South Dakota

June 28, 2012

We arrived in our newest state to get colored in on the map on Monday. We traveled west along I-90 from Minnesota and stopped for the night just over the SD border after driving over 400 miles from Duluth, fairly tired.

The drive south began on I-35. With our previous trip to Grand Marais, we drove most of the eastern length of the state. We talked about stopping at Mall of America in Minneapolis, but decided to conserve the time for later stops. At that point the glacial lakes of northern Minnesota had given way to rolling farm lands, looking much like Wisconsin and other states at the eastern edge of the Great Plains.

I-90 intersects I-35 just north of the small town of Aurora Lea, MN. The drive west skirted most all of the farm communities along the way. The most interesting we saw was Blue Earth, MN, home of the Green Giant of vegetable fame. The town constructed a 65 foot monument to the big fellow. Big enough that we expected to see him from the highway, but no such luck. From the Internet pictures, he looks just like the one you see on all of those cans and frozen packages, so we called it done and drove on.

We stopped just shy of Sioux Falls, SD. We took time for laundry and a dip in the hot tub. We met some folks who were returning from Mount Rushmore who gave us some good pointers about the place.

We stopped the next day in Mitchell, home of the world’s only Corn Palace. We enjoyed the huge arena that is decorated with murals of corn, wheat, and other local products. The palace is the brain child of 2 businessmen in 1910 who were concerned about the lack of growth in the town. The corn festival has been held in August every year since except for interruptions like drought and war. Volunteers were working the day we were there on the 2012 theme of Sports. It was interesting to watch them prepare the wheat and then staple it to the wooden mural bases. The corn work, in 12 different colors, appeared to be finished. Inside this modern arena, not the original building of 1910, we saw a film of the history of the palace and its town. A souvenir shop is set up on the basketball court. Corn murals are high up on each wall surrounding the stage. This building serves the community in many ways!

We continued west, the land getting more flat, producing more hay and cattle than corn. We were entering the Badlands of South Dakota. We spent the night at the National Park. I’m hoping that the temp of 110 was a record high, but maybe it gets that hot on a regular basis. Just before sunset the temperatures dropped to only 90 so we went for a walk in the formations. The area consists of dried up mud beds and eerie sandstone peaks that erode at a rate of about an inch per year. We didn’t know that the first dinosaurs were found in this area. The science of paleontology was born and continues in this area.

Yesterday we started out with a drive through the remainder of the loop through the Badlands. We enjoyed the 30 mile drive and were rewarded with getting to see bighorn sheep at Pinnacle Point. It is weird to see how the grasslands weave in and out of the parched hills.

The famous Wall Drug of Wall, SD was our next stop. The line here is, “free ice water!” This simple small-town drug store of the 1940's has become an iconic tourist stop due to the cleaver advertising of the druggist’s wife. It is now 76,000 square feet of photos, food, t-shirts, hats, restaurant and even some drugstore items. Wall and Mitchell prove that a little ingenuity and hard work can pay off for everyone in a community.