2 Cars, 2 Cats, 2 Kids, Volume 3
From Sheridan, we continued on and on and on through Wyoming. Did you know that too much breathtaking scenery will eventually rob your brain of oxygen and start to destroy brain cells? Well it will.
But Devils Tower (or Bear Lodge, depending on whom you ask) was pretty freaking cool anyway.
We also stopped at Jewel Cave, which is the third longest cave in the world, with over 130 miles of underground paths discovered…so far. When the park’s resource director and other exploration minded staff members have a little spare time, they go down and explore. (They have to go in teams of 3 or more.) They expect that by the end of the summer, Jewel Cave will take over as the world’s second longest cave, because they discover more unexplored areas every few weeks. Unfortunately, we were about 30 minutes too late for the cooler “Lantern” tour, so we only got to go into the entrance of the cave. Damned radiator.
We got into Rapid City, SD too late to actually visit Rushmore that night. Instead we took the “express tourism” route the following morning and paid our $8 for parking to spend approximately 25 minutes there.
Immediately upon leaving Rapid City, you start to see signs for Wall Drug. The signs are posted about every half mile for 42 miles. We felt compelled to stop and see what all the fuss was about. The story goes that this family bought a drugstore in Wall, SD during the Great Depression, but business was so bad they almost gave it up until the wife came up with the idea of offering travelers to and from Rushmore free ice water and 5 cent coffee. And business has been booming ever since. We had buffalo burgers and ice water (after all, it was free) in the store restaurant for lunch.
But the piece de resistance in our trip to Omaha had to be…the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. If you thought there was a note of irony in that previous sentence, you’d be right. See the murals on this huge building. Made entirely of corn which has been oh-so-skillfully mounted on wood. And they change them every year. Legend has it that the murals used go all the way down the building, but the rats kept eating the lower portions.
There are more murals inside, and when it isn’t being used for basketball games or other sporting events, the palace appears to be dedicated to…corn.
That's it for now. More later on the trip to Indiana...
posted by Legal Quandary at
01:09
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