We followed the I-90 as it made its way across Montana and into Wyoming. In a lot of spots along the highway, the road was paved red. We could see why, since the soil is also red in many spots. Here is a red highway (through a windshield with a bug on it - I did try to avoid taking pictures through the windshield but sometimes that's the only way to capture what you're looking at):
After Wyoming, we found ourselves in South Dakota, home of the iconic Mount Rushmore. We stopped in at Mt Rushmore to check it out. It was a pretty impressive sight. We of course had to pay to park, but as a bonus, we got to keep our parking pass for there for a year. Unfortunately, this is non-transferable, but at least if anyone else is crazy enough to rent the exact same car and take it to Mt Rushmore, they won't have to pay for the parking.
After this, it was getting dark, and we wanted to find our campsite in the Badlands, so we continued on our way. The drive in to the campsite was through Badlands National Park, and we saw quite a lot of wildlife on the roads and not much of anything off the road, since it was completely dark by the time we got there. In flat lands, it gets dark very quickly once the sun sets, whereas where I live, in the mountains, the sun sets but then we have twilight for several hours afterward, as the sun is still technically in the sky - just it gets blocked by the mountains sooner. Anyways, though we couldn't see the landscape, we still knew that the badlands are supposed to be somewhat desert-like, which is why the first of many frogs we saw took us by surprise. Driving along that road became like a game of reverse-frogger - we in the car were trying to dodge the frogs! We also saw a raccoon, an owl, a snake, and plenty of rabbits and mice. Every once in a while, some geographical wonder would pop briefly into view in our headlights, so I was very excited by this wildlife wonderland and its many nifty sights.
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