Day 4: Spearfish, SD to Lincoln, NE.Today, we drove clear across South Dakota on I-90 from one end to the other, and then took a 90 degree turn and drove directly south the Omaha & then west a little to Lincoln. The aim: to get to Librarygirl’s house and visit before it was too late to humanely do so. Total distance: 621 miles.
Turns out South Dakota is very large, and insanely flat. Once we got out of the Black Hills at the western end of the state (home of the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary, for our nieces, who have sponsored horses there), we were out on open prairie for the rest of the afternoon. The roadkill degenerated from deer to prairie chickens (actually, subsequent investigation has suggested that these were sharp-tailed grouse, which are often confused with greater prairie chickens but are much more common. but enough with the ornithology). South Dakota is also Laura Ingalls Wilder territory, something we didn’t figure out until after we’d gone through it. Where the grasses were still around, we could see exactly what Laura described in her stories of the plains and the great bowl of the sky. Sadly, we were travelling east, not west. How retrograde of us.
Our two junk tourist attractions today were supposed to be Wall Drug and the Corn Palace. Wall Drug, sadly, failed to cooperate: there was a huge stationary train blocking access to the road, and a lot of pissed middle Americans in camper vans turning around and heading back to the highway. We waited 5 minutes and then gave up as well. Thus continues our noble tradition, as Tim has pointed out, of going to the vicinity of tourist attractions and failing to see them.
The Corn Palace was actually pretty cool, not so much because of the corn but because it’s located in Mitchell, a pretty nice American town that still has a main street and lots of old sections with large trees bending over the streets. The Palace itself is basically a two-side facade to an old building, with crazy Muscovite towers and a corn facing. The outer husks of the corn are stuck to the sides of the building, and the direction they’re facing causes a textured effect. Quite neat really, though not as pretty as the main street.
At the eastern end of South Dakota we crossed over the Missouri River and were immediately thrown into a completely different landscape, complete with trees. After Sioux Falls we were into true Iowa cornbelt territory: neat, tidy fields, corn hoppers and elevators, green strips and small tree windbrakes. Also, rather weirdly, Iowa has decided that every Interstate rest stop will have wireless internet - a feature prominent on all the rest stop signs down I-29. Why wireless? Why not, uhh, heated towel racks, or free doughnuts? Presumably Iowa has some kind of mandate to modernize, and those things aren’t 21st century enough.
Our trip ended with a temporary backtrack west an hour to visit Helen’s friend Librarygirl in Lincoln. LG has purchased a sweet old house in the leafy old section of Lincoln (she calls it “the letter district,” because all the streets are letters of the alphabet), and has installed a modern dog & boyfriend. The dog, Cody, barked a lot but chiefly what he was saying was “don’t hate me ‘cos I’m beautiful” … because, well, he is. LG hasn’t changed a bit since 1999, apart from a spiffy new haircut and an encyclopedic knowledge of the Omaha music scene. We were both rather taken with Lincoln, especially the gigantic grain elevator complex (well, that’s mostly Helen). The night is balmy and smells like cows.
Book report: we are done with The Golden Compass, after excitement, tragedy and lots of trilogy-intended foreshadowing. And we hope to see our new friends Lyra Belacqua and Ioric Byrnison in book two.
Summary: Helen has white line fever. Jeannette’s butt hurts. Librarygirl is cool as ever.