One could argue, it began when we harnessed our suitcases to our minivan’s roof, or you could argue, it sprang in the mind when we fueled our unrest and decided to brave Covid-19, embarking on a road trip unlike any we had undertaken before. Not the original trip we had planned earlier, much shorter, we aimed to drive a thousand miles through the night, cutting west in our minivan. A wild experiment.
First oddity, we couldn’t nap at will before our evening departure. Second, we pulled over twice in our first hour itself because the carrier flaps kept banging on the roof. Coffee in hand, I drove the first shift. Sunset blasted colors onto the open sky. My youngest confirmed multiple times if the Sun would indeed set. And when darkness shrouded our surroundings, he attempted to measure how much time the Sun would take to paint the sky blue again. Luckily, he slept along with the other two.
On the way . . . 
Chasing the Sun into the night
I found driving on the dark freeway easier than expected, but the heaviness of fatigue, the tightness of the neck muscles, the tingling of the heart manifested reminding us rudely we’d aged—no longer the crazy college graduates who could mimic machines and drive like that, we were gracing the forties. We switched driving around midnight. But when sleep reeled me in, rain pounded on the windscreen. At first, its drum roll comforted me, but soon, another sound mixed in, a crunching, cracking disturbance, anything but a pitter-patter lullaby known to rain. Not a shard of sleep graced my eyes during my “sleep shift” as midnight blended into two in the morning. That’s when we pulled over into a rest area. Our carrier had ripped. While the rain had ceased for good, water seeped inside, and cramped space inside the car offered few opportunities. So I blamed the carrier for my night-driving experiment to bomb.
At the ungodly hour, no stores had doors opened to exchange the broken carrier. Allowed to park for three hours at the rest stop, we could have slept, sure the mountain time zone would grant us an additional hour, and we would reach Badlands at dawn’s first glimmer. But when worry grips the heart, sleep flees. So the second shift driver, aka my husband, pulled out of the rest area without a drop of rest, the carrier still broken, its rip enlarging and its sound menacing. When Sun cut through the horizon, children awoke and fatigue now had crunched my every fiber, every molecule. A yawn, too, couldn’t help. We switched driving at a gas station, and the brilliant, Godly moment of five-forty brought us to Badlands. As the “Orange Sun,” as my youngest terms it, reared its head above Badland’s jagged, rugged, and dusty terrain, my children bubbled with excitement. I learned that despite them, too, realizing we had loathed driving through the night, children adapted to hardships and changes with a flick of an eye.
The Sun found us 
We folded a seat under in our Pacifica and hauled the overhead luggage into the car cramping my daughter, the rearmost passenger. Through stiffness, we exited badlands. When I pulled into a coffee Kiosk in Rapid City, Alaska’s sweet memory enlightened my heart—the pristine place that had first introduced us to the cute, mini coffee drive-through huts. That cup of coffee, my friends, enabled me to drive my shift without incident to Mount Rushmore (from the outside) and Custer State Park’s Needle Tunnel. When we were there, coincidently, we also heard the news our president dreamed they carved his face next to the current four presidents on Mt. Rushmore, and I thought about Crazy Horse, the Native American hero (from Black Hills,) his monument, still incomplete due to no funding.
So our wakeful night driving on I-90 West had passed. When my husband began driving the last shift, the car’s hum resembled an airplane’s growl as though carrying me across the globe to India. As South Dakota’s Black Hills receded and Wyoming’s dull desert loomed, the temperature hit late nineties, and the air conditioner fell short of comfort. Long sighs, whines from children, and my straight face carried us to our hotel at two o’clock of the afternoon at Buffalo, Wyoming. Our duration of being on the road lasted from 5:15 p.m. the previous evening to 2:45 p.m. CST that Saturday. We thanked our stars for the early check in, disinfected the room, stripped their comforters (we brought our own), showered, and crashed like no tomorrow existed. We awoke to eat our preordered pizza—a faint memory—because we slept right afterward, only a fresh sunrise awakened us the next morning.
Trivia:
Buffalo, Wyoming. Population ~ 9000 (Similar to our tiny Chicago Suburb but a fraction of neighboring suburbs like Palatine, Schaumburg, IL.)
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2 replies on “#1. From Dusk to Dawn: Chasing Memories. To Wyoming.”
I absolutely hate driving at night and refuse to do it, so I admire your tenacity! Enjoy your trip. The Badlands are one of the most underrated parks IMO.
I don’t like driving through the night, too, now from experience. I totally agree badlands are the most underrated national park. I don’t mind. Because that means I can go back to it again and again and avoid the crowd. Lol.