(Today was a big photo day, but that's why we built this slideshow thing. Enjoy!)

Small town Nebraska, farms, guys wearing cowboy hats, the occasional snake on the road, farms, actual tumbleweeds...big sculpture made of old cars painted gray! Yep, Stonehenge just comes out of nowhere, and is followed by a lot more nowhere for miles on either side. But it was all the roadside Americana we had hoped for. It also comes with bizarre stories, like that the creator wants to be buried there, and that the band P.O.D. has a video that features it (though the band didn't appear, about 30 local kids did). Carhenge is also a "Car Art Reserve," so you've got your dinosaur made of car parts, your car decked our like a covered wagon, your four cars representing "The Fourd Seasons," har har...it beats the lame bicentennial rest stop sculptures we encountered yesterday. Also, some wiseguy further down the road had put a toilet and a chair on some bales of hay and labeled it "RestStop." At least the town has a good sense of humor about all the deranged tourists that pass through, some of them apparently seeking religious experiences (?!) here.

Rick jumps in with a story of a bunch of dead bison

We thought we'd continue on and not see much until the Black Hills of South Dakota, but then I caught a glimpse of a sign labeled "bison bonebed." Hard to pass that up, and today was all about little diversions on small roads, so we went. I turned out to be a small research station in the Oglala Grassland where over 1000 bison died herded together about 9,000 years ago. The original theory from the 1970s was that it was a Paleo-Indian kill site. Modern research makes it more likely that there was a massive grass fire. The herd huddled for safety in a little depression in the landscape near fire and, whoosh, the surrounding fire sucked all the air out like a vacuum pump. Talk about your natural disasters.

Bison are cousins of buffalo. People interchange the names a lot (me, too). Buffalo were all hunted to extinction as I recall, but bison look very similar.

Jen back with her commentary on the road to the bison station

Soon, Rick was seduced by a sign for a bison bonebed. I looked it up in the guidebook and it sounded interesting enough, and only 15 miles away, so we followed the sign. Within a minute or two, we were on a dirt road. For those of you who've never been in a car on a dirt road for any length of time (like me), it's loud, it's bumpy, it kicks up clouds of dust, and it confuses the cows that just come right out into the road when you're not on it. This road was so underused it went single-lane for a while, with a "turnout" here and there where you could pull over to the side and let other vehicles go by. I would have turned around and gone back to the happy land of pavement, but Rick drove on. "It's like a video game!" he said. "You owe me one," I told him, over the din of rocks flying out from under our wheels. The surrounding hills and grassland looked like another planet.

After Carhenge and deceased bison: flat plains, flat plains, someone flicks the "on" switch...suddenly, trees! Nebraska has a forest. Who knew? We left it behind quickly, and then it was back to farms for a while.

South Dakota

We thought it couldn't get more isolated than that, but we weren't yet in South Dakota. South Dakota has eight people per square mile, and it shows. For a while, not only were we the only people on the road, not only were there no farms, but there weren't even any trees or cows. If not for the grass, we would have wondered if South Dakota was actually capable of sustaining life of any sort beyond bacteria. We nearly cried with joy when we started seeing cows again. "Four cows and a house. It's civilization," said Rick, "And goats! Yay, goats! Wait...what the hell are those?" Later, we learned that they were antelopes, as in "where the deer and the antelopes play."

Soon enough, we breathed a sigh of relief as we entered the Black Hills and started to see a few other cars. This is one of the well-known scenic areas of South Dakota, and quite a breath of fresh air after yesterday's snoozy bout with I-80. We pulled over to take a picture of some bison in the distance, then noticed there were two prairie dogs (little tan critters between the size of chipmunks and squirrels) playing together a few feet from the car -- our second encounter today with Animals Who Know No Fear, after the dumb cows on the Nebraska dirt road.

We had a look at what will be the world's largest monument, a 500+ foot statue of Crazy Horse, the Indian leader, created to balance the white-man focus of Mount Rushmore. I knew Crazy Horse wasn't done yet, but I guess I'd forgotten that it was barely started: his head is done; now they're working on his horse's head. Maybe this'll be completed by the time we're old and gray and back here in an RV.

Next stop was Custer State Park, which promised winding, slow roads through good scenery, and possibly more wildlife. The Needles Highway was a 14-mile stretch that would take 45 to 60 minutes, said our park map. As if I hadn't had enough X-treme Driving already today. This route had it all: hairpin turns, pigtail bridges (multi-story and corkscrew shaped), tunnels wide enough for one car so you have to blow your horn on the way through, and a vast array of intimidating road signs ("Falling Rocks," "Narrow tunnel," "Buffalo are dangerous, do not approach..."). Rick handled it like a pro, and claimed to like it better than the long, boring stretches that had been putting him to sleep while I drove. Personally, it gave me the heebie-jeebies, but it was worth it for the views.

After complaining that we hadn't seen any animals, Rick spotted a brown hump up ahead and to the left. Hey -- it's a bison! Look, it's two more! Right by the car! Even Rick, King of the Camera, did not want to stop for a picture here. We'd been appropriately warned that you do not mess with the bison. (We got a photo of one from a better distance a little further along.) After that, the animals just kept on coming: another buffalo/bison/whatever, some deer, a couple of pheasants, and a burro standing right in the road. Unlike the cows in Nebraska, it didn't move when it saw us coming. We carefully drove right past it; if we were stupid, we could have rolled down the window and patted its head, we were that close.

On the way out of the park, we caught a glimpse of Mount Rushmore through the trees (hills, trees, hills, trees...giant president heads!) Our scenic drive almost over, we decided to go get as close a look as we could for free and then call it a day. We refused to pay $8 for parking and the free parking was closed, but we got decent enough pictures through the windshield. Good enough. We passed through the truly tacky Mount Rushmore-obsessed town of Keystone and used a coupon to get a room at a Super 8 (third night in a row).

We got dinner at...take a wild guess...a brewpub in downtown Rapid City (population: 60,000). The Firehouse Brewing Co., South Dakota's first brewpub, is located in a renovated firehouse, and we ate in the outdoor bit that I suppose used to be the truck garage. Prices weren't bad considering the high tourist content of Rapid City (we were carded, and the waiter didn't blink an eye at our Massachusetts licenses) and the beer was tasty. They teased us by listing 12 beers on the menu but only serving four, which bummed us out, because we didn't get to try the ones we'd been most interested in, but were content splitting a porter, a stout, and a seasonal amber. As a bonus, the food was good and they used real cheese. It's the little things.

Tomorrow: The Badlands, back on Route 90, Wall Drug, and maybe even Wyoming.