Badlands National Park

After our exceeding long day in the car on our first travel day, we were all thrilled that the second day was just a short few hours to Badlands National Park.  The Badlands are a totally unique place, a landscape like nothing you've ever seen.  

We were just there for an over night but we did manage to go for a short hike and explore the landscape a little bit.  

Sierra really, really wanted to use the binoculars, though I'm not certain she was really seeing anything with them.  We had to shut down the binocular usage when she kept tripping because she was trying to walk with the binoculars against her eyes.

My parents camped their way out west with us, and we set up our tent near their camper space with a nice view of the scenery.  The only problem we had was severe straight line winds, all night long.  In hindsight, we should have definitely set up some guy lines for our tent, but we didn't.  As a result, in the middle of the night, I looked across our two sleeping children at Jason on the other side of the tent and the side of the tent was just inches from my face.

Credit to the tent, though, it managed to last through those sustained winds for hours and hours.  Until the next morning, when it finally couldn't take any more and snapped under the pressure.  Jason managed something to keep the pole usable for the rest of our trip to Bozeman.  And here's another reason to love REI: they replaced the tent entirely with no trouble.