Day 3: South Dakota

The Corn Palace
Originally uploaded by apete.

Well, Today was the first exciting day of the trip. We started off by heading to the Corn Palace in Mitchell. This is one of the stops that I think that my family missed when we took this route when I was in high school. It was definitely very interesting. It wasn't quite as corney as I imagined. Much of the structure was brick and there was also a lot of hay or grass covering it. I don't know why I was imagining all of it being corn. They use 12 different varieties of corn to get the different colors.

We continued onward across South Dakota stopping in Murdo for lunch at some diner. The diner was attached to the Pioneer Auto Village which was very large and very interesting. It had all sorts of things but among my favorites were a Wells Fargo stagecoach, a mess of old lunchboxes and of course the General Lee.

We got going and went through the Badlands fairly quickly with a stop at the Prairie House which was an old sod house homestead from 1909. I couldn't imagine living like that. The badlands were pretty cool. We ran into some Bighorn Sheep but didn't have time to do any good hiking. After getting through the Badlands, it was a stop at the old Wall Drug which I couldn't believe that Sarah had not heard of but she has now experienced. I also got a text message while we were at Wall Drug that some friends of mine had a baby. That was a first.

We finally pulled into Rapid City at about nine and neither of us felt like the half-hour trip to Mt. Rushmore even though it would have been interesting to see it all lit up. We did eat downtown Rapid City at the Fire House Brewery. It was ok. The best was the Gorgonzola Ale soup which was as interesting as it sounds and good.