Inspiring travel stories, tips, and guides from a couple exploring the world one destination at a time.
Medora sits in the far west of North Dakota, close enough to the Montana line that you can be there in fifteen minutes. Interstate 94 runs along the edge of the plains for hours and then, without much warning, drops into the valley of the Little Missouri River and the country falls apart into buttes and coulees. Medora is down in that hole. Fewer than 150 people live here year round, and the reason anyone comes is the national park on both sides of town.
Last Updated: September 14, 2026
Two facts sit inside a twenty-mile circle here. The town is named after the officer whose 1874 expedition found gold in these hills and broke the treaty that guaranteed them to the Lakota. And the cave south of it is where, in the Lakota account, people came into the world. You can drive between the two in half an hour.
Last Updated: September 14, 2026
The Badlands are almost exactly halfway through their existence. Water began carving them out of the prairie around 500,000 years ago, and at the current rate of about an inch a year, the Park Service expects them to be gone in roughly another 500,000. Everything in the photographs below is temporary. That is not a melancholy thought so much as a useful one, because it explains why the place looks the way it does — nothing here is hard enough to last.
Last Updated: September 11, 2026
Mitchell sits on Interstate 90 in the southeastern quarter of South Dakota, about an hour and a half northwest of Yankton, and it is known for exactly one thing: the World’s Only Corn Palace. That claim sounds like small-town bluster. It is literally true, and the reason why turns out to be the most interesting thing about the building.
This was the last stop of a long month — Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa and now the eastern edge of the Great Plains — and the weather had not finished with us. Sustained winds over 20 mph with gusts past 50, rain, and nighttime temperatures near freezing. We were still inside the country that produces spring tornadoes and we kept the truck pointed out, ready to move if we had to. That habit is the subject of its own post, Crossing Tornado Country in an RV, and this was the third campground in a row where it earned its keep.
[Read more…] about Mitchell, South Dakota: The World’s Only Corn Palace, Oscar Howe and a Thousand Years of CornLast Updated: September 11, 2026
This was a week governed almost entirely by the weather. We left Branson and ran north up the Missouri River valley in three hops — an hour to Springfield for an Airstream repair, then Blue Springs outside Kansas City, then Onawa in western Iowa, then Yankton, South Dakota, on the river below Gavins Point Dam. Rain cut Kansas City short. Iowa gave us three days of steady thirty-mile-an-hour wind with gusts to sixty. And the whole route was shaped by wanting to stay out of the way of spring storms on the Plains.
That is Lake Yankton at the end of it, flat as a sheet of glass, three days after we had been building windbreaks out of the truck in Iowa. If you want the argument for why we planned our travel the way we did for nine years, this week is the whole thing in miniature — and it is written out properly in Crossing Tornado Country in an RV.
It is also where the spring finally caught us. We had been traveling inside the bloom since Florida, moving north at roughly the pace the season moves. By the time we reached the Missouri there were Canada geese with goslings on the bank and wild turkeys displaying in the campground, which is the point at which you stop arriving early and start arriving on time.
[Read more…] about Blue Springs, Missouri to Yankton, South Dakota: Wind, the Nelson-Atkins and the Council at Calumet BluffLast Updated: September 9, 2026
From Eminence we drove west and then south, three hours across the width of the Ozarks, to Branson. Branson sits in the far southwestern corner of Missouri, in Taney County, close enough to the Arkansas line that the Boston Mountains start just over the horizon. It is a town of about 12,000 people that takes in something on the order of nine million visitors a year, and it got that way because of a novel.
The Ozarks cover about 47,000 square miles across southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, which makes them the largest area of high ground between the Appalachians and the Rockies. The highest point reaches 2,561 feet, in Newton County, Arkansas — and it is no longer called Buffalo Lookout. On November 15, 2023, after our visit, the United States Board on Geographic Names renamed it Wahzhazhe Summit, at the request of the Osage Nation’s tribal historic preservation office, which argued that the peak should carry the name of the people who lived on this plateau for 1,300 years before removal rather than the name of a fire tower that used to stand on top of it. We met the Osage a week earlier, at Blue Spring near Eminence, in the name they gave that water.
And “plateau” is the right word, because the Ozarks are not mountains. Nothing collided here and nothing erupted. Around 300 million years ago the continental collision that built the Ouachitas to the south pressed down on the crust, and the Ozark block levered upward in response — a slow seesaw. Everything since has been water cutting down into a broad dome of limestone and dolomite. Which is why the country here reads the way it does — hilly, and full of rivers. The hills are what is left standing between the valleys, not anything that was pushed up. It is also why this is the fourth place in a month where the same soluble rock has run the story, after Mammoth Cave, Bowling Green and Eminence.
[Read more…] about Branson, Missouri: The Ozark Plateau, the Bald Knobbers and a Thousand Butterflies