Birthday Surprises!

Thanks to my finely tuned deductive reasoning skills, I guessed right! Sam and I headed out around 2pm on Monday for Medora - Western North Dakota - the Badlands! We went through the park a little ways and then headed north through the National Grasslands - the nice thing about ND is that President Teddy Roosevelt made sure that 1 out of ever 4 acres is National Grasslands or National Park land. So in essence, that means, that you can roam all over it! Anywhere you want! They've struck oil in these them hills - so there are a lot of oil wells, but that's on private land and fenced off. And in the National Parks, you have to camp at the regular camping grounds with all the normal stuff - fire rings, side by side camping, etc. etc. etc. But in the National Grasslands - you are free to go wherever you want! And we really dig primitive camping if it means that there is no one else around! What's the point in camping if there are like 6 million people around you. Hello. I could sleep in my own bed. So we found a spot where the National Grasslands had the Little Missouri River running right through it so that we could go swimming! It was like 97 degrees on Monday!!! So we found the perfect spot, it was about 8pm and we got camp all set up - aka - our tent! Then we went swimming. Here's the kicker - the Badlands in July has killer Kamikaze Tsetse flies! I don't know what kind of flies they are but they are deadly - dive bombing us, even while we were in the water! So the whole time, we were trying to get away from them and finally decided the only way to do that was escape to the tent! It gets dark around 10 or 10:30 pm anyway, so it was going to get cold. They were calling for temps. to get into the 50's! So anyway, all that to say Bethers, thanks for the sentiments, there were bugs, but it was worth it to get away! Then we got up on Tuesday and just went on a drive around the Badlands, we were looking for Teddy Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch, but there were no roads leading to it. So we gave up and headed home! We had a nice afternoon of getting things done. It was just to nice of Sam to plan this little get-away. It's been so busy lately and my favorite thing in the world is spending time with him, so I really appreciate him taking this much time out of his extremely busy schedule to whisk me away! And then, if that wasn't enough, he did give me a gift certificate to a local spa for a pedicure - I don't know that I've ever had anything so fancy. I'm always looking for the cheapest one in town, which happens to be in the mall run by a bunch of Vietnamese, don't get me wrong - they do a great job! But I'm really looking forward to that. There is one minor problem with that. The other Sunday at the Wedding Brunch, I was taking out the trash and someone had put glass in the bag and I didn't know it. So it scraped my leg a little, but it was right on the shin and so it bled a lot. Anyway, I carefully chucked the bag into the trash bin and a big ole' piece of glass came popping out of the top and landed right on my third toe at the base. So it's basically right in the way of any flip flops I want to wear. Well, it cut pretty deep. I should have gone in for stitches, but that's no fun, so I've been babying it - not so well, I might add, with Neosporine and band aids.... For as much blood as came spurting out of it, you'd think I cut the thing off. Goodness gracious. But anyway, all that to say - I have to wait for that to heal before I can begin thinking about my relaxing pedicure! Well, that's about all I had to share! Oh, I was going to tell you this one other funny story! While we were camping the other night, I moved a little and my feet swished the tent in the corner and I don't know how much I've shared about Sam's crazy sleeping stories - oh that just spring boards into about a million more stories for you... But anyway, he woke up and started yelling, "There's something out there! There's something out there!" And I said, no, it was just me - and he said, no it wasn't, there is something out there - and he jumps up on all fours and is staring out the tent window, growling! I'm so serious! He's growling!!!! Then our poor dog Tonto - is scared to death. I think he thought something was going to get him, so he came running to our tent and started scratching the side for us to let him in! I just died laughing, I told Sam that it was only Tonto, to go back to sleep! Oh my goodness, I've been laughing about it ever since! Oh the stories could go on forever, but I only have about 30 more minutes before I need to leave work - so I should get some stuff done!!! :) Hope you enjoyed this post half as much as I did! See ya!