Family car trip covers 6,780 miles, 6 national parks
Amanda and Adam Miner, 165 McElroy Road, Sugarcreek Township, took their daughter, Julia, 8; and their son, Beck, 10 months; on a 16-day car trip that covered 6,780 miles and included six national parks, two national monuments, two South Dakota state parks and a South Dakota state monument, as well as stops at Iowa's “Field of Dreams.”
Amanda Miner, a learning support teacher for kindergarteners through second-graders at Dassa McKinney Elementary School, West Sunbury, said the trip also included visits to “the Mall of America, the mall with the amusement park inside it and a stop at Antique Archaeology in Iowa,” the home base of Mike Wolfe, one of the co-hosts of “American Pickers” show on the History Channel.
“The 'Field of Dreams' in Iowa, that was really cool,” said Miner. “The guy still owns the farm where they shot the movie. There's a tiny, little store there. We stopped there on the last day as we drove home from Iowa.”
The Miners stayed in a variety of accommodations during their trip through the country's heartland.
“It was a combination,” Miner said. “We rented a cabin in South Dakota for five days and six nights. We met family from Florida there. It was near Sturgis. We were there a month before the bike rally.”
“Sturgis was so much smaller than Chicora even. It was tiny,” Miner said.
“We camped through Montana. We stayed at a hotel in Nebraska and at another one in Iowa,” she said.
“We debated camping in Todd Park, but it was late in the day. It was easier to grab a hotel room than to unpack the entire car,” said Miner.
The Miners started their odyssey on July 8, taking 13 hours to drive through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois to Madison, Wis., where they stayed the night.
The second day they drove from Madison to South Dakota, stopping along the way to visit Wall's Drugstore, a South Dakota tourist attraction known around the globe for its promise of free ice water and more than 3,000 road signs.
“From there we reached the rented cabin in Sturgis,” she said.
During the stay at the cabin, the Miners made day trips to Wind Cave National Park; Custer State Park; Needles Highway, a National Scenic Byway; Bear Butte State Park; Badlands National Park; and Devil's Tower National Monument, the last made famous in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”“We also visited Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse site and visited Deadwood, where Wild Bill Hickock died in a saloon,” said Miner.The Miners made the trip in the family's 2012 Hyundai Elantra packed to the roof with camping gear and supplies. It had 70,000 miles on the odometer to start.“We left Sturgis and drove to Yellowstone in 12 hours. We camped in the park's Grant Village campground. We stayed in Yellowstone for four nights,” Miner said.Again, the Miners took day trips through the surrounding area from their campground. .She said, “We drove to the Grand Tetons from Yellowstone. It's its own national park. We drove to Jackson Hole, Wyo., because we had brought along one pacifier for Beck and he lost it. My husband said, 'How do you go 6,000 miles from home with only one pacifier?'”“One thing that was a surprise,” she said. “We woke up one morning and it was in the low 30s. It was 70 during the day and during the night it was very cold. We slept in our winter coats.”The temperatures were more of an annoyance for the Miners than the thinner air at the higher elevations, she said.“It never really bothered us,” Miner said. “Some tourists get headaches or have trouble breathing, but we didn't have any issues with it.”They did have an issue with bears, however.Bears approached within a 100 yards of their car at two different times in Montana.“One time when we were hiking we came near one sitting in a cluster of huckleberry bushes. At one point it stood up and then it sat back down. He wasn't bothered by us,” she said.At one point during their stay at the Grant Village Campground in Yellowstone, the Miners heard two gunshots in the night and were afraid there was a bear around their campsite.
And another time at Grant Village, she said, the park rangers “had to fire bean bag rounds at a bear.”“The children were great,” Miner said. “They were on great behavior at almost every park site we went to.”“Beck, being 10 months old, fussed at getting put in a car seat,” his mother said. “They were both resilient. We'd come back late at night. We wanted to make sure we used every moment.”Julia worked on collecting a park badge at every national park.Miner said, “They give kids a booklet on entry with a question-and-answer section, a scavenger hunt entry. You have to read and answer questions to get a patch and a pin certification.”Julia had earned seven badges by the end of the trip. She also got a ranger hat that holds all of her park pins.Miner said, “We did a lot of hiking, sometimes the trails were five or six miles.”“We didn't go through any planning. A friend gave us a book on 'must-see' recommendations,” she said.During the two and a half hours it took the family to drive from Yellowstone to Glacier National Park, she said, “We didn't see any cars or houses. We knew it was somebody's ranch because of the fences.”“I would say I liked the Badlands and Glacier national parks in Montana. Yellowstone was fantastic,” she said“So many different regions and the mountain ranges, that's the most beautiful thing,” Miner said.“We had beautiful weather. No rain on any of those days we were traveling. It got cold but the days were usually warm,” she said.“We hiked Logan Pass in Glacier National Park in Montana. We couldn't go down to the lake because the huckleberries were ripe and the bears were foraging,” Miner said.She carried her son in a backpack during the hikes.“I would go back to South Dakota in a heartbeat,” Miner said.They cooked most of their meals themselves at campsites.“We decided our money needs to be for gas. We would not eat at chains. We would eat at local places,” she said.Their appetite for the road hasn't been sated, she said.“This summer we plan to do five national parks: Isle Royal, Voyaguers, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and Hot Springs National Park,” she said.
