After breakfast in Wall, we headed west to Rapid City and then to tonight's destination, Allen Gulch Cabins in Hill City, SD. We made my first yarn store stop at SlipKnits in Rapid City where I bought a skein of the shop's own hand dyed yarn. That's the ultimate in local "souvenir yarn." And according to the universal law that there is always a brewpub within a few blocks of a yarn store, Bruce found Log Cabin Brewpub to hang out in while I shopped for yarn. After checking in to our cabin and chatting with Maggie, the owner's mother and bartender at the resort's taproom, we walked along the town's main street and did a little shopping. Supper was at the much-recommended Alpine Inn, where there are only two choices: a vegetarian option of German dumplings and a bacon-wrapped filet with lettuce wedge and baked potato. Guess which one we got. The restaurant is in an old hotel, and the ambience is warm and cozy. After supper, we drove to Mount Rushmore to see it lit up at night. Unfortunately, the evening ceremony that everyone told us not to miss was not available this early in May.
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We got up early this morning and headed for Badlands National Park to get in some hiking before the forecast rain. We haven't gotten a lot of use out of our $10 Lifetime Senior Pass for national parks that we got eight years ago on our Route 66 roadtrip. But admission to Badlands was $30 per car, so even at the current $80 cost for the lifetime pass, that would be worth it for visiting only a few national parks. The weather held out until around noon, so we got in a few short easy hikes and one longer, more challenging hike where we had to climb a trail that was steep and often covered in loose gravel-like rock. We didn't make it to the top of that one. I had to call it quits at about the three-quarter mark, and a good thing, too, because I wouldn't have wanted to try that descent in the rain. The scenery here is amazing. I've read that it's like seeing the surface of the moon, very alien. We headed back into town for a late lunch at Wall Drug. If you've ever traveled anywhere with 200 miles of Wall, SD, you've seen the signs for Wall Drug. It started out as a small drug store but is now a mega-complex of shops and other attractions, and a 500+ seat restaurant that serves 5-cent coffee and $10 pie. They even have a tiny chapel. Tomorrow we head for the Black Hills. We'll be in that area for about five days. Lots to see: Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse monument, Custer State Park, etc.
We woke up, packed up, and checked out of our room at the Holiday Inn. After we shared a breakfast at Josiah's (they serve five-egg omelets) where we couldn't get in yesterday because of Mother's Day, we headed back to Falls Park to experience it in daylight. We clambered over the rocks then went up in the observation tower for a bird's-eye view. After that, it was head west out of Sioux Falls, destination The Badlands. But first, we had a few stops to make. We couldn't pass up the opportunity to visit the famous Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. It's a combination basketball court, concert venue and gathering hall for Mitchell and the surrounding area. The big deal with the Corn Palace is that the outside walls and much of the inside is decorated with murals made of different colors of corn. And they put up new corn to change the design every year. Each year has a theme, and this year's is "Famous South Dakotans." Just north of the Corn Palace, we visited the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village. This is an active archaeological dig with a small museum focusing on the life of the indigenous people who lived on this site 1,000 years ago. We were the only visitors there, and received a personal guided tour. The village sits on the shore of a beautiful lake, and it's easy to imagine what life might have been like here long ago. Heading west on I-90, our next stop was one of the most remarkable highway rest stops we've ever seen. Rising above the motorway at Chamberlain, SD, the 50' metal statue named Dignity of Earth and Sky dominates the landscape. This soaring sculpture of a native woman stands high on a bluff above the Missouri River. Her starquilt is made of 128 diamonds in the colors of the water and sky that surround her. Dignity honors the Native Nations of the Great Plains. The artist, Dale Lamphere, also designed Arc of Dreams in Sioux Falls, which I mentioned in an earlier post. We rolled into Wall, SD, around 6pm, too late to check out the famous Wall Drugs, for which we had been seeing the hand-painted billboards along the highway for hundreds of miles. We'll get there tomorrow, probably in the afternoon because rain is predicted and will likely cut short our hiking in Badlands National Park.
I haven't said a lot about our accommodations so far. But here in Wall we're staying a few nights at Badlands Frontier Cabins. Our cabin is spacious and nicely decorated. We slept in, then had to search around for a place that didn't have a huge line for breakfast (it was Mother's Day). We finally found two spots at the retro Phillips Avenue Diner (stainless steel siding and all) where we sat at the counter and were entertained by the interplay between the restaurant's expediter and the wait staff. After breakfast we headed for Great Plains Zoo. I would call it a medium-sized zoo, with mostly outdoor animal habitats and just enough animals to be interesting. I like zoos. They do a lot for the conservation of endangered species. And I just about lived in Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo when I was a kid. After the zoo, we headed for Butterfly House & Aquarium. It wasn't much of an aquarium, but the butterfly habitat was amazing. One of the "keepers" (is that the right word for a butterfly attendant?) said they get shipments of butterfly chrysalises (chrisales?) from all over the world, so there are always butterflies hatching out every day. They also have the cutest little quails running around. I wish I could upload the short video I took of the butterflies flying around. I'll close with a few photos of street art in downtown Sioux Falls. There are sculptures like this all over.
Tomorrow after breakfast we're going to revisit the falls in daylight, then continue our trek to the west. 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.
We started our road trip yesterday with a short drive to Madison WI for an evening concert by Alan Doyle and his band at The Bur Oak. It was, as usual, a joyous occasion, with Alan interacting with the audience in this intimate setting, and calling up a young boy from the audience to sing a duet with him for the final song. We left Madison this morning and headed west. Our first stop was the FAST Fiberglass Mold Graveyard in Sparta WI. We spent a good hour roaming through a vast field of fiberglass molds used to make "statues, roadside attractions, themed water slides, and larger than life creations of all kinds." It's not actually a graveyard, because any of the molds stored here could be re-used if a customer wanted that piece. We had a nice chat with the owner's dad, who showed us how the molds are made, then how the actual fiberglass creations are produced, and even how the models for the molds are carved. They are actually made of styrofoam, He said that the models used to be carved by hand, but now they are carved by a machine after the design is created on a computer. Next we headed to Grandad Bluff Park in Lacrosse WI, where we had a picnic lunch and then hiked the shaded trails. There weren't too many other hikers, and only one (very polite) mountain biker. Then it was off to the Spam Museum in Austin MN. I can't eat Spam (the sugar in all varieties) but the museum was interesting, bright and colorful. There was even an electric car charging station. Our final stop for the day was a giant Jolly Green Giant statue in Blue Earth MN. There's also a Green Giant museum here, but it had closed by the time we arrived. I don't think that FAST Fiberglass made this one, or they would certainly have mentioned it. We made it to our cozy AirBnB in Fairmont MN and had a nice steak dinner in town. Tomorrow we're off for more hiking on the way to Sioux Falls SD, where we expect to spend a few days.
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May 2024
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