The Rest of South Dakota...

The Black Hills could fill a whole vacation on their own - two more National Parks, Custer State Park, Hot Springs in the south, panning for gold in the north, plus Deadwood too.  We opted to save all of that fun for a future trip, since Wisconsin was calling us.  Two days left on the trip, and we still had miles to go before we could sleep.

We started out with the unexpected - a visit to a former Minuteman Missile site, now converted to a sleepy tourist site.  It has a cell phone tour and a brochure, and is just off I-90 at the west end of the Badlands.  J was the most interested in this, so when I saw it on the map, we just added it to the day!  G enjoyed hunting for rocks.  Keeping with the food theme, we opted for the sure thing lunch - back to Wall Drug.  Lunch with free water!  Unending rooms of souvenirs!  We were lucky to get out of there with just one t shirt and no cap pistols, cowboy boots or rubber snakes.

On to the Badlands.  What to say?  At this point in the trip, it felt a little like "yet another national park"

After the Badlands we stopped at part two of the Missile installation - a trailer / national park site, with a short movie and the requisite passport stamps.  They also offer tours of the underground control site, but you have to be tall enough, and show up at 8am to get in line for tickets.  Uh, no, not for us.  Side note - the quality of the movie at national park sites is directly correlated to how famous they are.  Mt. Rushmore - narrated by Tom Brokaw, big movie production values.  Lewis and Clark - mid production, quality narrator.  Minuteman Missile - narrated by local park ranger with strong midwest accent, script probably also written by him, probably filmed by another ranger.  Made me wonder what the movie would have looked like if the Mt. Rushmore crew had produced it.  Or the reverse, what if the Mt. Rushmore movie had been made by this crew?  Hmmm....

It was now 4pm, and we had the bulk of the day's mileage still ahead of us.  So we stopped at a rest area to overlook the Missouri river, stopped in Mitchell to drive by the Corn Palace (no need to go in here.  J and I have been in it.  It is a slightly improved high school auditorium with tour guides.)  We made it into Minnesota well after sunset.  As we approached Worthington for our hotel we kept seeing all these blinking red lights off in the distance.  After 10 minutes or so of pondering, we finally realized they were windmills.  Last time J and I drove this way (uh, more than 15 years ago) they were not there!

We were all so happy to just crash in bed, with one last day to go.