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.
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We're a retired couple who think that travel is one of the most important things in life. Archives
May 2024
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