GADT Day 4 - A Monumental Driving Day

First on the plate today was the Corn Palace, but before that we needed breakfast. Driving down Main St. in Mitchell, SD mom noticed a little cafe about two blocks from the Corn Palace. Cafe Teresa turned out to be a lovely little place with great coffee and good simple food. Wifi and a wine bar are things you don't normally associate with a small town diner, but this place manages to pull off a little cosmopolitan flair without sacrificing hometown hospitality.

The world's only Corn Palace turned out to be the town's civic center, home to basketball games, town meetings, concerts and once a year a corn festival. What's so special is that the exterior and much of the interior is covered in corn cob art. These are large murals made from twelve different varieties of corn husks, cut in half and nailed to the walls. The people of Mitchell have been doing this every year since 1892. And they have been taking pictures of the place every year since then.

That's the bulk of what there is to see inside the building and it's more fascinating than it sounds. The pictures aren't just of the building, but also the people of Mitchell as they lived through two world wars, good and bad economic times, and the changing world outside this little town. The artwork swings from patriotic to historic, from mundane to exotic while below them the people and the town change. It's all free and we spent a great hour there looking at the art and chatting with the people.

Now the drive to Mt. Rushmore was a real eye opener for me. I've never driven beyond Iowa before, so I've never seen the real prairie of Laura Ingalls-Wilder. I think what awed me the most was that for three hundred miles we were almost constantly going uphill! I'm used to going up a hill and then going down the other side. Out here you go up, it levels off and then you go up again. It reeked havoc on my gas mileage and at one point I was worried the Prius might run dry.

Those of you from the East Coast will probably be familiar with South of the Border, that icon of tourist traps whose aggressive billboard advertising provides Florida bound travellers along I95 with amusement and frustration. But did you know where Pedro got the idea for all those billboards? From Wall Drug, that's where. Back in 1931 Ted Hustead bought the only drugstore in the little town of Wall, SD. Disappointed at the small number of customers coming in he started putting up amusing signs on all the roads leading into town offering people free ice water if they came to Wall Drug.

Those signs now reach all the way into Iowa and who knows how far in every other direction. Some are funny, some are silly, some are just advertisements, but all of them entice the weary traveller to push on to Wall and experience its now famous drugstore. As with most tourist traps, Wall Drug doesn't live up to the hype, but it was a fun little side trip that doesn't take long. There's plenty to see in this souvenir mini-mall and you'll be hard pressed to walk away without buying something. We bought a Chapstick for mom.

Okay, I'm about to step on some patriotic toes here. We got to Mt. Rushmore, a place I have wanted to see since childhood, and my first impression was... it's smaller than I thought it would be. Don't get me wrong, it's an amazing sculpture, but it's just not as grand as movies and pictures led me to believe. It was a beautiful day, with nice puffy clouds in the background and I got some nice photos, visited the gift shop, bought some books and a t-shirt, but on the whole it was a bit of a let down.

On the other hand, about twenty miles away is the Crazy Horse sculpture and this one was actually bigger than I expected. I'd been warned away from going inside the park, they charge $10 a head and you can't see anything inside that you can't see from the road. We pulled off and I pulled out the binoculars. If this thing ever gets completed it will really be a wonder. Only the face seems to be completed and there didn't seem to be any work going on. Should they have blasted away the natural wonders to replace them with man-made wonders? I don't know, but at least I have a t-shirt!

After leaving the monuments area we headed down US 385 towards Nebraska. We had no idea how far we'd get, but wanted to have a short a drive on Thursday as possible. I ended up driving all the way to Cheyenne, WY, pulling in at 9:30 pm Mountain Time -- a thirteen hour day.

Day 4 mileage: 637