Bailing on the Badlands

July 02, 2009

Filed in: North Dakota

Last night about 7, I made the executive decision to cancel our last night in Medora and head back to Bismarck a day early. Don’t get me wrong – the North Dakota Badlands are amazing, and we have had an incredible two days, but the boys are tapped out.

Yesterday, we went mountain biking, which was both very very cool and very very hard. I would say “there are mountains everywhere” but that’s kind of like arriving in Venice and complaining that the streets are full of water.

The only reason it would ever even occur to us to try biking through some of the most famously inhospitable country in the country (the U.S. Army guys used to call it “hell with the fires put out” ) is the famed Maa Da Hey trail, which we managed to poke the front wheels of our bikes onto, just enough to discern a) this is perhaps one of the coolest bike tracks in North America, and b) this is way, way beyond our abilities. Way. The track is 6 inches wide, with zero room for error. One wobbly wheel and you’re a goner. It’s for very experienced bikers in great shape, and we are neither.

The day before, we did a 2-hour loop around the national park, complete with 25-minute walk/hike, and saw bison (both far away in a herd and one big guy up really close), prairie dogs by the hundreds (I can see why the ranchers hate them – they’re really just slightly cuter squirrels with a funky communal living arrangement, but boy are they fun to watch), a majestic Northern Harrier who swooped up over the side of the cliff and almost, almost got a few Pairie Dogs (fun and interesting to watch them sound the alarm en masse), and, best of all, four horses from the famed wild herd in the park: a stallion, two mares and a foal so young it was still nursing and still figuring out how to walk. Totally cool.

Having seen and done all that, and wandered around the super-super-super corny “Western Town” franchise that serves as the anchor to the National Park (in Bismarck we complained about the chain restaurants that were everywhere; now we’d kill for an Applebee’s), the boys are done, and I can’t blame them. Alone, I’d do more hikes, give the bike thing another go, but they’re over it – even though I am forcing them on one more march this morning.

As my BFF N has said multiple times, we’re crazy in the first place to even try these “family vacations” (there’s a phrase that strikes fear in your heart), and I agree with her basic premise, which is that teenagers love their lives just as they are – they want to be home with their stuff and their friends and their routines. The only way to do this kind of trip and survive is to let nearly all the “other” rules go out the window – yesterday, we bought $20 worth of penny candy at Ye Olde Western Candie Shoppe and I let them eat it all, in one sitting. Yuck.

Today, we’re leaving one of the most wild and beautiful areas of the country and driving back to Bismarck so we can watch a movie in a darkened theater, which we could go anywhere in the U.S.A. – except of course for Medora, ND. And that’s okay – we got four days of mostly strife-free fun out of North Dakota, which is pretty good in my book. Just hoping a) to see more animals this morning and b) that the movie isn’t Transformers II.