Day 19: 6/20/24
From: Badlands National Park, SD (Cedar Pass Campground)
To: Garretson, SD (Palisades State Park)
Distance: 290 miles 

We “sleep in” today. Though we wake often in the tent, we manage to ignore the daylight until 8:30. It’s been raining on and off all night, too, but the tent has held up well. Fog covers the rugged peaks in the Badlands and we’re supposed to hit significant storms on the way east today. It’s going to be a tedious 4-5 hours on the road, especially with the incessant wind.

We pack up camp and head out to the gift shop, which has a diner where we expected to eat breakfast, but neither kid wants anything on the menu, so we leave with the intention of stopping somewhere else along the way.

We make a quick detour to a prairie dog “ranch” we saw when we came into the park, where we proceed to watch the critters poking their heads out and running around. You can buy peanuts in the store to feed them, which is probably why they are so tame and easily photographed.

There’s just one problem with relying on our own plans for breakfast. There’s nothing “along the way.” We end up at two different gas stations, both insanely busy. Is Summer Solstice a holiday in South Dakota? It certainly seems like everyone is out today. By the time we get any sort of food, it’s noon. Breakfast was basically yogurt and pastries. No one is complaining. (Lies. Husband is complaining. He wants eggs and bacon and something significant in his stomach.)

The next two hours on the road are some of the scariest. Lightning, thunder, wind, and heavy rain abound. We pass one car stuck in the middle of the grass that divides the highway. They must have spun out with all the water on the road. I’m getting worried that our campsite might be flooded out. When I check the weather forecast, there’s areal flood watches over the entire county.

I was looking forward to seeing this today, but I’m pretty sure that’s not happening. The weather on this trip continues to be wild.

When we reach the campground, there’s a small break in the rain. It lightens just long enough for us to set up the tent if we move at light speed. We get everything inside just in time for the next round of pouring rain. Split Rock Creek is roaring pretty good and I’m a little disappointed. I picked this site specifically because I know how much Husband loves the water (even when he can’t fish).

We spend an hour and a half just catching up on social media, reading, drawing, and napping and when the rain lightens again, we venture out for dinner. A sports bar in Brandon, SD called Tailgators calls our name and has plenty of gluten-free options.  The meal is incredible, as is the dessert. During dinner, we play each other in archery, basketball, and darts in Game Pigeon on our phones (it *is* a sports bar after all). And when we come out to the parking lot afterwards, it’s just starting to rain again. 

Back at the campground, we climb into the tent just in time for the next downpour. It looks like this will be our night! From the tent, we hear the roar of the creek just below us and train whistles from trains coming down the tracks on the other side of the creek. Plus thunder and rain. So much rain.

At 11 pm, the Sheriff drives through the park with a message playing on the loudspeaker that severe weather will be developing in the area over the next several hours. What does this mean for us? Is he telling us to leave? Just warning us that it’s going to get sketchy? We don’t know. What I do know is that our little tent site #94 at Palisades State Park ends up with a raging river on two sides of us by 1 am.

The storm gets so loud and vicious that I can’t fall asleep, despite Husband’s snores being drowned out entirely by the rain on our tent and the rushing water of the creeks. So at 1 am, I check the weather app and see that we’re now in a flood warning, which makes sense since I can hear the small trickle of a creek beside us now rip-roaring and emptying into the larger one. It’s already flooded half the campsite and is still rising. What I can’t understand is how the weather reports could be so wrong all day and into the evening, predicting an end to the rain in “2 hours” no matter what time of day I checked. Regardless of time, the radar always seemed to look like this:

I wake Husband. I know we’re *probably* okay where we are (the tent is on the highest ground on the site), but I don’t want to be a news headline for all the wrong reasons. And I can’t sleep when I’m terrified the way I am. I like data. I like being able to analyze data and figure out the *right* answer to problems. Husband thinks we’re safe where we are. But he agrees that if the kids and I aren’t sleeping because we don’t feel safe, then we should get a hotel. 

So at 2 am, I book a hotel 6 miles down the road. We aren’t even sure we can get out of the campground. When we try, we face a small bridge already under several inches of swiftly moving water, a veritable river flowing up and around both sides of it as well as through it. We make the right decision and don’t try to go through it, but it’s scary how quickly your mind thinks “Well, it’s just a couple inches deep. We could probably…” I’ve seen too many videos. Instead, we turn around to wake the camp host (a saint!) who instructs us to use a service road to get to the main highway and tells us if we can’t get out for whatever reason, we can move the tent to any open site.

We reach our hotel safely by 2:30 am, but it takes an hour for the adrenaline to wear off before I can even think of sleep. Water is no joke. It’s powerful and fast and unpredictable.

Older Child says the quiet of the hotel is weird after so many hours of listening to rain pounding the tent. They say it’s like being at the beach all day and then coming home and still hearing the phantom echo of waves in your ear. It certainly is.

I know people keep telling us we’re creating so many amazing memories for our family, but this kind? This kind, I could do without. For now, I’m just glad we’re safe and dry and can hopefully get a few hours of sleep.