South Dakota - Day 16 - in Pelican Lake campground

Pelican Lake Recreation Area, Watertown

Monday, 16 August 2021

This would have been a very nice campground if it hadn’t been for the bugs.  Flies, mostly.  Although there were so many ants at our campsite when I first checked in that I sprinkled baking soda all along the path of the electrical cord, and sprinkled more inside the hole where the rest of the cord was.  I still haven’t forgotten the lesson I learned a couple of years ago when I got infested so badly with ants and it took me months to get rid of them.

But the flies were a real scourge.  Any time we left the RV, any time of day, we were besieged by flies – and these flies bit.  They caused real problems for Dexter, made things miserable for me, and even Gracie noticed them when they swarmed all over her face.  Really.  It was a mess.  We went out anyway, but we’d have gone out longer and farther if it hadn’t been for the flies.

Maybe that’s why there weren’t many campers here.  I mean, I know it’s a Monday but there didn’t seem to be even a dozen campers in the whole place – and it’s a fairly large campground.  One group pulled in not far from our site yesterday, let their Golden Retriever run around loose for a while, then left their RV early this morning and didn’t come back for the rest of the time we were here – a relief to me because I wasn’t sure how to get my dogs out while that Golden was running around.

Not far from our campsite was a large area the campground called a Monarch Garden.  I don’t know if they just left the area in its natural state or if they seeded the flowers, but there were hundreds of wildflowers amid the grasses.  I saw at least 5 different kinds of yellow flowers and 3 kinds of purple flowers.  It was really pretty and there were indeed a bunch of butterflies roaming around there.  Very nice.

One section of it had a trail through, so the dogs and I walked along it.  Besides the butterflies I saw a bunch of small yellow birds with black wings and faces.  I noticed their swooping flight and they sometimes trilled on the downward part of the swoop.  I looked them up and decided they had to be American Goldfinches.

American Goldfinch

Online Audubon says the call is a “4-note lilt in flight like po-ta-to-chip.”  The bird book describes the call as “per-chick-o-ree,” which doesn’t sound like potato chip to me but, oh well.  I didn't think they sounded like either one of those, but I’m still sure what I saw were these goldfinches.  You can see they’re really pretty, and they’re just as pretty in flight.

I spent hours today figuring out my driving routes for the rest of the month.  As I’ve said before, that’s no small task because I have to wrestle with Google to get to the places I want to go, especially when it refuses to acknowledge they exist 10 minutes after telling me they exist.  But it’s done and I can feel assured I’ll be able to get where I’m going with no more than the usual trouble.