Highway to Hog Heaven
August 7th, 2006
Today we rolled through most of South Dakota. The state (at least most of what we saw from the scenic Interstate 90) was pretty blando, or as Jen and I call it, barren wasteland. We started the day in Mitchell, SD, home of the highly touted Corn Palace. It’s part auditorium, part basketball arena, and all tourist trap. To commerate the stop, we picked up a deck of Corn Palace playing cards (made in China) and the photo you see here.
We stopped along the way through the Badlands, and saw some scenic dirt and rocks. It actually was beautiful, and not just in comparison to I-90. We also saw some bison, bighorn sheep, a deer, prarie dogs, and some ancient pig fossils. And speaking of hogs, read on.
Our destination for today was supposed to be Mt. Rushmore, but when we planned our drive across South Dakota (two days ago) we didn’t know about this mega-huge Harley Davidson Rally in Sturgis, SD which is just north of Mt. Rushmore. Increasingly as we travelled west across the state we were surrounded by more and more bikers headed for Sturgis. At Wall Drug, in Wall, SD it looked like a Harley convention in and of itself. By the time we got to Rapid City, our intended stop for the night, the town was literally swarming with hogs. Every motel was booked solid, and we were starting to feel like Mary and Joseph with no room in the inn.
So we nixed the Mt. Rushmore plans and instead went to Chuckie Cheese in Rapid City and played skee-ball. That was big fun, and I should mention here that I made it 30K shy of 450,000 points in one game which would have awarded me 250 bonus tickets. But alas almost didn’t count. With our combined forces tickets we bought a ferrari huge plush toy little rubber frog with internal blinking blue and red LEDs which is now wrapped around our Sentra’s rear-view mirror.
We made it all the way into Wyoming before stopping in the town of Buffalo, which was the only place we could find a vacancy. It turned out to be lucky that Jen had called ahead an hour before we arrived, because we got into the last room available about 10 minutes prior to someone else getting turned away. And it’s from Buffalo, Wyoming that I’m writing now.
So tonight some rest, and tomorrow it’s on to Yellowstone.
