Sage Creek Campground, SD -> Madison Lake, MI
480 mi, written on March 8th, 2026
I woke up in the wilderness. Well, of course, right? I was in the Sage Creek Wilderness, after all. However, I can say that this is one of the only times I felt like I wasn’t in man’s world. When I left my tent, I was greeted by a lone bison just across the street. It wasn’t until this moment that I realized how big bison are. Bulls have nothing on these megafaunas. As we started to pack up and prepare breakfast, two more appeared and they got scarily close. Bison are not exactly friendly animals; they will attack and kill if provoked. Thankfully, they seemed unbothered by our presence. In the distance, a lone coyote scurried across the landscape, keeping its distance from the campsite. In the middle of the campground loop, there was a prairie dog town buzzing with activity. Wildlife had been strangely absent for most of Spokes, despite us getting to out pretty far from civilization at times. Maybe it’s just the nature of road biking. This morning sure was making up for that deficiency.
Having admired the wildlife for long enough, we packed up our things and started our drive through Badlands National Park. We spent the next three hours seeing the sights and hitting all of the major viewpoints. It felt like we were on a safari seeing the herds of Bison and Bighorn Sheep running across the prairielands. The Badlands have a landscape seen in few other places, it’s quite something.
We reached the Eastern end of Badlands National Park, and with it the end of the “fun” of this road trip. I made this route prioritizing seeing the beauty of the northwest, with a time constraint of 10 days to make it to Boston. This meant that, in order to have time to enjoy the northwest, I had us plow through the Midwest on I-90. We left Badlands and got directly onto I-90. This marked the start of my hellish journey across the second half of the country. Three days on I-90, with long hours and few planned stops. All to make it back home. Needless to say, this quickly became boring. Even more than before, Ramona and I passed the time yapping about random things, planning impromptu stops, and finally starting to draft our blogs. The stop of biggest note was Sioux Falls, SD. The river flowing through the middle of the city and its accompanying falls were surprisingly scenic. As we were driving on this day, Sarah was flying back from Las Vegas. She sent us her location during her layover in St. Louis, so close yet so far.
We were approaching our destination for the night surprisingly early. Tonight, for the second time on this road trip, we were going to stay in a house. I managed to secure housing at my dorm floor’s GRA’s parents’ house. Thanks, Katie! (I doubt you’ll actually ever see this though). We were doing so good on time that we even told the parents that we would be able to make it to a 7pm dinner. Then, the heavy rain hit. It slowed us down a bit, especially since we were off the interstate now. The rain eventually passed but then google maps decided to route us through a closed road as we approached Madison Lake. Feeling confident in my off-roading skills in a Pacifica by now, I decided to ignore the closed road sign and made my way up the unsurfaced road. As far as I could tell, I only had to drive up the road for a mile, and besides, google maps was telling me to go this way! As I made my way up the road, however, I quickly lost my confidence. The recent heavy rains made the unsurfaced road extremely muddy. I was not in the business of getting the van stuck somewhere I was probably not legally allowed to be in, so I managed to power through a dirt wall onto the other side of the road and back whence I came. Google Maps fixed itself at this point and added like 15 minutes to the route. We got to the parents’ house about an hour after we said we would, yikes! It was fine though. We both got our bags out of the van and immediately showered. We had gone three full days without showering, since Duck Lake Campground. It was badly needed, and that warm pressurized water was heavenly. Our hosts had some food prepared for us, which was delicious. I definitely missed staying with people after our four days of camping. I collapsed onto a soft bed and began to recuperate and prepare for the following days.
MIT Spokes 2026 
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