After a comfortable night at our Airbnb in Fairmont MN, we hit the road after breakfast for our first of what I thought would be three hikes in Garretson SD. It turned out that the first hike was so lovely, and so strenuous, that we (well, I mainly) decided to press on to Sioux Falls and take a lovely shower in our hotel there before finding our supper. We hiked the Split Rock Creek Trail in Palisades State Park. My AllTrails app says this hike should be 1.5 miles and take an average of 33 minutes. After much clambering up and down over rocks, we clocked in at 1.76 miles and 1h32m. I'm sure we were off trail for some of it. It's a beautiful park, as you will see below. (If you are viewing the slideshow on a phone and all the photos are in one vertical line, I know about this problem and have requested help.) After resting in our room and a nice supper, we decided to take another, less strenuous walk in the Sioux Falls Japanese Gardens. This is a long strip of green space along a lake with some nice Japanese touches but not like other Japanese gardens we've visited. But it was a pleasant short walk. I'd read about the Arc of Dreams, a giant sculptural arch in downtown Sioux Falls, and saw photos of it lit up at night. It's only a stone's throw from our hotel, so we walked over there to check it out. We didn't get any photos of it lit up, but the ones below are pretty spectacular. We were walking on the bike path along the Big Sioux River and I thought, well, it's not quite dark yet and we're not too far from the actual falls, so we kept on walking and got there just as the sun was going down. It's amazing to see something like this in the heart of a good-sized city (Sioux Falls population is around 200,000). We're going back tomorrow morning to get more photos in the daylight.
1 Comment
Patricia McCarthy
5/12/2024 07:19:34 pm
You’ve picked a beautiful time of year to travel!!
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We're a retired couple who think that travel is one of the most important things in life. Archives
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