27 Sept - Wednesday - Mitchell, SD and Council Bluffs, IA

Wayne writes:
Before turning the computer over to Margaret, I thought I’d bring you up to date on today’s drive. It was close to the longest day on record (this trip) – over 324 miles. As Margaret will tell you, it was a tough day; not so much the distance as the conditions.

I didn’t think it there would be much to report in terms of photo ops, but we found “The Corn Palace”! Who’d thought?

A piece of good news. We fueled up in Rapid City, SD (at $2.51); and this afternoon , after driving 522 miles we topped off (at $2.49/gal) with an average mileage rate of 12.6 mpg. Not too shabby for 24,000 pound RV! And diesel prices keep getting lower and lower and lower! Hooray!

Now over to Margaret:

Today was a marathon drive, finally leaving Chamberlain, SD, early and stopping for the night in Council Bluff, IA, in a beautiful state park on a lake. The day was made difficult by intermittent rain, never hard but enough to make the roads slick and the windshield wipers smear; and the bad road conditions which went from broken pavement to one lane switches.

Our break for the day was a visit to the world’s only Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. Have you been there? Well, it is worth the trip! It’s a-maizing-ing! This is one inventive way to advertise the bounty of the heartland! That or it is the world’s largest bird feeder.

Lewis and Clark traveled through this area in 1805 declaring it the Great American desert unsuitable for anything except buffalo. So the corn palace was intended to put Mitchell on the map and prove L & C wrong. So build it they did, and many come to see it. A festival in late September celebrates the fertility of the area and its people, and the design for the coming year.

The palace we saw today is actually the third and is used not only as a tourist attraction but as a community center featuring stage shows (Peter, Paul and Mary on October 5), trade shows, high school basketball games, proms and graduations. The inside has corn mosaics as well. Otherwise, it is a modern gymnasium / theatre / ballroom.

With few exceptions, the design is changed annually. Materials are corn (in 12 colors), Milo, rye, oat heads, and sour dock. The corn is cut in half lengthwise and the grains bundled before being nailed to the building. This year the corn harvest was poor due to the very hot summer. The side benefit was that the corn already on the building had not deteriorated, so only the grains were being replaced. There was a crew of four doing that.

So the theme is decided, the art work drawn of black roofing paper with colors, and then that is tacked to the building. Then the corn, all the 275,000 half ears, is nailed in place! They describe it as a very large corn-by-number project!

WBH writes:
The first photo is of the overview of the Corn Palace. I think of it as a stationary Rose Parade where almost everything has to be "natural". The exterior is nailed-in-place using 12 different colors of corn, milo, rye, sour dock, and grasses used in the decorations. The next two photos are close ups of the workers putting the materials in place and a close up of the milo clumps used on the wall.