The Creston Dinosaur, South Dakota

Creston Dinosaur

I have now walked about 1,380 miles, which puts me at the Creston Dinosaur, a roadside attraction 30 miles past Rapid City, South Dakota. Jackie says she thinks we visited this beast on our first date thirty years ago, and while I don't remember for sure, it seems like the sort of thing we did that weekend, and it's on the way to the Badlands, which we definitely visited.

I have already mentioned some of the major things we did that weekend. Here are few of the smaller details I remember:

• The check I wrote to Jackie to pay for my part of the trip bounced, because I was too slow to make a deposit. She just resubmitted it, and it went through. As I recall, she did not even mention that until I brought it up.
• We left work Friday evening and flew to Rapid City, so we got into the airport late, then we had to get a car and drive to Custer, SD, so Jackie called our motel from the airport to let them know we would get in late. They said they were all going to bed, but they would leave our rooms (still two rooms back then) unlocked with the keys inside. So when we got there, I walked into Jackie's room with her and checked around to make sure no one was inside, then went to my room and made the same search.
• The motel had a game called Crolf, a game they invented that was a cross between croquet and miniature golf. Balls and clubs (maybe mallets?) were free at the front desk. It was a silly, fun game, nothing too sophisticated, and we played more than once.
• We reserved a small car, but the rental place didn't have what we reserved, so they upgraded us to a Nissan Pathfinder. That turned out to be useful when we drove around Custer State Park and went on a rough dirt road looking for buffalo. We spotted one lone buffalo walking along, and we stuck with him for a while, until watching him felt a lot like watching a cow, and then we moved on and stumbled onto a big herd and a photographer with a long lens and a death wish. I have told that story enough times and will skip it here, but we have a buffalo picture on our wall to commemorate the lone buffalo and the photographer incident.
• We went to a local show, and part of it was having the audience sing a song in which we spelled out the word "vacation." Before the song, they asked us to spell it out, and we all spelled v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n, and them some of us (me included) added an "e," because it was shortly after Vice President Dan Quayle had helped preside over a school spelling bee, and he had tried to get a student to add an "e" to "potato."
• In Custer State Park, we drove up Mount Coolidge, which has an observation platform and is the highest point around at just over 6,000 feet, so the views were great. At some point we noticed that every time we said "Mount Coolidge," it started to rain, like it was a curse or a call to the rain gods.
• And yes, I tried to sing "Into the Mystic" as we drove to Mystic, South Dakota, which either isn't anything, or we went to the wrong place. I hope I knew more words to that song than I remember now - I'm sure it wasn't a great performance. At least it's a good song.

 Walking is going well - I have averaged over 12,000 steps per day since January. It occurs to me that I have not been sick or injured once since I started, though I had a couple of days when I forgot my pills and did not walk much. If this keeps up, I will be done in about a year.