At about 3 am I woke up because the tent was making very loud noises. In my dream state, and not knowing what time it was, for some reason I thought it was the campers next to us walking through our campsite and tripping over the tieline holding the fly down. After it went on for what turned out to be hours, I ultimately realized it was just the wind battering our tent. Not long after that, the rain began, and continued through morning. From inside the tent it sounded like a torrential downpour, and as we slept, Dave and I both wondered what was going to become of our day in South Dakota.
I finally got up a little after 8 am to scout out the situation. When I stepped out of the tent, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it actually wasn’t raining as hard as it sounded from inside the tent – it was really just slightly harder than a sprinkle. After stopping in the bathroom and putting in my contacts, I went into the store/office to ask the woman who runs the campground what she knew about the forecast. All she did was look it up online to find that the forecast was cloudy and scattered showers with a 40% chance of rain. That wasn’t helpful for the moment, but it did give me hope that just because it was raining in Belvidere didn’t mean it would definitely be raining in other places… say, the Badlands.
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