I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m a nerd. In this particular case, it’s because I like to keep track of the traffic on the Black Hills Travel Blog. If you run your own blog, you know how addictive web analytics can be. The colorful charts and pretty graphs certainly have something to do with it.

I noticed an influx of new visitors last week, so I did a little detective work. It turns out that USA Today published a little blurb about the blog with a link on Tuesday. It wasn’t exactly splashed on their front page or anything, but it was still exciting. Not bad for a blog that’s not even a month old. I scrolled down to the comments and read through the notes people had left. I got a laugh out of this one:

rainman07 wrote: 3d 18h ago
…I was interested in training for the upcoming Mars mission….sort of , average Joe gets to go feeling…
I did all my training in North Dakota….Mars with snow.

Mars with snow. Cute. But the author was either a little ADD or a bit confused – or maybe both. The Black Hills, of course, are in South Dakota, not North Dakota. I don’t blame him if he was just switched around, even if South Dakota was in the headline of the article. A lot of people aren’t sure in which Dakota the Black Hills exist. In fact, people search Google for ‘Black Hills Dakota’ almost as often as they do for ‘Black Hills South Dakota.’

And then, just the other day, I saw a game show host ask a contestant in which state Mount Rushmore was located. She thought for a moment, and in a pained expression answered, “Oklahoma?”

As for the comment about the snow… I’m torn a bit here. South Dakotans and North Dakotans like to poke fun at each other. It’s all in good sport, of course. But as tempted as I am, I won’t knock our neighbors to the north. They may not have the Black Hills, but they’ve got some really pretty places to visit, like Theodore Roosevelt National Park and Lake Sakakawa.

And when it comes to weather, neither Dakota is a synonym for the North Pole. It is true that the Black Hills are considerably milder than places like Minot and Bismarck (I just had a conversation last week with some Fargo natives about the warmer mountain climate in Rapid City). But the Black Hills are milder than a lot of other places, too. Just check the weather report. According to the National Weather Service, things aren’t looking real good for the Midwest this week: rain and snow in Michigan and Ohio. Even New York City is supposed to get rain and temps in the thirties and forties by the middle of this week.

Then you look at Rapid City’s forecast. So far this morning, it’s sunny and 72 degrees. Of course, it will cool down by Wednesday and Thursday – to the upper 50s. Brr. Just frigid, no? Better break out your parka.