SD Day 2 - Wooden Chapels, Wind Caves, and World Leaders Carved in Stone
Today my mom and I had a busy day of sight seeing ahead of us, so I got my morning coffee quickly and efficiently at the excellent little drive thru Dixon Coffee Company. My mom while still partial to a cup of tea from time to time, does not have the same slightly ridiculous caffeine dependency living in a car for a year will make you develop so she didn’t get anything but she did think it looked like a nice place.
Our first stop was a beautiful oddity on the outer edges of Rapid City called the Chapel in the Hills. Finished in 1969, the Chapel is an extravagant and faithful recreation of an 12th century Norwegian church carved almost entirely out of wood, not even using nails but instead wooden dowels, just tucked in the Black Hills. The idea of the church began when Lutheran minister Dr. Harry R. Gregerson was looking for a location to broadcast his radio show Lutheran Vespers. A native South Dakotan, he was drawn to the spaciousness and natural beauty of the hills but they needed a building. Another local minister, Conrad Thompson, had spend time in Norway and fell in love with the architecture of their stave churches (or “stavkirke” in Norwegian), and he suggested that a building like that would be a visually stunning, novel attraction and also a lovely tribute to the many Norwegian immigrants who settled in this region of the states. He even managed to contact the Norwegian Department of Antiquities and acquire the exact blueprints of the ancient Bogrund stavkirke in Laerdal, Norway, which is considered one of the best preserved of these early churches. To execute the more intricate details of these plans, the Lutheran ministers flew in a master woodcarver from Norway named Erik Fridstrøm who, with the help of a local craftsman named Helge Christiansen, made sure the gorgeous carvings in and around the building were authentic to the original in exacting detail. It was a crazy idea, executed incredibly, and, even if it’s a wild amount of time, energy, and international collaboration to ostensibly just promote a radio show, it all came together and they really did produce a showstopper:
The interior was just as breathtaking as the exterior, and the skill of Fridstrøm and Christiansen’s wood carvings really take center stage. They even went to the trouble of trying to use the same kind of wood as would have been available in Norway. The meticulous attention to detail, and the fact that everything is just held together by wood on wood was just mind boggling:
The grounds of the Chapel were also filled with other fun allusions to Norwegian history including Viking Runestones, smaller wooden prayer huts and statuary along a meditative trail through the woods, and an authentic grass-roof cottage called a stabbur that was shipped directly from Norway.
A big highlight was a log cabin that had actually been built in the Black Hills by a Norwegian gold prospector, named Edward Nielsen in the 19th century. The cabin is now a museum dedicated to the region’s Scandinavian heritage. I don’t know if the wood carvings out front are supposed to look like an old married couple of Garden Gnomes, but that was my immediate assumption and I thought it was delightful.
Inside the cabin was filled with beautiful old Scandinavian artifacts and creepy mannequins (sadly less gnome-like) which paint a cool portrait of people balancing maintaining their heritage and striking out for life in a foreign land:
Next, Mom and I made our way up to South Dakota’s most famous landmark: Mount Rushmore. Before we got to the monument itself, there was a huge influx of tourists and traffic slowed to a crawl the closer we got which gave us a nice sneak peak of the mountain in the distance. We were prepped that it would be smaller than we expected since while each head is a whopping 60ft tall they can’t help but be a little bit dwarfed by the surrounding mountains. I think because of the monument’s near-mythic status in American pop culture, it was always going to have a lot to live up to in person, and it was paradoxically at once hugely impressive and a bit disappointing. We did come on a good day though to discover the very fun fact because of the brow ridges and noses on the presidents, when it rains some of the water gets blocked making it look like the four iconic figures are crying and leaking snot. If there isn’t a more on the nose metaphor for how these guys would feel about the current guy, I don’t know what is.
Eventually we did make it to the visitor center, and naturally I had to get a picture of Mom and the Boys:
Due to conservation efforts and a little dash of post-9/11 anxiety, that’s about as close as average visitors can get to the monument without special clearance. We were informed by older guests that they use to be able to walk right up to it, but I think people trying to play North by Northwest eventually became too much of a liability for the site. Luckily there’s a pretty cool museum about the construction and history of the monument so visitors have a bit more to do than just get a peek at four big heads in the distance.
I give the museum credit for some incredible photos from the building of the massive sculpture, but the more I learn about Mt. Rushmore the more conflicted I feel personally. On the one hand it is a hugely impressive piece of art, but on a much bigger hand it was built on land that was sacred to the Lakota and then stolen from them via the breaking of several treaties by the US government. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had promised the Black Hills to the Lakota people, but as soon as gold was discovered in the hills in 1876 US troops came in and forced them to relocate to make room for the influx of White Settlers. This would have been disgraceful enough, but for many Mt. Rushmore is seen as a final insult to injury by not just taking but then chopping up once holy land.
Even more conflicting, the artist who began the project Gutzon Borglum (his son finished it) is insanely talented for being able to shape such human looking features out of dynamite and stone, but he also happened to have had ties with the Ku Klux Klan. Yikes (also strange since y’know Lincoln is in the Monument but I get racists aren’t exactly known for ironclad logic). I guess the complicated history almost makes it a more fitting American national monument than people would like in that, like America, it’s big, beautiful, and impressive but built on stolen land by fundamentally racist architects. So what do we do with it, the monument and the nation? I don’t think at this point either is going anywhere, whether they should have been built at all they’re now pretty well imbedded into the landscape. I guess the start is to not love it blindly, but to really look at the history honestly and celebrate only that which actually deserves celebrating while not forgetting to condemn that which really deserves to be condemned. Waaaayyyy more needs to be done, but increasingly it becomes obvious (arguments about Confederate statues are currently on the news) many of us really haven’t even begun there yet so it’s a small start but a start nonetheless.
There was a small but nice collection of Native American arts and history, but without knocking any of the artifacts themselves, given the context of the monument it felt like perhaps too little too late:
I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, my mom and I were glad we got to go and see Mt. Rushmore with our own eyes, but not acknowledging the full and often unpleasant history of the place feels irresponsible. That being said we had a very nice lunch there. I ordered buffalo stew which was rich and hearty like beef stew but with leaner, locally sourced meat. I didn’t get a photograph because we ended up bonding with a little old lady sitting across from us and I didn’t want to be rude since she was being sweet and friendly by chatting with us.
Before we left, I did get this picture of a gold inlaid rifle dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the site’s completion. I don’t really get the significance of it being on a gun, but it was pretty in its own weird way.
ndnAfter Rushmore, it was just a short drive over to another famous mountain carving: the Crazy Horse Memorial. Intended as a resounding rebuttal to its more famous neighbor, this work-in-progress clocks in at 641 feet long and 563 feet which puts it at over twice the size of all four Rushmore heads combined. When it’s completed, it will be the second largest statue in the world. Work began in 1948, when Henry Standing Bear, an Oglala Lakota chief, commissioned Polish-American sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, to create a monument honoring a Native American hero to match (and overshadow) the use of Native lands for honoring white heroes. Crazy Horse was chosen to be the face of the monument because of his fierce leadership during the Battle of Little Big Horn and his advocacy for Native Rights throughout his life in both peace and wartime. One of the reasons beyond its great scale that the sculpture has taken 60 years and counting to carve is because per Standing Bear and Ziolkowski’s wishes, the whole project has been done so far without a dime of federal assistance, the goal being that this is a monument that was a monument built by Native Americans (and one Polish guy) for Native Americans. Good intentions not withstanding, the monument, while intending to celebrate Native history and culture, has still been met with a good amount of controversy because some Native leaders feel that it is an example of two wrongs not making a right. Much of opposition to Rushmore was the carving of the mountain at all not necessarily the subject, so for some tribal leader even if the image is pro-Native, the carving of another mountain is inherently damaging to the land and Indigenous culture. I think there’s a lot more nuance here than in debates about the ethics of Mt. Rushmore’s creation, in that in their own native land there is so little art truly celebrating Indigenous American culture and certainly not on the same scale as monuments to White-European culture, but in filling this gap perhaps the methodology was imperfect. There’s also the issue that in not taking federal funding, while a stance against government treatment against Native Americans, the monument also insured complete control of the project to a White artist and his family. The Ziolkowski’s are by all accounts pretty dedicated to preserving and honoring Native culture and putting a good chunk of the money they get to funding jobs and education for Native peoples, but they themselves are also getting much richer off the whole endeavor than any person of actual Lakota descent. It's pretty messy, and I have a much tougher time knowing where to stand here, in that I do think the intentions are noble and the work already done is massively impressive, but yeah maybe the simplest stance is we should just let mountains be mountains? Reading about the monument for this post, I came across this New Yorker article that I think does a pretty good job attempting to make sense of all these contradictions, which you can read here.
After taking in the mountain we made our way to the visitor center, where we were greeted with a pretty stunning scale replica of what the completed sculpture will look like. I think it has a real dynamism and energy that a lot of similar monuments really lack, but there is a certain irony in the fact that within his lifetime Crazy Horse refused to be sketched or photographed because he felt that it was giving up a piece of his soul and putting his own legacy above his people’s so he would probably not to be too jazzed about the whole thing no matter how good it is. I like that in order to try to capture his likeness without any examples, the artist interviewed various Lakota elders who had actually known him to base his sketches off. In that way it is more a sculpture of a collective Native memory than just one person albeit an incredible one. I’ll leave it up to the Lakota people to decide if it’s a success on that front, but I do conceptually like that abstract element of honoring the memories of those who came before us.
Stepping inside we were greeted by an impressive giant wood carving of Crazy Horse that Ziolkowski has used to practice the increasingly larger scale of the project as well some of other sculptures he had done using some of the left over granite that had been blasted off the mountain.
Also in the lobby was a miniature replica of the entire site which does an incredible job both capturing tiny details while also putting the gigantic size of the sculpture into perspective. You can also see in the background, that they had a performance by traditional Lakota dancers who then stayed and answered any questions visitors had about their nation’s history and culture.
After the lobby, we thought we were entering the affiliated Indian Museum of North America but we accidentally ended going through the exit and starting with the gift shop. Luckily for us, it was a much cooler than the average museum souvenir stop featuring some genuinely impressive works of art by Native artists and craftsman. My mom’s and my respective socks were knocked clean off.
We were particularly impressed by the ceramics and especially pieces involving intricately carved designs and animal patterns. I have no clue how you even begin making pieces like this, but I was real glad to get to see them.
Exiting through the gift shop, we made our way into the museum. The Indian Museum of North America is a great example of quantity being quality, because it features hundreds of artifacts from over 300 Native American Nations so it’s hard not to be in awe of the sheer breadth of arts, culture, and history on display. I don’t know enough to say if other museums of Native culture have better curation, but for sheer size and scope I don’t think I’ve come across a bigger collection in my travels and I think in a way it does really hit home the fact that we had massive, complex civilizations and nations here long before European settlers arrived. I feel like pop culture perceptions of Native Americans are just a bunch of disparate tribes scattered across the country, but that inherently delegitimizes the true extent of the societies they built, and there’s no reason their history shouldn’t be given the same grand scale as any other nation’s.
That being said me being me, I should acknowledge that I took terrible notes and mostly focused on art, so if I do a disservice to the historical and cultural aspects that is fully my failing rather than the museum’s but I still want to share all the amazing things I saw.
The first gallery we saw was dedicated to some of the earliest known crafts of the Ancient Puebloans. Basket Weaving may be the one of the earliest crafts in North America as baskets were practical, versatile, and could be woven from a variety of readily available materials. While weaving became a widespread practice, the oldest surviving examples of basketry have been found in the Southwest and date back over 8000 years, which is just mind-boggling. The showstopper of the museum’s collection was this absolute behemoth of interwoven bark strips with little dogs and people all around the circumference. Making a basket this big at all would have been incredible even if the designs didn’t really stand out, but doing both really is a perfect blend of artistry and craft.
Next to weaving, pottery was adopted early and soon became integral for both religious ceremonies and everyday life. My personal favorite piece here was a clay bowl which initially seems very unassuming, but the longer you stare at the simple geometric pattern the more mesmerizing it becomes:
The next displays were filled with Kachina dolls, which I grew to really love seeing when I was traveling through the South West. While lame knock-off Kachina figures very common in souvenir shops all over New Mexico and Arizona have made a lot of white folks think of them as cute tchotchkes, Kachina dolls actually have a very old and rich history. Belief in Kachina goes back to Ancient Puebloans, and each Kachina is a spirit being that represents something in the natural world. They exist in a sort of in between space between gods and humans, having familial relations like people but influencing the world like more supernatural beings. They weren’t worshipped like gods, but there was a belief that if you venerated and respected them they could bring favorable outcomes like good crops or fertility. These beliefs evolved into grand kachina ceremonies where whole Puebloan communities would get together for big dances and religious rituals with members of the tribe dressed as different Kachina. The Hopi tribe (descendants of the ancient Puebloans) began carving the first recognizable iteration of modern Kachina dolls in the 18th century as a way to help children learn about all the different figures, and over time the passing of dolls to children became an exciting and important part of the Kachina ceremonies.
My favorite Kachina is called Mudhead and he’s a clown figure with a round belly and a perpetually surprised look on his face. Unlike the majority of the Kachina, he isn’t tied to anything the human world but he just sort of exists to be a goofball, crack jokes, and play games. My kinda guy.
While not Kachina dolls, one of the other display cases did have these truly shocking baby dolls on top of it and no real explanation for why. I’m guessing they were an example of contemporary art, but I think the mystery is more fun:
Similar to Kachina ceremonies, the Navajo Yei Be Chai dance is a tremendous celebration spanning nine nights where dancers wear masks to personify the gods and invoke good favors. The eighth night is also particularly important because that is when young men and women are initiated into the tribe as adults. Because it’s a pretty big deal, the ceremony features prominently in lots of Navajo art and my favorite representations included an elegantly woven carpet and a truly insane traditional sandpainting that you would never guess was made entirely of different colored grains of sand.
The next display featured some gorgeous jewelry by Native artisans. The case had a mix of more traditional jewelry of religious significance and more modern pieces which were like any jewelry just intended to look really pretty. My favorites were: an incredible set of Persian turquoise set in Sterling silver by an artist named Milton LaToya out of New Mexico putting an international, high art spin on the sort of turquoise jewelry that dominates souvenir stands across the stare; and necklace/earring set featuring dozens of stone Zuni fetishes, small stones carved to resemble animals as religious effigies to bring good luck.
Moving almost an entire continent away from the Southwest where most of the prior works originated, the next collection was all works by Inuit artists from modern day Alaska. I was blown away by some of the materials used that just aren’t common in this less frozen part of the world such as caribou skin and whale vertebrae. Possibly because they tend to be under-represented in the contiguous states, but I feel like I know the least about the authentic cultures of Far North tribes, and it’s a shame because it’s such a unique landscape to live in and the fact that so many cultures not only survived but thrived up there for so long must mean that there’s rich history of real stories and myths that I know so little about. As a testament to the vibrant culture that remains in the snowy tundra, the display was capped off by an absolutely astounding sculpture of an ice fisherman made by an unknown contemporary Nukson artist using whale bone, ivory, and sinew.
The next couple couple displays really showed off the versatility of beadwork employed by different Native artists across the country. There were rifles covers made in the Plains; purses, moccasins, and keepsakes by local Lakota artist; artful photo frames and animal figures made by Huichol artists from near the Sierra Madre; and a gloriously elegant saddle and covering for a horse. I think if you gave me a million beads and all the time in the world I wouldn’t have thought to do any of theses things, so I was pretty equally impressed by both the functionality and the beauty of everything I saw.
Some of the oldest pieces in the museum’s collection were clay figures from Tarascan Indians in Western Mexico. I loved these funky looking guys and their shocking genitalia, and I was surprised to learn the perhaps obvious fact that at one point they would have been brightly painted, but it turns out that hundreds and hundred of years might make even the brightest dyes fade.
Next up was a series of displays about weaponry, but naturally I was most drawn to more artistic interpretation of armaments. I found this modern version of an animal hide shield particularly beautiful even if the image of a heroic brave being totally outnumbered was pretty heartbreaking on a historic level:
The next display case was filled with various artistic and ceremonial pipes. The term “peace pipe” that might pop into most white American’s minds is actually hugely reductive as smoking to honor the signing a peace treaty was just one of over a hundred potential pipe ceremonies, and the style of pipe, the thing being smoked, and the symbolic purpose of the smoking varied from religion to religion and nation to nation. It’s kind of amazing and horrifying to realize just how much faulty pop culture has impacted many of our notions of so many thousands of people’s lives. I was most impressed by some of the more complex pipe designs with my favorites being: a deceptively hollowed out tomahawk with a heart cut into the blade symbolizing its role being more related to love than war; and a simply incredible (and gigantic) wooden pipe carved into a chain of interlocking turtles.
As I’ve not too subtly alluded to, my personal favorite part of the museum was the all the art, and they did a positively fantastic job honoring the vitality of the current contemporary Native art scene thriving all around the country. I always hate when art museums have a Native American wing that is only filled with ancient artifacts like their aren’t hundreds of insanely talented still living Indian artists being overlooked. This is going to be a big block of text because I think it’s important to give these (largely) less well known artists their due (though I missed a couple of their names which is my bad), but my favorite pieces included: a symbolically rich funeral scene packed with little character details by Woody Crumbo; a sparse haunting print by Rich Red Owl; a dazzling landscape scene (the frame’s not too shabby either) by Godfrey Broken Rope; a series of spooky dreamlike monotype prints of human-animal hybrids by Roger Broer; a massive, powerfully evocative quilt by Freda Goodsell; an intense three dimensional wood carving of the Battle of Little Big Horn by Charlie Kinkade; a gorgeously painted animal hide by Paha Ska (the painting below it is also really good, but I didn’t note the artist’s name sadly); a series of painterly photographs from around the Crazy Horse Memorial site by various artists (the names were too blurry to read in my photo but at least the works themselves are well represented); a stunning painting on sandstone, with ghostly Mount Rushmore heads carved in, by Marcella Dupuis Carlin; a stoic sculpture of tribal elders by Monique Ziolkowsk, the ninth daughter of the memorial’s sculptor (not of any Native American descent I should point out, but still grouped with the modern and contemporary art); a magnificent portrait of Chief Joseph by Norman Bean using Ink on wood to achieve a really unique textural quality; a dramatic impressionistic portrait of Lakota running superstar Billy Mills (painted by his wife for an extra layer of sweetness), who went from being virtually unknown to most Americans to winning the 1964 Olympic Gold medal in the 10,000 m race setting a world record in the process and becoming one of the great surprise upsets in sports history (and remaining the only American to win gold in the event to this day); a pretty scene capturing a religious ceremony surrounded by spiritual otherworldly beings (couldn’t make out the artist’s name); and a vividly detailed painting of a Kwakwakaʼwakw winter dance by Gordon Miller.
Next up was gallery of historic photographs, which were beautifully portraits of various Native people from different time periods but also a little ethically murky depending on how much consent was really given to take them and uncertainty around the extent to which they were authentic vs. staged. Murkiness or no, this almost perfectly round baby was too cute not to share:
Last but not least, there was a display of objects belonging to prominent Native leaders, but the piece that stood out to me the most was more of a symbolic inclusion in the form of the Seven Sacred Rites of the Lakota rendered in beautiful metal plates by artist, David Claymore:
After a big morning of monuments carved into the landscape, my mom and I decided to take in some unvarnished natural wonder. For someone who hates animals and the sun, my mom is not exactly a nature freak, but for whatever reason there’s one natural feature she really loves: caves. I actually never knew this about mom until I started posting photos from caves I went to, so it fun to learn something surprising and new about someone I’d known my whole life and to now get to share in this mutual appreciation. Fortunately for us, South Dakota is actually has multiple beloved famous caves. I think initially we were going to try to do Wind Cave and Jewel Cave (the two most famous ones), but after our jam-packed morning we were short on time so we elected to just do Wind Cave. Another deciding factor in that decision was that right when we were approaching Wind Cave, the sky seemed to just open up and let down one of the most pissing deluges of rain either of us had ever seen so we were also slightly stranded.
In the maybe 15 yards between the parking lot and the visitor center, my mom and I got soaked to our bones. It would, no joke, take days for everything to dry out completely. It was insane, and we were grateful that the nature we decided to take in was underground. “That’s why I love caves, nature without the nature”, my mom proudly pointed out.
We had some time to kill in the visitor center before our tour began, which was a good opportunity to dry off. I was fading after only one coffee, so I went to a coffee vending machine in the center which looked like it was probably installed in the 60s and hadn’t been used since. It was truly the worst cup of coffee I’d had in the country, which is impressive in its own way, but it was caffeine so I still drank every terrible drop. While I punished my tastebuds, we took in some of the informational displays, and this demonstration of what caving attire looked like at the turn of the century was pretty mind blowing. The idea of women spelunking in long, heavy dresses with only candle-light to guide them is just so crazy.
Our tour began and for the next hour or so, we were constantly blown away by the surreal, stony, winding passages of the cave. Wind Cave is not the longest or deepest cave in the world nor even the country, but it has the distinction of being the most complex with passages twisting in and around each other in unexpected ways. Due to its unusual structure, Wind Cave is considered the most dense cave in the world because of its high ratio of open passages to cubic meters. The cave was “discovered” in 1881 when brothers Tom and Jesse Bingham noticed what looked like wind coming out of a small hole in the ground. Tom looked down to investigate and the wind blew his hat clean off. We now know that wind was air escaping the cave to maintain internal atmosphere, but to the brother’s it must have seemed practically supernatural. Little did they know that beneath this 10 cm wide hole in the ground was nearly 150 miles of caverns! It’s a very cute story, but also obviously the Lakota had known about the cave for thousands of years so “discover” isn’t necessarily the most accurate term. The cave even factors into their creation myth as the place where humans emerged from the underworld, so it wasn’t even like a little known secret. Since Tom’s hat got blown, white settlers became fascinated with the mysterious cave, and over the years explorers would begin mapping it out and uncovering the secrets of its seemingly endless tunnels including a giant underwater lake. It was really an otherworldly magical place. My other favorite story about the cave was that in 1989 students at the National Outdoor Leadership School were using the cave to practice search and rescue skills and one young woman actually did get lost for 37 hours which really was a bit of an extreme final exam.
The cave is also famous for a rare geologic feature called boxwork made of delicate, honeycomb like structures of calcite. In fact, 95% of the discovered boxwork in the entire world is right here which is bananas! It’s intricate structure is so uncommon because it requires hard rock to fill cracks in softer rocker and for the soft rock to gradually erode leaving only the skeletal formations behind. You need like a perfect storm of geology, time, and climate for everything to work out. Given the rarity, there’s obviously no touching the box work but the tour guides make you sure you get plenty of chances to see these strange beautiful rock patterns up close.
Other notable formations were funky little baubles of limestone shaped by dripping water called Cave Popcorn. Cave Popcorn is a lot more common than boxwork, but nonetheless it’s fascinating to think that these weird lovely things just happen through random combinations of physical properties hundreds of feet below the ground.
After our spelunking, we ventured through the small lake of the parking lot back to Rapid City for much needed warm dinner. We went to a highly recommend restaurant called Tally’s Silver Spoon . The waitresses had a good laugh at our very soggy appearance, and then informed us that we happened to be visiting on a very special holiday that I had previously been un-enlightened to: Pork and Pinot Tuesday. Lo on this beautiful day for just $23 you get a glass of fine pinot noir, your choice of pork dish, and a soup. It was the perfect way of warming our bones and getting a pretty great sampling of the restaurant’s abilities. My mom got a roasted pork sandwich; I got pork carnitas tacos with a delicious light pineapple avocado crema and Mexican corn; and we both got perfectly rich pheasant and veggie soups. I can’t believe I’d lived 23 years without experiencing such a wonderful day as Pork and Pinot Tuesday, but I think it was the (almost) perfect ending to a long day of sightseeing.
I only say almost perfect, because obviously the fully perfect ending is dessert which we got at a fantastic local ice cream shop called Silver Linings Creamery. They specialize in small batch in house flavors which allows them to constantly experiment and rotate their menu, with classics like cookie dough and mint chocolate chip side by side with more out there flavors like New England Brown Bread and Spiced Chai. I went experimental and got something called the Chubby Violet, which was basically a creamy chocolate chip but with floral hints of violet extract blended with the vanilla. I’m not sure if I can describe it in a way that really sells it, but it was honestly one of the best ice creams I’ve ever had (not to mention the homemade waffle cone). Now that’s the perfect way to end the day.
Back in the hotel, we decided because my mom wasn’t really into my music in the car that we would try to find a nice audio book to listen to, because we used to listen to audio books in the car all the time when I was little. We decided on George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo, because we’d both heard good things and it felt thematically right near Mount Rushmore to listen to something presidential. We tried to start listening to it that night, but we both passed out practically the moment our heads our respective pillows. I think everyone thought when I set out on this trip that I would be doing a happy go lucky misadventure, and while that was certainly a part of it, every time someone visited me I really realized just how much I crammed into each day, but there was just so much to see!
Favorite Random Sightings: A cafe called The Mud Hole; Holy Terror Mini Golf (so intense); a candy store called Turtle Town; an overly dramatic advertisement for “Touring God’s creation"; an actual place called Horse Thief Lake
Regional Observations: Ranching is big in SD, so we drove by lots of farms. At one point, we drove by what looked to me like a normal cow, and my mom turned to me in disgust and said, “What is that creature?!”
Music Listened To: My mom’s not a big music person for someone who married a singer-songwriter, but we did listen to the Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart together which was really fun.
Joke of the Day:
Two men are walking doberman and a chihuahua when they see a restaurant.
They're pretty hungry, so they decide to head in for a bite to eat. Unfortunately, they see a sign out front that says "NO DOGS ALLOWED".
The man with the doberman says "I know what to do, just follow my lead." He throws on a pair of sunglasses and walks in.
The waiter tells him "I'm sorry sir, we don't allow dogs here." The man says "Oh, you don't understand. I'm blind and this is my guide dog."
"A doberman for a guide dog?" The waiter asks, skeptical.
"Yes." The man replies. "Dobermans are very loyal. They're easy to train and protective too. They're born for the job."
The waiter sighs and leads the man to a table.
The second man, excited by this idea, throws on his sunglasses and walks in.
The waiter tells him "I'm sorry sir, we don't allow dogs here." The man says "Oh, you don't understand. I'm blind and this is my guide dog."
"A chihuahua for a guide dog?" The waiter asks.
"A chihuahua?" The man asks. "They gave me a chihuahua?!?"
Song of the Day:
A Classic