cattails are beautiful in so many different ways.

I am expecting to be released from this assignment sometime in October, at which point I plan to visit friends and family in ND and MN a little before I head south. Assuming the weather stays nice. :-)

20 Aug 2011 - Wisconsin and Michigan

Crossing over the "Mighty Mississippi" was more meaningful than usual, since it had just taken me maybe only 20 steps to walk across the Mississippi at its source a couple days before. Although on my way to Nova Scotia, in general, my next goal was to visit more relatives in Wisconsin and Michigan. Driving across Wisconsin, I was thrilled to see several big, beautiful sandhill cranes in a field. I've seen them at a wildlife refuge, but I'd never seen any in the wild before.

I have agreed to update our family tree on my mother's father's side of the family, and I wanted to get back in touch with the Appleton leg of the family. One of my grandfather's sisters married a Wisconsin man and settled near Appleton. I was able to visit with some of them, as well as with a cousin and friend in the Madison area, before I headed over to Michigan.

I was impressed with the corn, which looked green and healthy and tall - "as high as an elephant's eye", as I drove through the Michigan. Again, I was primarily passing through on my way to Nova Scotia, but I made a point of stopping to visit a cousin. My cousin and his family love the little town of Ithaca. It was good to get back in touch with him. I parked next to a small lake outside of Ithaca, and enjoyed the quiet, serenity, and beautiful sunsets at the site when I wasn't visiting with my relatives. I was parked there, on another beautiful sunny day, when I got the word that FEMA wanted me in South Dakota, as soon as I could get there. I was disappointed that my second attempt to get to Nova Scotia this summer was also unsuccessful. Maybe next summer. :-(

The drive from Ithaca to Pierre, SD, 1100 miles, took me a couple of days and went smoothly.

The kitties have gotten pretty relaxed about traveling; they enjoy riding in the RV.