the entire Flickr set is here.
i arrived home late Friday afternoon after 15 days of travel with family. it included a 3-day road trip to my brother's home in eastern, rural South Dakota with my dad, stepmom and Ciara. we arrived on the 4th of July in time for a BBQ dinner and then my brother took C and i to Watertown to see the fireworks. my sister-in-law painted, furnished and decorated the loft space off Ciara's room into a beautiful guest room and that was my haven for about a week. we took side trips to Sioux Falls...to Marshall, MN to see my nephew Zak pitch in an American Legion game (in a beautiful American Legion park)...to Minneapolis for dinner downtown along the riverfront before Kayla's arrival at the airport...and a day of shopping at Mall of America (which made both nieces very happy). we drove home from Minnesota with tornado activity a few dozen miles north of us (exciting!) we road-tripped across South Dakota to the Black Hills for 3 nights in a cabin in the hills outside Lead...stopping along the way in the Badlands and Wall (for lunch and some tourist-y shopping). the cabin was beautiful...set among the aspens...3 floors...4 bedrooms, 2 baths, hot tub. i shared the loft bedroom with the girls. we spent one day seeing the sights in Deadwood and another day visiting the Crazy Horse monument and the quintessentially American Mt. Rushmore. Kayla and i flew home together from Rapid City.
it's hard to be on someone else's vacation, especially when you're used to leading a very independent life. my brother had wanted us to all be together this summer and my folks had never been to South Dakota, so this trip was really for all of them. when you're sleeping in lofts and sharing hotel rooms, it can be a challenge to spend 2 weeks w/o any privacy...or to feel your heart tug a bit as you whiz by yet another potentially gorgeous photo that won't be captured by your camera because others are deciding where to stop. that said, i'm enormously grateful that i could tag along since between
my brother and dad, they picked up most of my expenses.
my brother took me fishing on two different lakes three different times...once with each niece and the last time with our Dad. i caught a walleye and two trout. i'd never been fishing before! (shocking considering my brother's a former commercial fisherman.) as a girl i'd once begged my dad to take me and he did...but once i learned he was going to expect me to bait my own hook and touch the fish, my fishing career was over before it had started. but i didn't have to touch any worms (we used lures) and my brother unhooked each of my fish...a walleye and two trout. i was surprised to find it so relaxing and rather zen-like.
the sights were lovely and the weather was perfect. there was a major lightening storm one night that seemed to last for hours. being a native Californian, I'm used to the hills turning golden and brown in the summertime, so i was surprised at how green everything was both in eastern South Dakota and western Minnesota...miles and miles of green fields and crops. (i've never seen so many cornfields in my life!)
i stumbled upon M. J. Andersen's memoir, Portable Prairie, on a sale table at Wall Drug and picked it up for $4.99. sacrilege! it's fabulous and i encourage you to read it even if you have no interest in South Dakota. it's about our quest for home and what that word even means to us. she's also very witty.
i also read Pete Dexter's brilliant Western, Deadwood. me, reading a Western...i know! it's a great book and it was really fun to go to Deadwood as i was nearing the end of it.
and in the gift shop at Crazy Horse i picked up The Journey of Crazy Horse which i'm about halfway through. it's a lovely book, though it's hard not to feel some white guilt and shame while reading it. it's beautiful to read about the Lakota way.
i took a sabbatical from Twitter and Facebook while i was traveling and though i've been home a couple of days, i can't seem to get myself to jump all the way back into them. i suspect my social media engagement is going to be a little quieter for the remainder of the summer as i work through what my next steps will be.
hope you're having a wonderful July.
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