Day Eight -- to Medora, ND

Day 8 – Vermilion Dam Lodge to Medora, ND
We packed up most of the Teardrop last night and set out this morning on the next leg of our trip. The original plan was to drive 400-some miles to Bismarck, ND; according to Mapquest, the journey takes 7.5 hours. And that might be doable – if you’re not hauling a 1000-lb trailer and stopping for potty breaks every 45 minutes. (Note to self: It’s not such a great idea to give each kid a full water bottle upon buckling up and setting out at 9 a.m.) The trip through Minnesota – winding through Hibbing, Grand Rapids and assorted fishing villages and resort towns, mostly on two-lane highways – took much longer than we expected – about 7.25 hours just to Moorhead. But it was a lovely drive, and we had a nice lunch at a wayside stop on the south shore of Leech Lake. The kids played on the beach and collected stones while we made sandwiches out of the back of the trailer. I love that. So we watched as the landscape evolved from thick pine forest to lush lake country to wide-open prairie. It’s amazing how fast it changes.
(Keith, of course, was thrilled to drive through Hibbing, and interrupted tape 5 of Jim Dale reading “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” to listen to “Like a Rolling Stone” on the way through town.)
At some point – maybe after we had gotten through Fargo? – we noticed a strong odor and figured it was just the smell of North Dakota farmland that we would have to tolerate for the rest of the afternoon. But a few minutes later we realized that Natalie had been keeping a treasure box of items that she had collected over the last few days – mostly snail shells and dismembered crawfish parts – and she had opened it to show it off to Charlie. We asked her to kindly keep that nasty box closed for the rest of the trip. At least while we're in the car.
So we hit the North Dakota border around 4:30 p.m. and at that point decided to push about 200 miles beyond Bismarck to Medora, about 25 miles from the Montana border. It made for a long day: In the end, we spent about 13 hours in the car and drive about 600 miles. But this way we can spend some time at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the morning, and drive an easy 300 miles or so in the afternoon – that’ll get us close to Billings, and puts us within shouting distance of Yellowstone; it won’t be hard to get there in just a few hours on Sunday.
Tonight, our tenacity was rewarded with views of the luminous North Dakota prairie – waves of electric-green grass that turned shades of lavender and violet as the sun set farther into the horizon. Keith was confident that we could make it from Jamestown to Medora on one tank of gas, but we coasted into town at about 10:15 local time with fumes and white knuckles. Yikes.
(The kids’ internal clocks, btw, are so messed up. It was 12:30 a.m. in Indiana by the time we got them into bed. They held up well. We can say we’re trying hard to get them on local time ASAP, I guess.)
The North Dakota badlands sprang up out of the prairie just before we hit Medora. The town – or what we saw of it as we coasted through to the closest gas station – looks like a Disney version of the Wild West, with lots of cowboy hats and fudge shops. And here we are, at the Badlands Motel, a classic drive-up that’s so earnestly kitschy: wood paneling, a rodeo theme and a circa-1960 bathroom. Sweet!