The iron grip that the INS recently has had over our travel life continued through the end of 2004. Their strange rules matched brilliantly by stranger regulations by the airline companies left us with no choice but to hastily exchange our trip  to Mexican Yucatan to the frigid great plains of central US. The destination was picked purely by elimination - all the other alternatives conveniently eliminating themselves for being too cold or prohibitively expensive. The choice was not a calculated risk but a reckless gamble which surprisingly paid off. When the rest of the world was being drowned in all sorts of water based disasters, we got to enjoy bright, clear and most importantly mild days.

Our first stop was Badlands National Park, 1.5 hrs from Rapid City. Given the time of the year, we got to share all the view points in the park with animals instead of people. Apart from the wildlife, the only thing that stands in our memory is a walk up the notch trail (1 hr round trip).

The following day, after spending some time gaping at the famous four on Mt. Rushmore, we made our way to the lesser known attractions of the black hills. The black hills are littered with a labyrinth of limestone caves and we visited the  top two in the region - the Wind Cave and the Jewel Cave. The caves were formed by standing and not flowing water and hence are home to some unique formations, the most notable of which are the calcite boxwork - found only here and the Czech republic. Due to the relative size of the natural openings, the caves also "breathe" quite violently resulting in some interesting "frostwork" and "popcorn" formations. Since we were in the region, we also dropped in at the Mammoth Site, an old sinkhole graveyard of prehistoric mammoths and the Crazy Horse Monument, a 56 year old, excruciatingly slow work-in-process monument of the 19th century Sioux Indian chief.

We then took a 4 hr drive to Wyoming to see its and the nation's first  monument, the Devils Tower. It was formed by an underground volcanic eruption cooled and eroded to today's form. We were lucky to reach there at the best possible time - sunset. After a slippery walk around the outcrop, we made our way to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We spend the good part of the following day driving around the north and the south units of Theodore Roosevelt, which for most part looked strikingly similar to the Badlands of its southern neighbour.

After returning to Rapid City, we spent a day visiting its museums and tourist traps and recovering from the long drives. The Journey Museum and the  Museum of Geology were worth the efforts while the Reptile Gardens, especially during this time of the year, is singularly avoidable. Having exhausted all the attractions of the Dakotas in half the time we had allocated, we decided to bail out of the trip - the proposal of which was promptly turned down by the airline company.

We decided to spend the remaining "free" days driving around Nebraska, where we were pleasantly surprised to find a series of "worth its" and "not bads" to occupy us. The first of these was the Agate Fossil Bed National Monument, where apart from the usual array of old mangled bones, we also saw a "Daemonelix" - a cock-screw shaped fossil of a pre-historic beaver burrow, one of its kind on the planet. A couple of hours south of the place lies the Scottsbluff and Chimney Rock formations. Both of these would have been just another boring South West formations if not for their location - first to come to view on the important 19th century trails - the Oregon, California and the Mormon. The Stuhr Museum in Grand Island, the wildlife refuge near Valentine and the Wounded Knee massacre site constituted the rest of the stopovers.