Corn Palace, Friday, 9/5/14 and Saturday, 9/6/14

Friday, September 5, 2014 

It was cold this morning as we headed east on I-90 at 8:30 a.m.  We were headed to Casper, Wyoming as Cindy wanted to see a specific museum located there.  At 2:30 p.m. Chuck said he thought for sure we would have already been there.  Upon investigation, we realized that we had missed the I-25 exit at Buffalo, Wyoming and were almost in South Dakota.  Oh well, so much for the museum.  At 4:00 p.m. we stopped in Rapid City, South Dakota and ate an early supper at Texas Roadhouse.  Chuck then filled up with gas and washed the truck in a self-service car wash.  (He did not wash the suitcases.)   At 5:30 p.m. we checked into a hotel and Chuck spent the evening watching sports on TV, and we also studied the maps to decide upon a new route home.   We are planning to go through Kansas City so we can meet Dan and his family for some good barbeque on Sunday.  (Dan is the young man who got shot and hung so many times this summer, and we lived with him at the Bonanza Inn.)

Saturday, September 6, 2014

We left Rapid City this morning at 8:40 a.m. and headed east on I-90.  We got off the interstate and drove through Mitchell, SD and past the Corn Palace.  We were so amazed by that structure on our journey last year that we wanted to see it again.  We found that the building is currently undergoing a remodeling and the streets around it were blocked off, but we got a look at it from about a block away.   Every spring, its exterior is completely covered with thousands of bushels of native South Dakota corn, grain and grasses that are arranged into large murals.  The theme for this year is “remember when.”  We saw crops of corn growing along both sides of the road for the whole day.  (That’s a lot of corn!)  We also saw quite a few sunflower fields.   

We drove across the Great Plains through miles and miles of nothingness and couldn’t help but think of the pioneers who traveled this land via covered wagons.  We covered 1037 miles in two days, but the pioneers only traveled 12 to 20 miles a day, under the best conditions. In the immense open spaces of the Great Plains, this frequently meant that settlers stopped for the night within sight of their previous day's campsite.  In poor conditions -- when the ground was muddy or rocky, when there were rivers to be crossed, or when there were hills to be climbed -- they might toil all day long to progress less than five miles.   It would have taken a wagon train a minimum of 52 days to cover the territory we covered since leaving Bozeman, Montana yesterday morning.   

We stopped in Council Bluffs, Iowa to buy gas and then went to a restaurant that was featured on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.  The name of the restaurant was Dixie Quicks, and we were sorry that we succumbed to the lure of the TV show hype.  This is about the fourth restaurant we have visited after having seen it on the show, and we have been disappointed each and every time.  We called it an evening and checked into our hotel in Council Bluffs at about 7:00 p.m.