Heading Home

Fri. & Sat. June 24 & 25: We were all up by 6:00 again to have a quick “Continental Breakfast”. Macel, Kari & Laura left quickly to try and get Laura to a family gathering in Kalamazoo Saturday afternoon and Kari home to prepare to lead the service Sunday morning. The van with Alex, Eli, Carol, Linda and Sue left next. When Jackie, Ed, Marv & I left, only Mary, Emily, Karen, Katie, Summer, and Maddie remained. They were heading to the North Badlands unit to do some hiking since we missed out on that on Sunday with the rain. We decided to drive up to Wounded Knee one more time. As we walked around, Dakota came up again. He was taking a picture of the grave of his uncle, which now bore a small Swedish flag. It turned out that his uncle had traveled to Sweden and married a Swede. Dakota has cousins and other relatives there and has visited them, near where Ed once lived. The relatives sent decorations for the grave and he was taking a picture to send back to them. Then the four of us got on our way, stopping only to get postcards in Nebraska to mail to James & the McCoy kids for their collections, and for lunch at a local café in a small town in Nebraska (Marv & Ed had the special—chicken fried steak—and Jackie & I had the Navajo taco salad, served on Indian Fried Bread.). Along the way in the morning we saw several deer and prong horn antelope, and more evidence of flooding. We stopped at another small town café just inside the Iowa border and then drove on until about 10:00 to stay in Waterloo, Iowa. The first place we found was a Howard Johnson’s that had no vacancies, but the desk person kindly called 4 places before finding a Motel 6 that would take us. It was not nearly as nice as our stay on the way out and didn’t offer breakfast. We got a sandwich at Subway and plowed east, stopping at Wendy’s south of Chicago and Panera’s in Battle Creek for faster meals than our first day. We got home about 8:30, looked at the yard and gardens as twilight fell, checked in with our moms and kids and fell into bed. In the next few days I finished the wonderful book, Neither Wolf Nor Dog, by Kent Nerburn, which was so helpful in putting much of what I had seen on Pine Ridge Reservation in context or me. I recommend it highly! Marv found a Pandora program online that recovered most of the pictures he had deleted, but none of the videos. Once we were home we again had access to the internet and our email. So I am able to offer this latest adventure, with pictures, to you on The Savage Traveler.