No one ever says journeys are perfect, without a few bumps in the road. Even vision quests. I didn't have to wait long for the first bump. It was windy that first night in South Dakota. Like, crazy windy. My gas mileage that day had been abysmal, and I assumed it was due to the 80 mph speed limit for the majority of my drive (which I may have been exceeding, ahem, slightly). In reality, it apparently takes a lot of effort for your car to continue driving straight, to not blow off the road in winds that strong. I learned later that I had been camping in 50 mph gusting winds.

10:00 pm I woke, my tent feeling like it was moving around me. I clicked on the headlamp, and sure enough, it was clearly smaller than it had been a few hours earlier. Boots on. As I headed out to investigate, I remembered the YouTube video review of our Kelty tent that Ben and I had watched when deciding whether to purchase it. The first thing the reviewer had said was to throw away the stakes that came with the tent, (his literal words were "they are garbage"), and buy new ones instead. I thought of this, because we hadn't taken his advice. I was still using the original stakes.

We never should have doubted him. The wind was so strong, most of the stakes had been ripped out of the ground. I re-staked my tent in the dark, hoping they would hold this time. Because we are minimalist campers, we don't own a mallet for pounding stakes into the ground. Any rock, piece of firewood or the back of our ax will do. Well, at this hour I didn't want to go digging through the back of my car for the ax, and I was camping in the barren prairie, with no rocks to be seen, so instead I used the heal of my boot, thinking that the ground was soft enough, stepping on the stakes would do the trick.

In the words of one infamous presidential candidate - WRONG. Rather than help to ease the stakes into the ground, my boots did nothing but prove how worthless they really were. They bent, twisted, contorted in any odd direction. I cursed into the cold, wind-whipped air, and hoped that the parts of the stakes that made it into the ground would be good enough to hold my tent in place the rest of the night. I headed back into my tent, settled into my warm sleeping bag, and fell back asleep.

1:00 am. Something was pushing into my head. In my groggy state, I couldn't identify what, until I peeled my sleeping bag back and looked around. The wind was pushing against the rainfly so hard, the flexible poles were bending more than they needed to be to maintain the tent's shape, allowing an entire side (the side by my head) to push inward toward the ground. "You have got to be kidding me!" I watched this phenomenon for a few minutes, trying to decide what to do, how to improve the situation. The rain flap was acting as a barrier to the wind - perhaps if I removed it, opening up my otherwise very transparent tent, perhaps that would allow the wind to simply flow through and not continue to disturb my slumber. Boots back on, I headed outside to detach the rainfly. Now completely exhausted, I didn't even attempt to fold it. I tossed it into my tent next to me, wiggled back into my sleeping bag, covering my head and face as much as possible, and fell back asleep, the fierce wind gusting around me.

3:00 am. "What is going on? Why are the sides of my tent on top of me?" I felt clausterphobic despite the fact that most of my tent was now completely open without the rainfly. The walls were literally closing in on me. It looked like I was the only thing keeping the tent in place. Boots on. Outside, this was confirmed. I had truly been the only thing keeping the tent in place. Once again, the wind had torn the stakes out of the ground, this time all of them. "That's IT!" Tired, cold and frustrated, I disassembled the tent one-handed, my second hand required to keep it from blowing away across the prairie. Balled up ("I'll deal with you later") I tossed the tent, poles and flap into the backseat of my car, leaving the mangled, useless stakes on the ground. Ironically, now that they lay on the ground, not even attempting to serve a purpose, the wind left them alone. I sat in the front seat, my pillow behind my head, leaned my seat as far back as it could go before hitting the cooler behind it, and attempted to sleep.

6:00 am. The first sign of dawn, the sky beginning to lighten. I must have slept, but certainly not well and who knows for how long. Good enough. Time to call it and hit the road.

As I rolled slowly out of the campground, I passed bison by the side of the road. Likely the same ones I had seen in the dark the night before, just feet from my car. I was beyond the park boundary in less than a half hour. I stopped on the rural, quiet road when I caught a glimpse of the sunrise in my rearview mirror. If I hadn't had that experience that caused me to sleep uncomfortably in my car for the last few hours, my aching body waking me up before dawn, I would likely have missed the glorious sunrise I was now seeing. Still exhausted, but now feeling grateful, revitalized by the dawn and the excitement of what lay ahead, I took a few moments of peace, enjoying the view. Then, onward to Wyoming, where I would surely be able to find an outdoor sporting goods store to buy decent stakes.