US border marker
Doug and I decided we needed to take these two international students (Feng and Shawn) with us on an adventure this fine spring day. It turned out to be a really fun adventure with enough culture clash to keep it exciting. We got into the car early in the morning and Shawn asks “So how many people are in our tour group?” (Questions like this are very typical of Chinese tourists). We shocked him by telling him that there was no tour group, nor any tour bus. He then asked where we went to meet our guide. Again, he was shocked to know we were going on an unguided adventure. I guess venturing out somewhere unknown was something these two guys from China were not used to.
We got to the Killdeer badlands and hiked for about 5 hours. There were some great views (as seen on the pictures). The most notable thing that happened was during the middle of our journey when we were furthest from the car. Feng decided to slide down a hill and sprain his ankle. We thought he was done and we would have to leave him there but he surprised us by limping two hours back to the car. Each of the guys were delighted to find deer antlers as souvenirs. We also drove the guys to the US border so they could jump across the line to say they had "been there."
The best part for me happened at the end. We gathered a bunch of broken trees and put them in the trunk. We then drove to more familiar badlands (big muddies) to do some caving, climbing and most importantly, make a fire. Unfortunately we soon got really hungry. Then I realized that we had some sliced meat in the car that I was returning to Doug. We preceded to roast the meat on sticks. We had so much doing this, that we didn’t even realize it was snowing pretty hard. We drove away into the blowing snow having rid ourselves of adventure for a couple days.
