South Dakota II Badlands/Wind Cave /Reptile Gardens/Storybook Island/Mammoth Site

Discovering and exploring South Dakota with my family has been exciting, filled with history, geology lessons and lots of wildlife.
In this episode we visited Storybook Island, a super fun place for the kids to run, explore and play. It kind of reminded me of Bookworm Gardens back at home in Sheboygan.

Right after Storybook Island we visited Reptile Gardens, super cool and rich display of all sorts of reptiles and fun facts about them. The best part is that the entrance is also a season pass, allowing you to go back and visit again at no charge. 🙂

Badlands was our next stop and FIRST National Park in this road trip. This was a day trip, the park is huge and filled with hikes, wildlife, beautiful landscapes and geology lessons. It was crazy to think that Badlands was once sea, then hot and wet and now it is dry and eroded displaying its age on its buttes and mesas.
Sadly the Wall Drug was closed when we stopped at the end of the day on our way back to Rapid city. Wall Drug has road signs inviting to visit that place for hundreds of miles.

In a different day we visited the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs was a super cool place to explore. Such an interesting story of how it was formed and what did to animals, specially mammoths during ace age. It was so fun to watch experts excavating and working on fossils.
We also visited Wind Cave National Park, the access to the cave was closed. We ended doing a few hikes and enjoyed the beautiful views that the park offers.

To finish our visit to South Dakota we did a super cool 12 mile bike ride in Hill City.

Visit www.carolstefano.com/travel to learn more about our trip across the USA. There are lots of pictures and posts about our daily lives.

Stay tuned for the next chapter of out trip!

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