South Dakota

After Yellowstone, we pretty much just hightailed it on out of Wyoming. Cody has the Wild Bill Museum but we bypassed it and Devil´s Tower later on down the road. Northern Wyoming is pretty...I heard other opinions about southern Wyoming from a developer on a plane trip once. At any rate, managed to get across Wyoming over to western S. Dakota in time to see Mount Rushmore that same day. I didn´t realize you can walk a circuit up near the mountain to get different views of the memorial itself. Shame that the better two, Lincoln and Roosevelt, of the the four presidents up there aren´t quite as prominently displayed as the venal Jefferson and especially vain and pompous Washington...but I guess Washington will always hold preeminent position.

We´d hoped to get over to the Badlands before nightfall but that hope was dashed when we got hit by a wicked hail and rainstorm. That slowed us down a bit, which was fortuitous because we ended up stopping at the exit wherein lies Wall Drug.

Wall Drug is the 3rd grand attraction of South Dakota, after Rushmore and the Badlands (only slightly tongue-in-cheek do I write that). We´d seen what must have been hundreds of signs on the interstate directing us to visit Wall Drug. Not an exaggeration on the number of signs. They were all over the place, like billboards on I-75 in Florida, except Wall Drug´s signs were of various sizes and a bit more tastefully done. The signs extolled the many virtues of Wall Drug, from the free coffee for vets to the Old West memorabilia. At first I was annoyed at all the signs littering the landscape, but in the end there were so many signs of so many varieties that we just laughed and had to check it out.

I guess I should mention that Wall Drug is not really a drug store. I would call it a giant repository of Americana. My only regret is that I didn´t get a bumper sticker....

As for the Badlands, they´re worth a gander as you´re driving on your way out of the state, but I wouldn´t plan my trip around them. Do it fast, the sandstone they´re made of diminishes an inch a year.