A quick tour of Badlands National Park is easy, running roughly parallel to I-90 in South Dakota. We started in Wall and headed straight south into the park, then made our way east along the main road, stopping frequently despite our tight schedule.
Like the entire country this past summer South Dakota was hot.
At one overlook I saw a crowd of people gathered at the rail, blocking my view. I had my iPhone mounted on a tripod and didn’t want to mix into that group both to avoid them kicking the legs of my Peak Design Travel Tripod and to avoid them breathing on me. Mask-wearing in my part of California is at ninety-five percent, I would guess. In South Dakota we were down to about fifteen percent.
So I stepped out past the railing and saw what everyone else had already seen.
This post is from a series of articles chronicling a 2020 cross-country trip with my wife and two daughters and a boyfriend, from California to Ohio (to visit family) and Pennsylvania (to drop off my oldest daughter at grad school), and then back. We spent over five weeks on the road during the pandemic.
