Our first stop was Sioux Falls, which is one of the only cities South Dakota has. It was full of casinos, saloons, and motorcycles. At eleven at night, everything shut down and the stoplights all started flashing. At first I thought that the city was simply one big truck stop, but when we got to the actual waterfalls of Sioux Falls, I was proven wrong. It has a cute little downtown with a train that goes over a bridge in the background of the waterfalls. The waterfalls are in the center of a nicely manicured lawn with a lookout building and the remains of a mill built in the 1880’s. There are strange formations of rock surrounding the area. It was very pretty.
A couple of hours later, we got to Mitchell, SD to visit what is advertised as “the world’s largest palace made entirely of corn.” I was pretty excited, as I’m sure any reasonable person would be. This thing was advertised like it was freakin’ South of the Border, so I figured it must be good. I was mistaken. The Corn Palace is a gymnasium with corn decorations on the outside of it. Yeah, that’s it. Such a disappointment. Don’t waste time seeing it. Nothing but the outer décor is made of corn.
THEN WE SAW BUFFALO. We had been looking out for them, and all we saw were cows, cows, cows. But there they were. Four of them, just standing in the middle of a field. Huge, awkward looking things, but also oddly majestic. It was SO cool! We freaked out.
After driving a little bit further, we stopped at the Badland’s Petrified Garden, which had a backyard full of petrified wood and moss and animal bones. It was pretty cool. The last ice age pushed all of the trees deep into the earth, and when the ice melted, the trees resurfaced and were rock. The place had petrified animal bones from 40 million years ago, and a ton of fossils. It was cool.
From there we drove further to something that made up for my Corn Palace excitement: the Badlands National Park. Looking at pictures of the Badlands, I thought that it would be interesting, but nothing stellar. Those pictures don’t do it justice; the Badlands are amazing. I haven’t been to the Grand Canyon, but I imagine this was a formation vaguely similar. Here’s the scene: we’re driving in the car, watching all of the rolling South Dakota hills and seeing a lot of cows and such, and then all of a sudden, there are canyons and mountains of rocks spanned out right in front of us. The Badlands in total are 240,000 acres. It’s massive. We took a windy road through 40 miles of the Badlands, where there are look out points all over, where we stood on the edge of these cliffs and look out 50 miles into the distance at more cliffs, plateaus, grasslands, and more mountains. It was incredible. The Badlands all look pretty much the same, but against the bright blue sky, they also all look different.
My eyes actually are open there.
At the very end of them, we saw a bunch of cars stopped, only to get out and see fields full of prairie dog holes and the little creatures generously posing for pictures, only feet away from us. They were so cute!!
Our final stop was Wall Drug, a drug store that has been around since the early 1900’s and is now the biggest drug store in the world. That is not an exaggeration. This thing had, among many other things, a drug store (go figure), a boot shop, a clothing store, two restaurants, a donut shop, an ice cream shop, a souvenir shop, a mineral shop, a place to buy guns, an art gallery, a place to buy deer heads, and a chapel, just in case you wanted to pray in a drug store. It was insane.
Let me just finish this unnecessarily long entry by saying that the scenery of South Dakota is truly beautiful. There are rolling hills, bails of hay, and tiny farms everywhere. We started passing huge sunflower fields all along the highway, where all you can look out and see are fields of yellow. No one litters out here, so it’s all very clean. There are lakes with horses grazing nearby, and so far, the sky has always been a vivid, clear blue. But I have to say, the most stunning thing so far, and this applies for almost every night, is the sunset. When the land is completely flat, we can see an entire horizon of a rainbow-colored sunset. Seriously, the sky goes from dark blue to light blue, green, yellow, pink, orange, and red. The sun casts yellow rays through all of the colors, and it is breathtaking. And since we are driving west, and since it’s the right time of year, we can look forward at the sunset and then look behind us at the Badlands, completely dark, but with a full moon over them.
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