Minnesota to South Dakota (SD)

August 14:  After leaving our motel in Albert Lea,  we drove 20 miles south to view about a hundred huge Dutch-built $850,000 wind driven generators in an Iowa cornfield.   Unlike in the eastern USA, most of the locals seem to like them, because farmers reap more per acre from them than they do from corn.   We stopped the car occasionally when something made us curious, but after lunch we realized that our destination for the night seemed further away than sunset.   So we set cruise control to the local limit, 75 mph, and arrived at our Hill City motel in southwest South Dakota as the sun disappeared from the clear blue sky.

August 15:  The reason for the accommodation shortage became clear.   All the previous afternoon thousands of motorcycles streamed by us in the opposite direction.   We'd never heard of the Sturgis (population 7,000) Motorcycle Rally, which was just ending.  This year about 515,000 people attended.   Click here for more on the Rally .    The bikes were mostly Harley.   On every little road and at every gas station the next two days they were thick like mosquitoes.  Apparently the typical biker was male, in his fifties, out of shape, tattooed, courteous, friendly, with a beard or long locks, traveling under the speed limit, on a rig costing a lot more than our Corolla.    He and his lady wore grimy black leather, but their Harleys were polished daily to showroom condition.

The rally ended the next day, but most of the bikes were still there.

This day we visited the Crazy Horse Monument, a mountain-size statue in the making, of a prototypical Indian (Native American) who died under a truce flag from a soldier's stab in the back.

The first photo below is of a small model of the far bigger eventual monument.

The second photo is of the actual monument.

We drove slowly through Custer State Park, where we saw hundreds of buffalo, as well as pronghorn antelopes, deer, scads of prairie dog colonies, and a few bighorn sheep.   Old-timers had killed all the wildlife except the coyotes and prairie dogs.  Beaver, which brought the mountain men here, are not among the reintroduced species.   Burros stopped traffic, looking for handouts.

 

Should I have said "bison" not "buffalo", as some insist ?  Then we'd have Bison NY, Bison Bill, the bison nickel,  "Well, I'll be bisoned", Bison soldiers (the famous post-Civil-War Black Cavalry), and
"Bison gals won't you come out tonight, and dance by the light of the moon?".   Click on that, then click on "Listen to this song".

Monday August 16:   We "did" Mount Rushmore, famously awesome, and learned a lot about the sculpture of the four presidential effigies.                                                                                                                                                         

We continued on a drive which included the ghost town of Aladdin, Wyoming (net photo), population 15 and some ghosts, with a seedy dark very-general store/post office/bar seemingly right out of a movie.

Tuesday 8/17:   Marge, especially, was very tired, from doing the weekly laundry and having insufficient sleep.   So we took turns driving and sleeping just 3 hours to a Comfort Inn (again "free" with accumulated points) in Pierre, South Dakota.   The next day: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: what a nice alliterative sound !

Here are our impressions of South Dakota after four days of it:   Except for the pretty forested Black Hills, viewed from Interstate 90 this state seems mostly rolling brown prairie, treeless except in gullies and around homes.   The tourist industry seems counter-productive: rampant billboards touting countless "attractions", and too many casinos, not confined to Deadwood.   A sign proclaimed, "Car Wash and Casino"- what a combination !  Worth seeing: Missouri River, museums regarding Indians and the 1803-6 Lewis & Clark expedition, buffaloes, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse statue project.   Away from I-90, the state's great agricultural engine is impressive.   But South Dakota does not inspire a return visit.