Day 18 - The Corn Palace and Minneapolis

On our 18th day of travel we woke up early and packed up our tent just after sunrise to hit the road for our next destination. We drive across the great state of South Dakota and stopped in Mitchell to see the 'world's only corn palace'..... and what a site it was! haha. It was interesting to think how there were no tourist attractions in their area so two men just decided to create one! The exterior corn decor changes every year and is more elaborate based on crop years with more rain. This year's theme is "Transportation throughout the ages," which featured a segway, a motorcycle, and a plane among other things.

In the corn archives were other past murals like this one featuring, "everday heros."

The drive through South Dakota was beautiful!

And our next stop was Minneapolis, MN where we visited the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and saw so many beautiful works of art!

Below is a sideboard by one of my favorite architects - Reitveld...

A beautiful Basilica in Minneapolis!

And we got to walk through their beautiful sculpture garden!

AND got to catch up with a college buddy Brita and her fiance Carl for dinner at a yummy asian restaurant in Minneapolis called Chino Latino where we shared some great Asian fusion tapas!

We were delighted to stay at Brita + Carl's house, and take our first shower in 5 days! : ) [Our camping accommodations didn't offer showers] We had a great time visiting and a we so happy to see Brita and meet Carl!

Day 17 - Exploring the Badlands & Wall Drug!

Breakfast!

There isn't the first thing "bad" about the Badlands! It is incredible and one of the most beautiful places we've been to yet! The colors weren't as rich as Sedona, but it was the most beautiful array of expansive landforms we've seen to date!

It seemed like every scenic overlook we saw had a totally different perspective. It was really incredible. Photos don't begin to do this place justice. But, here is a sampling.

We enjoyed 3 different ranger programs while we were in town and loved learning from each one.

In the little town of Wall, SD, in 1931 there was an enterprising young family who purchased a drug store and decided to give out "free ice water" to attract tourists to their store. The plan worked and they went from a town of 326 poor people to a business the size of a city block that attracts over a million tourists a year! It was really incredible. It was the same type of "wholesome family fun" as Pigeon Forge, but much more corny and a much smaller scale. We loved it.

And we loved seeing all the animals!!!

Day 16 - Mount Rushmore & the Badlands

Camping at Yellowstone was all full, so we had no other choice than to keep driving. There were no open hotels within hours of the park either. [Props to the Prius for being able to make it 450 miles on a single tank of gas!] At two points during the night we stopped at rest areas for potty breaks in Montana and found them extremely sketchy. We were reminded that the Arizona prison escapees were still on the loose, so we googled their last reported where-abouts and as it turned out we were in their path. The last sentence of the news release stated that they were frequenting national parks, campsites, and rest areas......so we were pretty much out of luck.

Kim drove until about 5am that night and once we entered the state of Wyoming we found a really nice visitor center that was just opening that we were able to take a little nap at.

[South Dakota has beautiful golden fields]

We were excited this got us so close to our next destinations of Spearfish Canyon, Mount Rushmore, and the Badlands National Park and afforded us a luxurious 2-night camping experience!

[Mount Rushmore]

Sturgis was having their 70th Annual Bike week, and there were thousands of motorcycles in town!!!

We arrived in the early evening to discover that the two young women beside our campsite were from Richmond! We were shocked since we hadn't event seen a VA license plate west of New Orleans!! They were also on a cross country adventure and we were excited to hear other people say "y'all" for the first time in weeks!

We enjoyed cooking over the camp-stove that andrews Aunt & Uncle gave us for a wedding gift 5 years ago and having a restful and relaxing evening.

His Aunt Susan Chapel gave us a Badlands tip to make sure and catch the "Night Sky" ranger program at the park which was amazing! It started at 8:30 and it was close to 11 before we were ready to head back to the tent for the night. We enjoyed watching the moon, learning about different galaxies, constellations, seeing the milky way with our bare eyes, and how amazing it was as the ranger used a 5 mile laser pointer to show us various astronomy highlights!

Day 15 - THE HALFWAY POINT

We hit the road around 10am and headed about two hours East into Yellowstone National Park enjoying the views of all the Ranches on the way in. We got some helpful info from our buddies Lauren Boswell and Will Watkins because they've done so much research on the park for their trip out in September! Thanks guys for sharing!

On the way into the park we enjoyed taking some goofy pictures!

We were blown away with the beauty of Yellowstone. It is 2,219,789 acres and HUGE!!!

[check out the buffalo grazing in the valley]

The park is split into "states" with different themes and park attractions. Some highlights for us were...

the painted pots

the natural hot springs and beautiful pools

old faithful

the thermal pockets

the views

and the animals stopping traffic to cross the road!

I know dad [Larry] will also really appreciate the fact that we saw a black bear and he was pretty close by.

We really enjoyed watching the animals in their natural habitat. They seemed totally indifferent that a dozen tourists were gawking at them, I guess they experience it daily and it's no big deal.

Yellowstone was beautiful and we easily could have spent days there and not seen it all. Kim really loved the old school yellow ochre buses and wagons from the 30's that the park has restored and takes people in tours on!

Andrew was dying to take a dip in the hot springs, but decided that since some park rangers carried handguns, it probably wasn't worth it! : )

As we were leaving we had to wait for a pack of elk to cross the road which was really funny. LA had traffic jams and Yellowstone has wildlife clogging up traffic.... we'll choose the latter any day!

Day 14 - behind the wheel

we just d r o v e .

and drove

and d r o v e .

We arrived at a hotel in Idaho that evening around dinner time and finally had an opportunity to upload all our photos that we had since the 'incident' and prepped all our veggies we bought in California.

... huge ear of corn we got in California at a roadside farmstand.... 7 ears for $1.

We were exhausted and slept for 9 hours until our alarm clock went off an we loaded up the car to head to Yellowstone National Park.