Day Two South Dakota

The i90 took us across open prairie land and the scenery soon became monotonous with the road stretching on ahead towards a vanishing point.

We wondered what it must have been like travelling this way with just a covered wagon and horses.  The journey must have taken forever.

This gas station sign had a scrolling message informing us that the movie Dances With Wolves was filmed around here. The covered wagon prompted the conversation about travelling this way before the highway was built.

At Mitchell, we stopped for a comfort break and decided to visit what was claimed to be the world’s only corn palace.

 This seemed to consist of an odd looking brick built building with photographs of corn cobs papered over some panels and straw roofing. Whilst I am certain it is the only corn palace, since I could not imagine anyone else building one, it was not really made of corn. However, to be fair it was in the process of being re-furbished and the minarets, shown in the publicity photos, were all stacked on the ground, so it will have real corn on it when finished. Apparently they change the theme of the murals each year and we must have arrived during that process.  Despite this I do not think I will stop in Mitchell again for anything other than a comfort break. 

This sign was made from real corn cobs

The next least boring part of this stretch of the journey was when we came to Chamberlin and crossed the Missouri River via a short span of bridge and a causeway. The road dips down from the prairie and you get some views of the town and the two road bridges.   I was a bit late with my camera so missed the best view.

After this the terrain started to vary a little, becoming more undulating and going from largely grain farms to cattle.

Long before we arrived at Chamberlin, we had gradually become aware that, for a long time, we had been passing a lot of signs advertising something called Wall Drug and what was odd, was that we realised that we had been seeing them for more than three hundred miles!  For people from the UK unfamiliar with the American use of the word drug, any kind of store in the USA with drug as part of the title, is what in the UK we would call a 'chemists'. In the UK, 'drug' has a very different connotation and conjures up images of glassy eyed dropouts taking illegal substances.
Although a UK chemist and a USA drug store were in origin a kind of pharmacy, nowadays they usually sell a wide range of goods besides medicines.  We do not have quite the same kind of store in the UK as a drugstore, but Boots the Chemists in the UK have a lot of similarities with Wallgreen in the USA.  But judging by the posters, Wall Drug promised to be something diferent.

With signs like this and..

this and..

this...

And so on

And so on..

Ad infinitum..

Well maybe not forever, but for over three hundred miles

Making unlikely claims until...

Eventually we started to get closeer, that is less than a hundred miles, and the signs changed a little.

And as we approached the Badlands.

We must be getting close...

Getting closer...

Closer still

Finally the last sign has this gigantic dinosaur stood by it.

The result of this was that, despite having a long trip still ahead, we just had to visit Wall to see what it was all about. Wall is a small Western town about fifty miles east of Rapid City and it turned out that Wall Drug is a store in this town that has grown from a simple drugstore into a major tourist attraction. The sheer quantity and persistence of the imaginative signboards makes you want to see what it is all about and whilst being a typical tourist trap, it is much more than a normal drugstore.

And here it is in all its glory

This plaque hoiuors and tells you about the founders.  No doubt the residents of Wall are grateful for the trade the drugstore brings into the otherwise isolated town.

Inside tthe main entrance

After satisfying our curiosity, we bought ice creams and then continued west. We passed by Rapid City and on to Sturgis.

In early August, the Sturgis Black Hills Motorcycle Rally occurs and the whole area becomes filled with bikers. One feature of this was that when we stopped anywhere near that town, the shops were full of 2014 rally tees at low low discounts and if I had wanted to look like an aging biker, I could have re-stocked my wardrobe with as many tee shirts as I could carry for very little cost.

Our ultimate destination was a lodge in Terry Peaks, a skiing and winter sports district high up in the Black Hills where we were going to be based. To get there, we had to leave the i90 after Sturgis and pass through Deadwood and Lead. You may have heard of the former, since it has featured in many Westerns and in particular the musical Calamity Jane, in which Doris Day sang The Deadwood Stage and Take me Back to the Black Hills. Of course, whilst we were there, there was a strict agreement amongst ourselves that no one sang either song.

The Deadwood stage has turned into a trolley bus

The local towns, Lead and Deadwood were modern looking but, had not changed in nature much since the gold rush of the nineteenth century. As well as the inevitable gift shops and ice cream parlours, there were several bars and casinos and gun stores. Also you could go gold mining for a small fee, which probably outweighed the value of any gold you could extract. In Deadwood there was a Subway, so we bought a takeaway and some wine and cider from a nearby liquor store and carried on up to Terry Peaks. The weather was still cool and our ears popped regularly as we climbed up to Terry Peaks, which has an altitude of about six thousand feet, notable by the balloon shapes of the packets of pretzels and chips (crisps) we had brought with us. The lodge we were staying in was off a dirt road known as Last Chance Trail and to get there we had to drive slowly along Lost Camp Trail and through Buffalo Trail. It is, as you may imagine, quite rustic.

Last Chance Trail

West Wind Lodge

The winters up there can be severe and many of the lodges had a small personal snow plough parked outside ready for winter.

It was very peaceful and noise free, but not exactly deckchair weather, but we unpacked, ate our takeaway and then had a drink sitting out on the balcony enjoying the evening.
The altitude was apparent when we unpacked our supplies because some of the packets we had brought with us were almost on the point of bursting.

Later that evening there was a thunderstorm and some rain, but it had cleared up by morning.

 Next post DayThree

North by Northwest

This year for our holiday with the US branch of the family, we went to South Dakota to visit the Black Hills area. Whilst there, we intended to visit Mount Rushmore and then take a trip across the border into Wyoming to visit the Devil’s Tower. Since both of these were featured in two major movies, we had to watch Hitchcock’s North By Northwest and Spielberg’s Close Encounters, just to get in the mood.

To accommodate the five of us and our luggage, we hired a Chrysler Town and Country, which has a lot of space and comfortable roomy seating.

Although the hire car was from a local Kansas hire company, the licence plates on it were from Tennessee, which rankled a little since Americans have pride in their home state and will almost always talk to someone they meet who comes from their own state when out of state.

Now that it seemed to the world that we came from Tennessee, I just had to remind the rest of the family where we came from by saying, ‘It sure ain’t like this here, back in Tennessee.’ as we were driving through a particularly scenic area.   I have been through parts of Tennessee and the places I saw were very different, so I feel my statement was fully justified.
Starting out from Lawrence, we travelled towards Kansas City, crossed into Missouri and turned north up the i29 aiming for Sioux Falls, where we were booked into a hotel for the first night. For that day we had to travel around four hundred miles.

For the two weeks before we started out for South Dakota, the weather had been very wet and flood warnings abounded around both the Kansas River and Missouri River areas, but we were heading north and away from the worst of the rain. The air was misty with humidity and had been, and still was, much cooler than usual for the time of year.

The i29 runs up the west side of Missouri and  into Iowa following the course of the Missouri River which forms the state border.  Just over the Iowa border is a town called Hamburg, which suggests Germans settled there in the early days.

That's nice of them.

Once in Iowa the Missouri River continues to form the state border, but now between Iowa and Nebraska and about half way to Sioux City, it runs past Omaha.

There were two of these unusual sculptures one on each side of the flyover

Most of the country we travelled through was farmland, with farms that ranged from the very small to massive industrial sized farms with thousands of acres of grain fields, huge grain storage containers and silos.

A small farm

A huge farm

Now and again we would pass by a farm equipment supplier and we saw row upon row of tractors, harvesters and all the other kinds of complicated farming equipment that only someone familiar with farming could identify. Unlike the UK, where you may come across a few farm vehicles at a country show, these were ranked up like soldiers on parade and obviously there is a big demand for this kind of equipment in those farming areas.

A small collection of agricultural machinery. This shows only a small selection snapped as we drove by.  Many lots were much larger.

Towards the end of afternoon we came to Sioux City which is close to the border of Iowa and so pretty soon we crossed the border into South Dakota and continued north on to Sioux Falls where we would spend the night.

A roadside sign made from a water tower

The distance between Sioux City and Sioux Falls is about 86 miles, so in about another hour and a half we arrived at out hotel and checked in. Across the road from the hotel in Sioux Falls is a Barnes and Noble, so after Dinner, we walked across and browsed the books section.  In the store were several books by authors that are ot often found in the UK.  Trouble with book stores in the USA, is that we have a weight limit on our luggage, so I only bought a few paperbacks!

Sioux Falls is so named because of the rapids and falls found at that part of the river. The area, once a hazard to river travel has become a park area. We were not able to visit the park because we still had a long journey ahead and could not spare the time.

So in the morning we set off once more, this time heading west on the i90 towards Rapid City. From Sioux Falls to Rapid City is just under 350 miles, practically all the way across South Dakota. So that part of the trip was a journey of several hours. We were heading for a place the other side of Rapid City and would have to leave the interstate for smaller more countrified roads and we did not know exactly how long that section would take, so we needed to get going.

Next post, Day Two.