Gone with the Wind

Day 33 -  Saturday - Gone with the Wind

We have 3 days - 2 nights on the road - to get all the way across South Dakota from Sioux Falls to Custer in the Black Hills, where we have reservations for a week of camping.  There was rain overnight but for once the forecast was correct and it had stopped by the time we were ready to leave.  We'd packed up a lot of stuff the evening before so it wouldn't get wet, so it wasn't difficult to get going.  Fill up the fresh water, dump the used stuff and drive away.  We usually try to avoid super highways but with almost 400 miles to do in 3 days, we'll be on Interstate 90 most of the time.

....which would have been no problem if the winds hadn't been around 25 miles per hour - no problem in a car but no fun in an RV, especially when they're cross winds.  By the time we reached Mitchell, our planned lunch stop, both of my hands were numb from gripping the steering wheel so I was ready for a rest.  While Vicky prepared lunch I took the camera to get pictures of the outside of the Corn Palace, of which more anon.  Crossing the road to return to the RV, I saw a familiar looking cat walking along the grass near where we were parked.  Sure enough, it was Cosette.  Don't know how she got out, but I had no problem getting her back into the RV - maybe she was trying to tell us Mitchell would be a good place to live.

Lunch having been enjoyed we left the cats to their afternoon nap and went to visit the "World's Only Corn Palace".   I'd visited many years ago on a business trip when with AT&T, and wanted to show it to Vicky.  The outside has murals made entirely of corn cobs - they grow corn in different colors and change it every year.  Some years, if the corn crop is not plentiful enough they can't cover the whole outside with corn so they paint parts of it.  The inside has some permanent corn murals.

The first Corn Palace was built in 1892 to showcase South Dakota's agricultural produce.  It was also an attempt to put Mitchell on the map - at the time it and Pierre were competing to become State Capital.  Pierre (strangely, pronounced peer) won, but Mitchell is now on its 3rd Corn Palace and gets the tourists.  The inside of the Corn Palace includes a small movie theater, a basketball arena which becomes a market most of the time, historical exhibits and a stage.  They have a concert in late summer each year, which has had big names over the years including John Philip Souza and Lawrence Welk.

Spectacle over, Vicky took over the scary driving to get us to Chamberlain, where we visited the Akta Lakota museum, featuring exhibits on the history of the Lakota (Sioux), artifacts and beautiful clothing, and a retelling of the shameful deception practiced on these people by the US government in the 19th Century.

As we would later find out, we could have stayed at a COA campground right in Chamberlain, but Vicky hadn't found it, so we had another 27 miles of windy driving to Left Tailrace, another mid-Missouri River COA campground.  This one had a difficult turn at the entrance - we had to disconnect the car to get in - but the campsite was spacious, and the river views and sunset were spectacular.