478.6 RV miles today, 8,610 total
After a pancake breakfast at Rafter J’s, we headed past Hill City to the famous Wall’s Drugstore since 1931. Then onto the Badlands National Park, with its peaks, gullies, butts & prairies. Then onto the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site (where I sat in one of the red commander chairs) & bison hot dogs for lunch. We saw this huge prairie dog & thought of you, Claire. Then we took the long drive across southern South Dakota stopping at the famous world outlet, Cabela’s, to buy some socks. After dinner at Sugar Daddy’s Bar & Casino, we camped at the KOA in North Sioux Falls at the border with Iowa & Nebraska.
“Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.”– Benjamin Disraeli
“I’ve been about the world alot, & pretty much over our own country, but I was totally unprepared for that revelation called the Dakota Bad Lands…What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere–a distant architecture, ethereal…, an endless supernatureal world more spiritual than earth but created out of it.” –Frank Lloyd Wright (1935)
“Ace in the Hole.”–John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States (referring to the Minuteman weapons system during the Cuban missile crisis. Over the next two years, hundreds of Minuteman Missile silos and support structures would be constructed across the Great Plains landscape, including the state of South Dakota)
“Driving across South Dakota on Interstate 90, you will see billboard after billboard advertising everything from an 80 foot dinosaur to a shooting gallery to free ice water – all of which are located at a drug store in a tiny prairie town called Wall. With a population less than 1,000 people, Wall Drug can have over 20,000 visitors on a busy summer day. The Wall Drug Store got its start during the Depression years by offering Free Ice Water to thirsty travelers & is now an international icon. Over the years, many visitors of Wall Drug have erected signs throughout the world announcing the miles to Wall Drug from famous locations such as Antartica, Capetown, South Africa, the Great Wall of China, World War II Europe, etc.”
