States & Provinces visited on this segment: South Dakota
Dates: Thursday July 5 to Saturday July 7
Miles driven: 450 (3300 total to date)
Summary: We left Custer on Thursday morning and rejoined I90 at Rapid City. We then headed east, stopping at Wall Drug in Wall, SD for lunch. If you have kids you really can’t miss stopping at Wall Drug. The signs along the road for Wall Drug are what most people who have traveled I90 will remember. There are signs hundreds of miles away imploring you to stop at Wall Drug for a plethora of reasons, including the signature “free ice cold water”. Ultimately it gets the kids asking “Just what is Wall Drug?” Once you arrive there are actually a lot of fun things for the kids to do in the “backyard”, and overall it makes a fun stop even if Wall Drug is over hyped to the max. After leaving Wall we detoured south off of I90 and visited Badlands National Park. We spent most of the afternoon there, stopping the various viewpoints and exploring the visitor center while the kids completed their junior ranger activities. We then rejoined I90 and continued east, spending the night in Chamberlain on the banks of the Missouri River.
Friday was Elizabeth’s birthday – she turned 10. Wow, double digits! It doesn’t seem nearly that long ago that she was born. We bought some cinnamon rolls and candles and sang happy birthday to Elizabeth during breakfast. We packed up and headed down the road to Mitchell to see the Corn Palace. They bill it as the “World’s Only Corn Palace”, and it definitely is a one of a kind place. The building was built to showcase all the crops that are grown locally. The building is a large multi-use facility that in addition to being a tourist attraction is home to local basketball games, trade shows, performances, etc. The third and present corn palace was built in 1921 and has a Moorish architecture. While the architecture itself is out of place in South Dakota, the real distinguishing thing about the building is the murals. The exterior and interior of the building are covered with giant murals made entirely out of different colored corn, grasses, and grains that are grown locally. Over 3000 bushels of grains are used to decorate the building in addition to countless ears of corn. Best of all, the admission price is just right – free.
From Mitchell we left the interstate and headed NE to De Smet. This small town in South Dakota was the setting for many of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, and is where “Ma” and “Pa” Ingalls, plus all the kids other than Laura are buried. Laura wrote “By the Shores of Silver Lake”, “The Long Winter”, “Little Town on the Prairie”, and “These Happy Golden Years” based on her experiences in De Smet. Every year the local community puts on a dramatic adaptation of one of Laura’s books in an outdoor amphitheater that overlooks the original Ingalls homestead. They do the performance on three weekends in July and we were fortunate to make it to town just in time to attend the opening night performance for 2007. This year they did an adaptation of “These Happy Golden Years”. We all enjoyed the performance. On Saturday we visited a number of the historic buildings and sites in town. Several of the original buildings are owned by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society and are open to the public – the surveyor’s house that they first lived in, the house that Pa built in town (and in which Ma, Pa, and Mary lived in until they died), and the first school that Laura attended in town. In addition, you can visit the original homestead site and see the five cottonwood trees that they planted on their homestead. Adjacent to the homestead site there are recreations of many buildings from the timeframe the Ingalls homesteaded in De Smet, with lots of hands on exhibits to give the visitor a sense of what life on the prairie was like in the 1870’s/1880’s. It was 103 deg the day we were there so we also got a sample of how difficult it could be to deal with the weather on the prairie. Overall it was a great educational experience and a must see for anyone who has read the books as visiting the sites and actual buildings brings the books to life.
Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/bryan.vacation/Part5CusterToDeSmet
Other notes: At Chamberlain we experienced our first issue with the trailer. I went to empty the holding tanks at the dump station and had the unpleasant surprise of part of the sewage going on the road rather than down the sever pipe when I opened up the valve to empty the tank. “Yuck” is an understatement. I was able to see that one of the seals had came out from the gray water drain valve, allowing some of the gray and black water to come out by the valve rather than out the discharge pipe. By wrapping a rag around the seal I was able to get the tanks drained, and then we headed down the road to find replacement parts. I was able to find a new valve assembly at an RV dealership in Mitchell. When I removed the old valves the next morning I found that the flange on the gray water valve was broken. In reassembling everything I discovered that the gray water pipe coming from the tank did not line up correctly with the valve assembly. This put a lot of force on flange, likely causing it to break. When they had built the trailer instead of fixing the problem they apparently just force fit the connection together. The flange may even have been broken from the beginning and it just started leaking when the seal worked its way out due to road vibration or opening and closing the valve. I ended up raising the whole drain valve assembly a little bit, cutting the gray water pipe, and installing a flexible rubber coupling to connect the gray water pipe to help remove the stress. In the end it took me a couple of hours to tear everything apart and put it back to gather again (including a trip to the hardware store in De Smet to buy some other parts), but in the end I think it is better than new. Next up: Belgrade, Minnesota (home of some friends of Karen’s from the Peace Corp)
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