Our first stop was the famed Corn Palace in Mitchell. It's fairly impressive to see a building decorated entirely by hand with grasses of various types, but it's just a civic auditorium. The interior was basically a gift shop set up on a basketball arena. We were so early, we had to find something else to do in Mitchell, so we ate breakfast at the Country Kitchen until the Corn Palace opened at 8. The food was of vastly varying quality, but even though they didn't have comment cards, I might get around to filling out the comment card on the internet.
Warning: if you have the QuickTime plugin installed on your computer, you will have the option of playing the corndance movie below. It's one of those tunes that will stick with you! I constructed this movie to imitate the bizarre song that accompanies the dancing corn toys in the Corn Palace. My best guess for the lyrics in English:
The next stop across South Dakota was the Badlands National Park. Weird place full of ditches and big mountains of dirt-colored stuff that doesn't support life.
When you exit the Badlands from the west, you're confronted with the possibility of exploring Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota, and most people probably go there just because of the huge marketing effort they made to get you to stop there via billboards. We ate lunch at the restaurant across the street, and the buffet was good. Andy is always pleased when several varieties of macaroni salad are available on the salad bar. I bought my official South Dakota refrigerator magnet from Wall Drug, and I also bought some gum and 50 cents' worth of fizzy Argentinian candy. So much for contributing to the economy of the area.
We went to see "the big guys" at Mount Rushmore, and then we went to see the progress they've made on turning a mountain into Crazy Horse. A warning about the latter: it's 8 bucks a head to get into the general area of Crazy Horse mountain, and it's several hundred bucks if you want to get on a bus and get anywhere you can actually see his face. They have an interesting way of getting rid of what they chip off the mountain: they give it away to tourists! We hauled a 5-pound rock all the way home with us.
Something that we saw in that part of the country that we don't see in Missouri: they have signs along the interstate that tell you to go back to the nearest city, and they have gates to shut the interstates when the snow gets too bad.
No more scheduled stops for the day, but the drive was scary at night because I-90 between Devil's Tower and Billings has a sign that says "deer crossings next 16 miles" EVERY 16 MILES.
We got to Billings without incident and stayed in the Motel 6. The stay, and the dinner that night at McDonald's, were acceptable without being remarkable.