Sunday - 24 Sept - Badlands, Grasslands, Wall Drug, and Air Force Museum

After exploring South and West, we headed East today to check out the grasslands and the South Dakota Badlands. Driving through the rolling hills, it’s easy to get disoriented. One minute you’re in a slight gully and can’t see anything except the hills around you; the next, you’re on a rise and you can see from horizon to horizon.

Now that the storm clouds have moved south, we have gloriously blue sky and hundreds of white puffy – what I call – layer clouds gliding overhead. The blue sky is a most unusual shade of blue – not the blue we’re used to in Florida or anywhere else we’ve been. I think it has something to do with the low humidity and low sun angle. Maybe it’s something else? I keep trying to capture the essence of the blue in photos but can’t do it justice.

After driving for about 45 minutes (and seemingly getting nowhere) we decided to take the scenic route – 25 miles of dirt / gravel road. It is on the map and there were farms / ranches along the way, but we really felt we were in the middle of nowhere! First there were the gullies with muddy water remaining from the previous rains, then there were the bare rocks and hills, then vistas of the Badlands to the South and the Black Hills to the west, the occasional bison, prairie dogs everywhere you looked, and finally Margaret tried to run over a rattlesnake in the road but missed. I think she hit a couple of his rattles because when she backed up to take a look, he looked pretty mad.

I must not forget our visit to Scenic, SD. I don’t know who thought up the name but it is in the middle of nowhere (where we went today) and looks like someone’s idea of what a deserted western town should look like -- and probably, in fact, was one. Except I don’t know who would ever go there on purpose. Yes, people were living there, far outnumbered by the horses and steers, and I guess some of the “stores” were open for business at certain times of the year, but it looked desolate. Great photo op’s though, I’ll try to include one as a stand-alone so you can get some idea. There were also some pretty large horns on the local cows in the corrals.

Even though we hadn’t planned to drive on dirt roads, this is one time we’re glad we did. The scenery was beautiful and spectacular in a special kind of way. Not soaring mountains or waterfalls, but incredible shades of green, ochre, ivory, and brown.

When we finally got back to a paved road, we found ourselves in Wall, SD. The Wall Drug Store advertising signs – Free Ice Water – are seen in many places in the northwest. Sort of like Visit Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, TN. But what a store. It occupied an entire city block in Wall and carried everything under the sun. I didn’t see any used cars for sale, but they had just about everything else, from quality western wear (boots, shirts, coats, etc) to junky trinkets you’d see in any tourist trap. There was the omni-present café (we split a BBQ sandwich, more like a sloppy joe); a miniature T-Rex in the back yard, rocks from the Dakotas, and book stores. Check out www.walldrug.com to see if they have anything you need! By the way, we were struck by the similarity to a business in St. Petersburg, FL where we grew up, called “Webb’s Drug Store – the World’s Most Unusual Drug Store", complete with a mermaid show. Wonder who came up with the idea first?

On the way back to Rapid City, we swung through the Air Force Museum just outside the base at Ellsworth AFB. They had a small collection of various aircraft including a B-29, KC-135 tanker, B-52 BUFF, B-1B bomber, B-66 and lots of small trainers.

Margaret says to remind everyone of some of the “interesting” business names we’ve seen including Chubby Chipmunk Chocolates, Prairie Berry Winery (we were going to go in but a tour bus arrived at the same time and we didn’t want to fight the crowd), and Holy Smoke RV Resort.