...And so began the longest day of my life

The next "day" was a blur, as we drove over 800 miles, from Sheridan, Wyoming to Minneapolis. We made several stops along the way:

• Devil's Tower: This was awesome. A wild sight rising from the ground where everything else is flat. Pictures can do it more justice than my words. Even better was the prairie dog town at the base of it. Hundreds of them were just chilling on top of their holes, barking like crazy and looking at us. We were able to get close to some of them. Also saw a black widow spider in the field. I was wearing flip-flops, who knows how many more of them were out there ready to chomp me?
• Mount Rushmore: It was cool seeing it, but not as impressive as I had thought it would be. The faces were kind of small compared to the rest of the mountain. It is still nuts that they were able to make the faces look so detailed, and so long ago.
• Badlands Nat'l Park: Driving through the nothingness that is South Dakota, and then seeing this place is mind-boggling. It's name describes it perfectly, this area was bad. Cliffs, canyons, boulders, rocks, and towers everywhere. We were there for sunset and it was perfect.

I took the wheel at this point as the sun was going down and drove across flat monotonous landscape into the early morning. The sun set around 8:30 but you could see brightness in the west until 11:00 at night due to the lack of civilization and flatness. At 3 am we stopped off for "dinner" and then Wild Man Justin took over and drove us clear to Minneapolis. I have no idea how he did this, and I woke up around 7:30 feeling like garbage. Fell asleep again and woke up an hour later at the Mall of America. From the middle of nowhere to a gigantic metropolitan mall in a matter of hours was a cool experience. After a couple hours at the mall, we made our way farther East to Amery, Wisconsin, to a house on Lake Bear Trap where some family friends of Justin's were to host us and show us a great time.