Custer's Best Park

Friday, August 10, 2007
Center Lake campground, Custer State Park, South Dakota

Thanks to my parents for the tip about this place, which deserves an entire vacation spent only here. Excellent naturalist programs, children’s activities, wildlife, hiking trails, hot showers, a good sandy swimming beach with very shallow water, etc etc make this the nicest place we’ve been (aside from the Lochsa). Beautiful too. So say I, comfortably warm and entirely relaxed after an entire afternoon reading a book at the beach while Reed practiced his back float and built castles at the lake’s edge.

I too remember spending hours playing in the water and wonder why now I am satisfied with mere dips, a 25 yard swim out and back, then enduring the five minutes of exquisite torture while the wind dries me off and then I can sit unmoving in the shade.

Now our new neighbors, deux adultes et deux enfants are moving into their campsite, speaking French, which has sent me into an immediate fluttery panic about trying to converse with them in my oh so limited French. The opportunity seems God-given, but perversely premature.

We drove most of the day yesterday from the Big Horn mountains, through Sheridan (where we indulged in a mom and pop restaurant lunch of cheeseburgers and fries – the real thing in Wyoming) then through Gillette and south to Newcastle and across the border to Custer. The long day was worth it, allowing us to spend today entirely in one place. We warmed bean quesadillas on the charcoal grill for supper last night, saving the steaks we bought at the store for tonight, with potato salad and baked beans on the side. We visited the visitor’s center this a.m., seeing a buffalo up close on the way there and on the way back. While there Reed participated in one of the kids’ programs, making a cute little buffalo bank out of a recycled plastic water bottle. On the way back to camp we dropped Walt at the trailhead of a 3 mile trail that led back to our camp and he had a hot but welcome solitary hike while Reed and I ate sandwiches and packed the bag for the beach. Reed and I also stopped at the box office of the Black Hills Playhouse and got tickets for him and me for the musical “A Year with Frog and Toad.” He must be excited about it because he is willingly foregoing a night around the fire for this play. How could he resist, when it features characters from one of his favorite books?