We continued our drive west along I-90. Our first stop was Badlands National Park. The trails in this park are very well maintained and many of them are handicap accessible. (I love hiking on handicap accessible trails.) Valerie and her family thoroughly enjoyed the scenery as we stopped at a few of the vista points along the Badlands loop road.

Valerie’s dad purchased a National Park Senior Pass for $10 (lifetime). This should allow us to enter most NPS attractions for no additional cost as we make our way across the country.

Our next stop was Mt. Rushmore National Memorial. I thought the carved faces were quite stunning in the evening light and wanted to stay and look at them for a while. However, it was going to get dark soon and we needed to find a campground soon. Beside the giant faces, there isn’t much to see at the monument and I can see how some visitors might be underwhelmed and regret making the long drive to the mountain.

We ended up dry camping at the Travelodge RV in nearby Keystone, SD. The Travelodge hadn’t enabled their hookups yet because of the recent cold, so they let us park in their RV lot for free.

We were the very last RV to leave the Winnebago factory among the Spring Adventurers.

Our very first stop was a Super Wal-Mart. We split our giant shopping list into three parts and broke up into teams to buy our supplies for the next week. About 1.5 hours later, we met up and loaded our RV with food, supplies, and toiletries.

We were a little worried that we’d have trouble navigating the Iowa roads on our way back to I-90. That worry was unfounded. Between Forest City and the Minnesota border, the roads were straight, wide, flat, and empty. Rural Iowa is a fine place to learn how to drive an RV.

Our first campground was American Creek near the Missouri River in South Dakota. We arrived just before 20:00. The campground staff was friendly and helped orient ourselves with the campground.

We had to be at the airport by 16:30 today to meet Valerie’s parents and board our shuttle bus to Forest City. After checking out of our hotel around 12:00, we ate lunch at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant for what we assume will be our last bowl of pho in quite a while. With a few hours to spare, we walked to the nearby Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and admired the free art. We picked up 4 banh mi from the same restaurant, picked up our luggage, and rode the light rail back to the airport.

The Great Alaskan Holidays technicians wanted us to “dry camp” the first night in our RV so that we can detect any major problems before leaving the Winnebago factory. This is the first time any of us have rented an RV in our adult lifetimes, so we had a lot of questions for the technicians. Many of our fellow campers were very friendly and helped show us the ropes.

Valerie was very cold the first night. Since the Great Alaskan team didn’t have additional blankets available, we will need to pick up more blankets at Wal-Mart tomorrow.

We started the day by walking through the Minneapolis Skyway system. I love sky bridges. To have an entire downtown area connected by them is a small fantasy. We happened to be walking around right around lunchtime. We saw swarms of Target employees heading to or from the local restaurants. Hungry, but discouraged by the crowds, we decided to try to find food at our next destination.

We went to the famous Mall of America (the largest mall in the United States). Again, we took the light rail from downtown. After wandering around the mall for a while and taking pictures with the giant Lego statues and roller coasters, we sat down for lunch at the food court. (In retrospect, we probably should have eaten lunch in downtown.) Aside from the amusement park and the giant Lego statues, the Mall of America is just like any typical American mall, except larger.

We went back to downtown to eat dinner at Restaurant Alma, which served an excellent 3-course dinner for ~$55/person. Valerie was excited that Restaurant Alma is a James Beard Award semifinalist.

In this episode of Valerie and Bryon Travel the World, Valerie and Bryon are going to drive an RV from Iowa to Alaska (accompanied by Valerie’s parents). We are going to pick up a brand new RV from the Winnebago factory in Forest City, IA and drop it off in Anchorage, AK about 18 days later. If this sounds appealing to you, you can sign up for next year’s Spring Adventure Package from Great Alaskan Holidays.

We flew from San Francisco to Minneapolis/St. Paul.  Belinda dropped us off at the Caltrain station.  We always leave lots of extra time for this transit since some terrible transit accident always seems to happen on this route.  Last time, a Caltrain fatality caused us to be delayed in transit by more than an hour.  This time, there was a Bart fatality.  It didn’t cause much delay, but maybe we should reconsider flying SFO if we can fly through SJC.

We arrived in Minneapolis around 18:30 and took the Blue line light rail into downtown for $1.75 each (including bus transfer). We hopped on a bus that took us to the Hyatt Regency, which Valerie booked on Priceline for the bargain rate of $60/night + tax. After setting in, we went out to Eatery 112, where we ate very tasty foie gras meatballs.