Heading out of the Yellowstone park area and into the Great Plains is a sobering event.  We had a taste of it while coming down from Canada, but now we were faced with the prospect of an extended Plains visit we had to take it more seriously.

Heading out of Cody in the AM, we raced across the state of Wyoming heading for Gillette so we could get Lisa on her plane.  It was made all the more exciting by the fact that Orbitz accepted the reservation online, issued a confirmation that it was ticketed, and then called two days later to tell us that they couldn't E-Ticket Frontier and we had to call the airline.

The airline told us that we had to get the ticket at the airport.  The airport wasn't really online with Frontier yet, and couldn't ticket.  To make a long story short, we were on the hairy edge of several systems and a new code sharing between Frontier, Great Lakes, and United.  Suffice to say that we saw Lisa get on the plane.  We just hope they allow her to get on her connection in Denver, and that her luggage doesn't end up somewhere in Mexico.  On to our story.

Most of the scenery after we left the mountains looked a lot like this.  There were areas where the rock formations were terrific, and sometimes the redness of the earth defied belief, but on the whole it was pretty monotonous going.  The only real break was the Bighorn Recreation Area which has a very high pass and some terrific views across the plains.

There were examples of Antelope along the ay to cheer us on.  It was cool to see them since we hadn't seen any in the park.  It's also nice to know that big animals really do live outside the park system, aside from deer.

We stopped in Sheridan to have some lunch.  The heat hit us like a wall when we got out of the car.  I didn't realize what a great job the AC was doing until we got out into the sunshine.  We got some lunch at a place that was probably the only one of its type in the town.  Suffice to say it had a lot of purple in the decor and a distinctly feminine feel to the place.  Not quite what I would have expected in the real cowboy country of Wyoming.

Eventually we got to the airport in Gillette.  We arrived a solid two hours plus early for the flight since it took so long to get the ticket squared away.  We ended up buying a new very expensive ticket so Lisa could get home.  She will fight with Orbitz and Frontier from home later on.

One of the cool things about the airport in Gillette is the game exhibit.  This allowed us to get a picture of an Antelope so we could show you what we were seeing in the wild. 

At one point I was behind the counter trying to figure out some issues with the Frontier ticketing application.  I was only slightly successful since they were using a completely custom version of Win98.  But the little I was able to do impressed the ground crew which seemed very interested in getting Lisa on the plane.  As a matter of fact, at one point we cracked open a bottle of wine in the lounge area (no bar in sight) and the ground crew would bring us updates on the process every so often.

After sending off Lisa we headed for Rapid City, SD.  South Dakota, and Rapid City in particular, takes its Dinosaurs very seriously.  They have a municipal park called Dinosaur Park, which has these green dinosaur replicas.  They are great fun for kids of all ages..

We finally got a nice divey motel in Rapid City for the night.  It came complete with a "Magic Fingers" vibrating bed!  The kind we always made jokes about.

Since Lisa was gone we didn't have to stay in those ritzy $100/night places any more.  Now that we are back to just us, we can practice trying to be frugal, like the good retirees we aspire to be..  :-)

Tomorrow we are off to Mount Rushmore and who knows where else!

7/11/01

Today started a little slowly.  We were having some pulsating in the front brakes.  For those that have had this problem, it's annoying but not a safety hazard.  Rapid City, SD had a Midas shop, so we went there.  Being I have a Mitsubishi and Rapid City is big American Iron country, they had to order the part.  Thus we are stuck here for another day.  We'll make the best of it.  The Midas people drove us to the local Journey Museum so we could continue our hectic tourist pace while the car was getting checked out.  Basically, it was a sort of interpretive center to try and display the different viewpoints of manifest destiny and the Sioux.  It seemed to me that the Sioux ended up pretty well out of the deal. 

First off, we know the Sioux kicked several other tribes off the land, and they didn't have to do anything for them.  But the Sioux got kicked off the land and they got a lot of territory, and even better, they got the gaming license.  It was pretty bleak for a while on the reservation, but things are looking pretty good now. 

Before I get a lot of hate mail, let's be clear.  People have been pushing people off land as long as there have been people.  The point I'm making here is that the Sioux got lucky enough to be pushed off the land by a group that has a guilty conscience, which puts us way out in front of most of the rest of the world in the reparations department.

After we got the car back from Midas we headed for Mount Rushmore.  For those that know some of the story, it's pretty boring stuff with a lot of hoopla, in my humble opinion.  But the real interest for us lies in the tremendous amount of Americana and people watching you can do at a place like this.

Oh, and the other thing, the tag line for South Dakota.  I hadn't seen this before, but now it makes sense.  The Great Faces, Great Places means the whole state is hanging it's hat on the stone faces of four presidents.  I'm a little surprised they couldn't come up with anything better than that.  After all, there's all that hunting and fishing.  And then there is all that farming and ranching.  And there are all those missiles and oil.  Maybe a tag line that plays to the dominant activities would be better, or something that shows the local color.  But Mount Rushmore just doesn't symbolize this state at all for me.

The Americana on display on the drive to Mount Rushmore was not to be believed.  The Flintstone's Bedrock City and the Jellystone Park Camp were just the starters.  The Reptile Garden, complete with a Komodo Dragon only begins to show the lengths these Sodaks will go to tease dollars out of the tourists pockets. 

And there are the tourists themselves.  It was like a "Salt Of The Earth" convention hit town and we didn't get notified so we could avoid it.  We heard the most incredible things come out of peoples' mouths.  For example, a kid is looking up at the faces on the mountain and exclaims, "Washington was rich?  He didn't even go to college!  How could he be rich?".  And other gems of this ilk were heard regularly, and usually in an accent strong enough (northern or southern) to make both of us blanch. 

The second picture is the original statue that was supposed to be the final look of the mountain.  But, a couple things happened, first the guy running the program, Borglum, up and died before it was done.  His son had to take over.  And then the rock wasn't good enough to do the bodies, so they decided to stick with the faces.  Personally, I think the answer is simpler.  They ran out of funds and had to quit while they were a head(s).

The third picture is just Caroline joining the boys club on the hill.  She's one tough cookie...

This is the mountain that will eventually look like Chief Crazy Horse, mounted on his fiery stallion.  It's a fanciful display that is taking considerably longer to complete than Rushmore since it's being done completely with private money.  You can kind of see his head and the white outline of the horse's head has been blocked out on the stone. 

Personally, it seems like another silly way to get money from tourists, but I'm not prone to a lot of sentimentality over these kinds of things.

Onward we went, delving deeper into South Dakota's great tourist history in the Black Hills.  We tried to visit Jewel Cave National Monument, but couldn't see waiting three hours for the next tour that we could join.  So we continued on to Wind Cave National Park.  This one appealed to me since I've been known to be a bit windy upon occasion.

The cave itself is pretty dry as caves go, and it's really big.  They have almost mapped 100 miles of caves, and they think they haven't gotten the majority done yet.  Spelunkers are a special breed of human, and the park service is enlisting anyone they can to help map the cave.

The dryness of this cave is nice because it doesn't drip on you as you walk around.  The down side is that you don't get as many interesting shapes handing all over the place.  This cave is most famous for it's "Boxwork" formations.  You can see examples in the second and third pictures.

The final picture shows some "popcorn" formations that are common in this cave.  The orangey light is a function of the incandescent lighting and a red pigment in a lot of the stone. 

We finished up the Wind Cave park by visiting the Prairie Dog Exhibit.  This exhibit consists of a field that has a whole lot of Prairie Dogs living in it.  The difference is that no rancher comes out to shoot them as soon as they stick their heads out of their burrows.  Needless to say this exhibit doesn't endear the park to the local ranchers and farmers, but it does show you what significant parts of the Prairie used to be like.

After all the touring we headed back to town to get some dinner.  We had another nice meal until a rancher and his family sat down at the next table.  We think he must have been sick or something because he kept launching into a noise that would make a pig give back lunch.  We told the waitress about it, and she looked at us like we had too much to drink.  Then the guy tosses out one of these snorts while she was standing there and I thought she was going to drop her water pitcher from the sound of it.  She came back to our table, apologized, and then we got the check.

Caroline, bless her heart for trying to improve the world, dropped by the table and told the guy that she hoped what ever was making him feel bad would clear up soon since it sounded so horrible.  He looked at her in a state of complete mystery. 

We headed back to the hotel for another night in the same place, the same room even.  We hadn't slept two nights in the same room since our first night in Eureka.  Tomorrow will be more of the Rapid City area while we wait for the car to get finished.  I can't wait to see what else we can come up with around here.

7/12/01

We got the car to the shop and then were given a lift back to the downtown.  Caroline proceeded to enrich the local economy a little more buying things that hopefully we'll be able to give away to unsuspecting friends and relatives.  We had some early lunch of South Dakota buffalo burgers, got the car and headed out of town.

It was terribly hot today.  I mean, hot, humid, and getting hotter.  As we got closer to the Badlands, it just got hotter, and stayed humid.  The AC was working hard, as was the rest of the car.  But the brakes felt good, the temperature gauge stayed steady, and we cranked on through.

We had been seeing signs for Wall Drug for literally hundreds of miles.  And since we were made a lot more pliable by the heat, Caroline decided that we needed to see what all the advertising was about.  Wall Drug is really a series of stores that sell every kind of tourist item imaginable, and then some, in Wall, SD.  Wall, SD is so named because it sits on the "wall" that separates the grass land of SD from the Badlands. 

As soon as I saw what a first rate tourist trap it was, and not wanting to get out of the AC, I never even stopped and just kept on rolling through the parking lot and out again.  But not before we popped this frame to prove that we really saw as much of it for ourselves as any person needs to see.

Shortly after we escaped from the Wall Drug experience, we entered the Badlands National Park.  They are bad because the soil is too poor to farm, and it's hot as blazes in the summer, and cold as can be in the winter.  It only gets about 16 inches of rain a year, and the early settlers said "..the water in the White River is too thick to drink and too thin to plow."  The rest of the time the wind blows like crazy.  It's no wonder it's not a very populous place.

However, the rock formations are terrific, and you can see a lot of it from the Park road.  The place was a seabed that got raised up.  Then the erosion started and made the various layers in all their colors come to the surface to entertain us.

Well, we just couldn't talk about this part of the trip without mentioning the big juicy bugs.  It's a good thing none of these bugs were on the endangered species list because we killed a whole lot of them today.  You can imagine how many colors can come out of one bug when it hits the windshield at 80 MPH.  The speed limit is 75 MPH out here, and I did get passed quite regularly, for those of you that might be somewhat critical of my driving style.

The only thing that was kind of weird was that Caroline got far fewer bugs than I did.  In any case, we can never be Hindus now that we've taken a zillion lives across the plains.

As we got closer to the far side (east side) of South Dakota, we started seeing signs for the Corn Palace.  Now it has to be understood that Caroline has been doing some genealogy work on her family tree.  And a bunch of her forebears came from Iowa.  We are talking serious corn people.  Well, Caroline just lit up at the sight of the Corn Palace ads and wouldn't even contemplate the idea that it might be something we could miss.  Her corn-related genes just started to go pitter patter, and it got worse the closer we got to Mitchell, SD - The Home Of The Corn Palace.

The Corn Palace is a pretty big structure.  It is covered in corn, in eleven colors specially bred for this purpose.  And the murals and designs change each year.  It's also an auditorium, stage, and gym that hosts over 150 basketball games a year, the high school prom, and any other event that needs the space. 

The inside is set up like any other event center, except this one has a retail operation on the gym floor when ever they aren't using it for something else.  It is just so over the top, you can't imagine.  And it has been going on for over a hundred years.  This is the third iteration of the building, and they don't seem to be lacking for continued enthusiasm for this shrine to corn.

Some of the highlights of the experience were the "corny" expressions as noted in the local Discover Mitchell paper that we read over dinner.  And no, we didn't have any corn with dinner since it's not in season yet and they wouldn't think of importing foreign corn - we asked.  The best expressions that we can remember are;

So many ears - So little wax.
Amaizing!
We're all ears!
You won't believe our ears!
The best ears of your life.

And on and on they go...

After dinner we put down some more mileage and ended up in Sioux Falls.  We got another really cheap hotel.  I knew this one was really cheap when I walked into the office to get the room and the guy behind the desk had a porno movie going.  The room was clean but there was a large number of trucks in the parking lot.  I got the trucker rate anyway by being nice to the guy at the desk. 

The other highlight of the evening is the fact that I got all our email via a data call on my cell phone.  That will eat up some of those extra minutes that I never use..

7/13/01

Today was a very momentous day.  We had breakfast in South Dakota, lunch in Minnesota, and dinner in Iowa.  And to top it off we got to visit with some of Caroline's relatives, in a cemetery. 

Caroline's grandfather was born in Iowa.  Caroline wanted to look at the town where he was born and some other towns where he and his parents lived.  We traipsed around this corner of Iowa looking at various items of interest to her family and perused a bunch of documents in the courthouse to see the old records and make copies.

We drove a lot of miles today.  And a lot of the scenery looked pretty familiar.  Corn, corn, and more corn.  In Minnesota we saw the occasional lake.  I think there were about fifteen that we saw - 9,985 to go..

At one point we came across this sixty foot Jolly Green Giant.  It was in Blue Earth Minnesota, and was located in the middle of nowhere.  But we hadn't seen it before, and we passed up the eighty foot dinosaur near Wall Drug, so how could we not stop?

When we came to Iowa, we stopped in the Visitor's Center.  Caroline never met a Visitor Center she didn't like.  And this one was particularly well themed for the area.  So many others are just so bland. 

Osage, IA is a sight to see.  This is where we got hold of the records of Caroline's relatives.  They have their own water tower, which just couldn't be missed.  It gives you a sense of what a rockin' place Osage really is.

And yes, that's me in the truck waiting for Caroline to shoot the buildings that were built during the time that her Granddad was in town.

There was an exhibit for Norwegian Immigrants nearby.  We stopped since Caroline's Great Grandfather came from Norway to Iowa.  There was a certain physical similarity between the statues and various members of her family.

We continued on to Mason City, IA where we stopped for the night.  Tomorrow we will check in with a second cousin of Caroline's so they can compare notes about their joint relatives.

7/14/01

Today was an interesting day.  We  started the day by visiting the Frank Lloyd Wright house called Stockman House.  It's in Mason City, IA.  It was great to see Frank's lowest cost house.  It was very much in the Prairie School, at the end of that period actually, and had all the touches that you'd expect from a Wright house.

We also did some more genealogy stuff with Caroline's family, except this time they are alive, which made it a lot more engaging.

The Stockman House is completely restored.  However, they don't let you take pictures inside. 

It's a nice house, especially given the time period it was designed and built.  It has all the great touches you'd expect, and a bunch of the bad ones too.  The ceilings are low, there aren't any closets worth talking about, and it has all that Wright and Stickney furniture that looks more like a torture device than something comfortable to sit in.

But the windows are terrific, the light comes through beautifully.  And the balance in the house is perfect.  We enjoyed it a great deal and are looking forward to seeing Falling Water even more.

Peggy is related to Caroline through her paternal grandfather's family.  Peggy and Caroline have the same Great Grandfather.  We spent several lovely hours at Peggy and Roger's house discussing family, geek stuff, sharing pictures, and having lunch.  We left late in the afternoon with promises to stop in again when ever either of us are in each other's neighborhoods.

After we visited with Peggy and Roger we continued east.  We stopped in the Amana Colonies.  For those that are not familiar, they are the people behind the Amana household appliances.  They started as a religious group that needed to escape persecution in Germany in the mid-1800s.  They moved to western NY, gathered more members, and then moved to Iowa.  I'm summarizing very quickly here, because it's tough to imagine how a German religious group could end up in Iowa.

They had some trouble paying the price for the land they purchased in Iowa and became a commune.  They stayed a commune for 89 years, a record, and then dissolved the commune in 1932.  Now they are a close knit community that seems highly productive.  They are very different than the Amish or Shakers.  These people embrace modern ways and technology.  They have some great crafts and food to see and taste if you are ever in the neighborhood.  We ended up taking some Blackberry, Cranberry, and Apricot wines with us, all of which were very different than the usual California stuff, and very good.

We ended the day by crossing the mighty Mississippi River.  We are spending the night in Illinois.  We are almost off the Great Plains.

And it was another good upload via cell phone.  If you've got the time and the signal, it really works!

7/15/01

Today we got to visit with my Uncle Myron in Urbana, IL.  It was a very easy driving day, which was a welcome change.

Myron is a professor at Illinois at Urbana.  He gave us a great walking tour of part of the campus.  It's a very large campus, so we focused on the things between his offices and his house.  Myron regaled us with interesting stories about life as a professor.  It sounded pretty good, I just can't seem to get past that undergrad degree part...

Myron has one of the largest offices I've seen.  I guess he must be a big cheese on campus.  :-)

Myron also oversee a number of students and their lab work.  We got to see some of the lab space and his other working office.  This is the one that seems to be the place where all the real work gets done.

After out tour we went back to the house and chatted, then had dinner out on the porch.  It was a lively evening, and it occurred to us that this was the first time that we'd had a home cooked meal in a long time.  It was very refreshing.

Tomorrow we are off to Indianapolis.

7/16/01

We started the day by saying goodbye to Myron. 

Myron headed off to his office on his bicycle like he has been doing for a very long time.  It a pleasure to see someone so satisfied with what he does, especially after he's been doing it for a very long time.

We headed off to see the round barns of Urbana.  This was an experiment that was run around 1908 to try and make a more efficient dairy barn operation.  About 60 barns of this type were built, but it never really caught on.  They are pretty neat to see since they are so different than any of the other barns that we'd seen on the prairie.

The next stop was the Indianapolis Speedway.  We were very lucky to be there at that time since the Brickyard 400 was fast approaching and there were some contenders doing test laps on the track.  Somehow the TV never captures the real sound of those cars as they come around the track.

Then we visited the Hall of Fame Museum.  It was loaded with old Indy cars of all types.  There was even a car that I could get into for a picture!

After the Speedway we headed for Stacey and Aaron's place.  And we got to meet Brin for the first time.  Caroline bonded with Brin very quickly as did I.  Brin really liked to see herself in the viewfinder of the camera. 

I just had to keep Caroline from taking the baby with us since she's just so cute.

Aaron and Darvon relax after the days work. 

We checked out the backyard and it's pond.  We even got to see some Muskrats in the pond. 

We went out to dinner that night.  That is where we got to see how much Brin likes spaghetti.  She likes it so much that she wears it all over her body.

After dinner we went back to the house and stayed up and chatted until late at night. 

7/17/01

Poor Aaron had to get up at the regular time for work, but we got to hang with Stacey and Brin for a while before we headed east again.  The next stop is Pittsburgh.

I guess the highlight of the day was getting to go to a fireworks store.  The pyro in me just got it's little fix.

Now I have to find a place to blow them up, with some helpful friends. 

The trip continues on the East Coast page.