Across the Dakotas (700L)
Maya and her brother Leo sat in the back of the van, watching the Dakotas slide by like a moving picture. From the window they saw long fields of sunflowers, tall wind turbines turning slowly, and trains that looked a mile long. The sky was wide and bright, and the sun lit the grass a warm gold.
They crossed the Missouri River on a high bridge. “That’s where the land changes,” Dad said, pointing to bluffs and water far below. Later, signs for the Badlands appeared. The cliffs showed layers of tan, gray, and rusty red. In a pullout, the family spotted a bison in the distance and a town of prairie dogs popping up and chirping.
Back on the road, the kids counted water towers and tiny towns. They read funny billboards, waved at other cars, and shared snacks. When clouds piled up like mountains, a distant flash of lightning made the sky look electric. Maya thought the road felt like a string that tied one place to another, and she wondered what else they would see before the day ended.
Across the Dakotas (950L)
The van’s windows framed the plains like a slow, changing filmstrip. Maya leaned her head against the glass while her brother Leo angled his phone for photos that never quite caught the distance. Section lines stitched the land into a quiet checkerboard, each mile marked by a shift in the gravel roads that ran arrow-straight to the horizon. Grain elevators rose at the edges of towns like pale, practical skyscrapers. Farther out, wind turbines turned with steady patience, their blades catching the same breeze that rippled wheat and pushed a hawk into an easy glide.
On the bridge over the Missouri River, the deck hummed beneath the tires. Dad said this was a kind of border—the line where glaciers once stopped and where the land, even today, seems to change its mind. East of the river, fields and shelterbelts felt orderly; west, the country loosened into draws and broken hills. Billboards for wall-size breakfasts and roadside attractions flashed by, cheerful and bossy in equal measure, promising the best coffee for a hundred miles.
By afternoon, the Badlands asserted themselves in bands of layered clay—tan, ash-gray, and a rusty red baked hard where underground coal had burned. The family pulled into a turnout. A bison grazed along a bench, its tail idly swishing away flies; beyond it, a scatter of prairie dogs sat upright at the mouths of their homes, barking alerts. Maya tried to capture the whole scene in one photo and laughed, realizing the view was bigger than the screen. Leo filmed a slow pan anyway, whispering “whoa” when a hawk tilted into the wind and hovered, fixed over nothing but air.
As the road rose again, the sky built its own architecture—anvils of cloud piling blue on blue. Lightning stitched a brief seam far away, so distant that thunder never arrived. Town names grew sparse. Water towers announced them like small flags, and the family began calling them out: “Medora!” “Mott!” “Murdo!” They shared the end of a bag of pretzels and, unasked, traded the last window seat for a turn up front. By evening, the light slanted amber across the dashboard, and the lane lines slid past in a quiet rhythm. Maya decided that a road trip is really a way of learning how places connect: river to ridge, field to town, one story to the next, until the map in your head feels almost like home.