Minneapolis, Middle of Nowhere, and the Badlands
Hi friends. Dylan already detailed a lot of what went down over the last few days, but what am I if not repetitive and narcissistic enough to think that my input is just as (if not more) valuable, so here we go!
First things first I wanna mention how incredible it's been to have so many people reach out about the blog. I literally can't even believe that people are reading this outside of like, my parents and the people from work I've forced into giving us pageviews. It's super exciting to know that y'all are "following along" with us, especially because you know we wanna keep our instagram like ratios high so we're avoiding posting too much there. Bottom line, THANK YOU.
This post is a little delayed because we spent the entirety, and I really truly mean the entirety, of yesterday driving through all of Montana. I'll talk about that a little bit later because it was a truly traumatic experience in more ways than one but the point is, it's way harder to blog on the road than I thought. Especially with all these cameras and no cell service (lol forget wifi), making an office out of the passenger seat of a rav 4 is a challenge.
Back to the trip. After a breeze of a drive through Wisconsin, we arrived in Minneapolis for what turned out to be one of the most surprising places on our trip. I'd always discounted Minny in my head for kind of a "rest day," where we'd spend the day laying around watching football in preparation for our long drives and the lack of civilization to come. We had a short list of things to do though and by the end of the day we were bananas about the city.
Our first stop was to the mall of america, which I'd been to once before but was a must see in tourist world MPLS, and since I love shopping and Dylan loves America it was a pretty natural fit. We completely slayed riding roller coasters with kids and I had my phone out the whole time so I'm pretty sure I'm banned from the MOA amusement park now but I'm pretty comfortable saying it was worth it.
Dyl already mentioned Revival and Can Can Wonderland and they were both so dope. The food at Revival was so incredible I legitimately debated leaving a 5 star yelp review while we sat there. CCW was so wild, and possibly the first and only mini golf course I can beat Dylan in. Was all around awesome.
The next day we left for South Dakota, which, in keeping with Minneapolis, turned out to be one of the more pleasant surprises of the trip. Which I know sounds ridiculous because it is South Dakota. But like once you shake the murder vibes that come with being completely in the middle of nowhere with nothing but farms and the occasional population 400 town around you, it was actually pretty neat. Like Dyl said, we stopped in the middle of nowhere to test out the drone and take some photos for Sylven. G helped.
We got to our Airbnb/motel in the early afternoon. When we saw the photos of this place we thought for sure we were gonna get murdered there but the owner wound up being incredibly nice and the room was just fine as well. We left the pup in the room since even though I knew he'd be ok in the Badlands (we weren't gonna be hiking), I knew I wanted to take some photos for Casey so I didn't wanna be distracted managing the pup, three pairs of shoes, two lenses and two outfit changes while trying to drive our way through. I'm working on getting those photos together and up in an album (hopefully sometime tonight), but in the meantime, here's a few selects.
The extent of my experience with the Badlands was that episode of the Bachelor where they left both girls from Chris's two on one in the middle of em, so to see that in person while reenacting Kelsey's "blessed with eloquence"/"amazing story" speeches was super fun. ALSO, there are snakes! We were super fortunate to not see any but I think Dyl got a little alarmed when he realized that the snakes were in fact rattlesnakes and not, what, any other snake as though that would be less horrifying? Idk guys I'm out on all snakes.
We caught the sunset at the Badlands and grabbed dinner at WALL DRUG. If you've ever been within 355 miles of Wall, SD, you'd understand what that is. The earliest billboard we saw for it was literally 355 miles away in Minnesota. It was just a tourist trap town with some old timey stores and restaurants but at 830 on a Monday in South Dakota our options were extremely limited so we did what we had to do.
The next morning we started our drive to Montana and saw a bunch of cool and horrifying stuff along the way. I'll get into that later though because it's time for us to head out and see Glacier!