Our first stop on our summer adventure was Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Our plan was to visit the park for a day by car, then find a rover for the dog and backpack overnight. The first lesson I learned on the road, was our plans would always change.

Before we left, I did a bit of research and discovered that the cost to stay 10 miles from the park was $6/night rather than over $25. We stayed at Buffalo Gap Campground. It didn’t have hook-ups, but that wasn’t a problem for us.

The first day in the park we drove into Medora and traveled the loop road. We were up early and were able to watch a coyote try to get a prairie dog. We also saw wild horses and American Buffalo (which are the same as Bison, but are called Buffalo in North Dakota and Bison in Wyoming). It was a super fun car ride through the grasslands. We got out of the car for a few short hikes, but for the most part it was just a road trip kind of day.

In Medora, the town the park road leaves from, there is a huge volunteer made play structure. It stands about a city block wide and long. Each day we were at the campground we would go to the playground and each afternoon we would witness massive rolling thunderstorms. The kids loved playing in the warm rain.

The next day, I had planned an awesome backpacking trip crossing the Little Missouri River, then through a Prairie Dog Town, and ending at a petrified forest. We would then loop back around and cross the river again. However, since we had Marley and we were in the middle of nowhere, I couldn’t arrange for a kennel. So instead of backpacking we figured out how to do each one of the things individually.

We drove miles on some backroads to get close enough to the petrified forest and hiked into the forest 3 miles. On our way in we had to circumnavigate a buffalo who had chosen our trail for his trail. Bison are notoriously aggressive so we gave him a wide birth.

We then drove out the road to the largest prairie dog town in the park and hiked in a mile and sat in silence for 15 minutes watching the prairie dogs, do their prairie dog thing. Finally, we stopped at the Little Missouri River crossing area where I was petrified to cross and crossed the river together. We played in the water until early afternoon then made our way back to the playground and slept in our warm beds that night.

We spent about 3 days at the park before we started on our way toward Minnesota to meet family.