Hello Everyone,
Greetings from America’s Dairyland. When I left you last week, I had no plan to be in Wisconsin quite this quickly, but once I got rolling, I just kept rolling. I took advantage of the cool of the early mornings to drive and then tried to make the most of my afternoons wherever I landed. Even though the name of the game this week was to drive towards home, it’s actually been a pretty great week on the road. I was sad to pass through South Dakota so quickly, but I will definitely be back when it’s cooler and I’m ready to really dive into it. Temperature-wise, it’s significantly cooler out here, but once I crossed the Missouri River the humidity started to increase with each passing mile. But it’s still cooler at the end of the day and that is making a huge difference after too many hot weeks out west. Now that I’m back on the eastern side of the Mississippi River and now that my brain isn’t frying every time I step outside, I feel like I’m in a better place mentally. My van did exceptionally well this week and it seemed much happier to be moving in the cool of the morning as well. All told, it was smooth sailing. While I didn’t get to see as much of Montana, Wyoming or South Dakota as I had hoped and planned for this summer, I was grateful for what I did see and will return another time for the rest. Now that I’m somewhere cooler, I will be able to slow down for a bit and see some friends and family before I make that last run for home. It may be cooler here, but it’s still blazing hot in D.C. so while I’m headed that way I’m not in a huge rush to get there at the moment. So let’s get into what I did see and do this last week as I made my way east.
When I left you last week, I was in the old coal mining town of Gillette, Wyoming. Gillette is not Wyoming’s biggest town and certainly not its prettiest, but it was nice enough for the night and the people were friendly. I had booked a Harvest Hosts stay at the Big Lost Meadery right in the heart of downtown Gillette and it was an excellent place to stay. Wednesday was bingo night, so I settled in to enjoy a couple of glasses of mead and try my luck. There weren’t too many people there, but there were obviously some regulars who come to play every week. One group had a very long basset hound which was absolutely adorable. I didn’t win a single game, but I enjoyed being there. After they wound up for the night, I wandered around downtown for a bit, but there wasn’t much happening so I called it a night and got a good night’s sleep.
The next morning I headed just down the road to Lula Belle’s café for breakfast. This is definitely a Gillette institution and it was completely packed at 7am on a Thursday with miners getting ready to start their shifts. I got an omelet which was excellent and definitely set me up for the day. I didn’t get on the road as early as I would have liked but I made a beeline for Devil’s Tower. Devil’s Tower is volcanic in origin, but nobody is completely sure how it formed. It is definitely one of the most distinctive and recognizable natural landmarks anywhere in the country, and it had been years since I was there last. There are plenty of American Indian legends about the tower, most of them involving a giant bear clawing the sides of the rock, and they have collectively agreed to refer to it in English as the Bear Lodge. When Colonel Richard Dodge came through the Black Hills for the U.S. Geological Society in 1875, he heard the legend of the bear which was translated for him as “bad god’s tower”, and so he took the liberty of changing “bad god” to “devil” and it went on the map as Devil’s Tower. In 1906, after the passage of the Antiquities Act, Teddy Roosevelt named Devil’s Tower a national monument, the country’s first. In those days it was quite remote and the only way to get there was on horseback, but there’s a road these days and it took me right to the base of the tower during my visit. I enjoyed the 1.3 mile walk around the tower and taking some photos as I went. A good bit of the walk was either in the shade of the trees or in the shade of the tower, so it was reasonably cool, but the day was heating up quickly.
When I left Devil’s Tower, I stopped for a quick walk around Sundance, the town where Harry Alonzo Longabaugh did some time for horse theft and got his nickname: The Sundance Kid. From there, I stopped in Spearfish for a workout and by then it was about 95° out. I was only planning on getting to Deadwood which is only about 20 minutes away, but the road between the two got steep and my van really struggled to get up the hills in that heat. We made it, though, and found a nice place in the shade to park for the night. It was the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in the Black Hills last weekend which I wasn’t expecting, and the streets of Deadwood were lined with motorcycles everywhere you looked. There were a ton of people milling around and enjoying the town which was once one of the meanest gold-mining towns in the old west. I had a few things I wanted to see while I was there, but it was too hot and too busy so I settled in for some people watching instead. I did pop into the Buffalo Bodega which is rumored to be the oldest bar in the state although there weren’t any signs or anything to that effect. I enjoyed a beer with two of the bikers in town for the weekend and they had had quite a ride over from Arkansas. Then I popped into Wild Bill’s Bar which had once been Nuttal & Mann's Saloon (commonly referred to as Saloon No. 10), the bar where Wild Bill Hickok was gunned down. I had a beer there and then I headed up the street to Legend’s Steakhouse in the old Franklin Hotel for dinner. They have the most beautiful bison ribeye on the menu and it’s something I had been looking forward to all week. It didn’t disappoint and I really enjoyed it. After dinner I set out to take some photos around town of all the bikers and then had a beer here and a beer there before calling it a night.
I was up super early the next morning and made my way south through the Black Hills towards Jewel Cave. I was the only person on the road at 6am, but there were a ton of deer out there including quite a few spotted fawns. I had one close call as one of them dodged right and then turned and cut straight in front of my van. She was so close I could hear her hooves on the pavement, but thankfully I already had my foot on the brake so no fresh venison was procured. I got to Jewel Cave right when the visitors center opened, and I just went in to have a quick look around before moving on to Wind Cave. America’s sixth oldest national park, Wind Cave was also the last national park in the continental U.S. I hadn’t been to, so I was eager to check it out. When I got to Wind Cave I got tickets for two different tours: the Natural Entrance Tour and the Fairgrounds Tour. Each one lasted about an hour and a half and they were both really interesting. The key feature to Wind Cave is called boxwork, and apparently 95% of the world’s known boxwork is in Wind Cave. One of the guides described it as if you had a brick house but all of the bricks eroded away leaving just the mortar. The “bricks” in this case were limestone, which eroded away and left the calcium carbonate “mortar” behind. It’s not what I would call pretty, but it is really interesting and definitely cool to see. Because these are essentially dry caves, there were no stalagmites or stalactites, so it was mostly just the boxworks and a few other small features called cave popcorn. I spent my time in between tours and a little while afterwards hanging around and reading my book in the shade and eventually popped just down the road to the small town of Hot Springs.
Hot Springs is a cute little town where most of the buildings are made from locally quarried pink sandstone, giving the main street an oddly uniform appearance. It’s also home to several hot springs and to the Mammoth Site which is an archaeological site where they found 58 Columbian mammoth and three wooly mammoth remains. I had been to the fascinating Mammoth Site before and on another scorcher of a day had very little interest in hot springs of any sort, so I took some photos and wandered around a bit instead. There was a really nice little bar there called Whiskey River which was cool and friendly and had a really eclectic menu. I popped in for a beer and decided to stay for dinner which was a good choice. It had been a long day though so I was only there until the sun went down and it was cool enough to try and get some sleep.
I shot out of Hot Springs first thing on Saturday morning and made a beeline for South Dakota’s capital city of Pierre (pronounced “peer”). I did make one quick stop along the way because it’s hard to pass by Wall and not stop at the infamous Wall Drug. Founded back in 1931 as a small-town pharmacy, Ted and Dorothy Hustead struggled to lure customers in off the road. Then they had the brilliant idea to offer free ice water and 5¢ coffee and people started pouring in. Today those signs, still hand painted, stretch for hundreds of miles in every direction. They still offer free ice water and they still offer 5¢ coffee but today almost two million people a year come to Wall Drug. I don’t know if there’s still a pharmacy there, but there are a couple of restaurants, plenty of T-shirt and trinket shops and a near infinite amount of things for tourists to spend their money on. It’s definitely a must-see (although you really only need to see it once). That said, I hadn’t been there in years and 5¢ coffee is always a good idea in my book so I made a quick stop and then continued on to the capital city.
It was definitely hot by the time I got to Pierre, but I found a nice shaded spot across the street from the capitol building and headed out on foot from there. As I arrived, they were just setting up for a classic car show on the capitol grounds which was cool. I enjoyed a quick wander to check out the cars and then headed straight into the capitol. After South Dakota became a state, they had three separate elections to decide where the capital city should be. Pierre won all three of them and after the third one they decided to go ahead and build a permanent capitol building there. To save some money, they chose to use the blueprints from Montana’s capitol in Helena which I just went to see a few weeks ago so it felt very familiar. I was happy I could picture it in my head because this one is being renovated at the moment so the entire rotunda is covered in scaffolding. I was still able to see the legislative chambers and some of the artwork as I wandered the halls though and I had the place pretty much all to myself.
While in the capitol, I saw mention of the “state nosh” of South Dakota: chislic. Having no idea what that was, I set off to find some. It turned out to be heavily seasoned, fried steak which was traditionally lamb or mutton but apparently beef is more common these days. Not unlike Idaho’s steak fingers, chislic was simple, but also really good and I enjoyed mine at the Longbranch restaurant in downtown Pierre. From there I went out to the State Historical Society’s museum which was up a hill on the other side of the capitol from downtown. The ladies working there were great and very curious about what it was like to come from Washington D.C. I told them all I could and then headed in to see the museum. They are in the midst of a grand remodeling as well, but they had a couple of rooms complete and open. One of the coolest pieces in their collection was a Verendrye Plate. Back in 1742, French explorers Francois and Louis Joseph Verendrye spent two years exploring the western side of the continent and searching for a route to the Pacific (over 60 years before Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery expedition). Along the way they buried metal plates which claimed the area for France. They buried one of these plates near present-day Fort Pierre (the town right across the river from Pierre), which was dug up by teenagers in 1913 and is now on display at the museum. On the back wall of the museum was a neat interactive panel telling the stories of some of South Dakota’s famous sons and daughters. I definitely didn’t know Bob Barker (of The Price is Right fame) was a South Dakotan. Although I wish I could have visited the museum when it was finished and complete, I was glad to have been able to see at least part of it while I was there.
When I left the museum, I went down to the Missouri River for a while to read some of their Lewis and Clark signs. Apparently when they came to this part of the river they encountered an encampment of the Teton Sioux, one of the very few negative encounters they had with any American Indian band along their journey. It was a tense meeting but everyone walked away alive so that was good. From there I headed to the other side of the river to Fort Pierre, where they were celebrating Pioneer Days with a street party and live music. When I arrived, I was able to see the championship round of the day’s turkey races which is exactly what it sounds like and was quite entertaining. Then I grabbed a beer and sat down to watch the band. The sun was going down, families were walking up and down the street, the band was playing, teenagers were running around with their friends and it felt like a very wholesome, small-town, summertime festival which was a perfect way to spend my evening.
I was up at 5am again the next morning and hit the road east. I drove along the Missouri River for a while through the Lower Brule and Crow Creek reservations. The sun was a reddish-orange ball through the morning haze and the huge fields of sunflowers were just nodding awake for the day. There was plenty of corn out there too and it was really quiet without any other cars on the road that early. When I got back to the interstate, I got off at the next exit to see the magnificent statue called The Dignity of Earth and Sky. Dignity is the work of South Dakota sculptor Dale Lamphere and was a gift to the people of South Dakota from the McKie family to celebrate its 125th anniversary as a state . Three Lakota women of different ages were used as the models for the sculpture and at 50’ tall, it is really something to behold. I have been seeing photos of this statue for years and it was one of my absolute must-sees on my drive through South Dakota. I thought it was amazing.
Continuing down the highway, my next stop was at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. The first of Mitchell’s Corn Palaces was built in 1892 as a gathering place where the community could hold a fall harvest festival. They still hold that festival today, but the current Corn Palace, the third built on that site, also hosts concerts, community gatherings, proms, graduations and one of the state’s biggest basketball tournaments. The outside is decorated with corn murals and every year they clear them off and start new ones, based on the theme chosen for that year. This year’s theme was America’s 250th and there were murals depicting the flag, the declaration of independence and other patriotic images. It takes about 250,000 ears of corn to completely decorate the Corn Palace, and it’s definitely something to see. In fact, about half a million people come to see it every year. This is another place I hadn’t been to in 20+ years and I really wanted to stop and have a peak. There isn’t much to it, and they are currently in the process of removing this year’s decorative murals, but it was still worth the stop.
From there I headed on to Sioux Falls in the far east of South Dakota. I started my visit with a wander through the Old Courthouse Museum which had some interesting displays but none were as interesting as the tremendous building itself. Leaving there I strolled down the Big Sioux River to the see the city’s namesake falls. I actually thought they were quite pretty flowing through the native pink sandstone of the area. There were some ruins there from an old mill which had once operated next to the river and the whole place has been developed into a beautiful city park. I crossed over the river and walked back into town on the east side, stopping to check out the Arc of Dreams, one of Sioux Falls’ most iconic landmarks. I stopped into Monk’s Ale House for a beer and a snack and then wandered downtown for a beer at the Fernson Brewery on Phillips Ave. My good friend Dave gave me a call and I hadn’t talked to him for a while so we caught up for an hour or so before I headed for my bed.
Another 5am start and another cool morning drive took me clear across the state of Minnesota in about 4 hours. It was great to see the mighty Mississippi River as I crossed into Wisconsin at La Crosse. I had been to La Crosse during my long visit to Wisconsin a few years back, and it was a nice enough place to spend the afternoon. While it was definitely humid out there, it was significantly cooler than it has been for me out west, and I really appreciated that. I spent some time at the library and then wandered down to the river for a bit. I popped into a couple of bars on 3rd St. which had once set a Guinness world record for having the most bars on one street in the world. There are a lot of them. Then I drove just north of downtown to a quiet little neighborhood to spend the night. Just up the street from where I parked was a little local bar called Dewey’s Side Street Pub. I thought I would pop in for a quick one, but since they had a special going with $1 tallboys of Hamm’s, I may have had more than one. There were some real characters in there that night and it definitely felt good to be back in Wisconsin.
It was a nice, cool night that night and it was great to be able to sleep in a little longer than I had been able to all week. When I got up, I walked across the street to a little diner called Marge’s on Rose for breakfast. I sat at the counter with all of the old guys from the neighborhood and ordered two pancakes which turned out to be the size of a dinner plate and almost an inch thick. I ate one and a little bit of the second and that was enough for me. It cost me under $10. Yes, it was definitely nice to be back in Wisconsin.
After breakfast I set off east to try and find a little cemetery just south of Westfield which I hadn’t been to since I was a kid. This is my dad’s family cemetery and it’s where my grandparents and many members of my extended family are buried, on a plot which was once next to their family farm. I was pleased that I found it on the first try and even though it’s been 35 years since I was there, it looked familiar once I arrived. I found some of the graves of people I knew right away, but it took some poking about to find my grandparents’ grave. I did finally find it though and caught them up on everything that’s been going on lately. It may be strange to talk to old headstones in an empty cemetery, but I find it quite a healing thing to do, and I was glad I went.
I hung around there for about an hour and then shot south to Madison to see my dear friend Chris. I’ve known Chris for over twenty years at this point and we’ve worked together at two different tour companies. He’s been back at home living in Madison for a while now while he’s been working on finishing up the book he’s been writing. He’s currently squatting in his uncle’s house who graciously agreed to let me stay there, in the air conditioning, for a couple of nights. When I arrived, we headed down the road to a little neighborhood tavern for lunch and caught up for a while over some great burgers. After lunch he helped me install a new air conditioner shroud on the top of my van. The old one had blown clear off of my van in a windstorm back in Wyoming, and while new ones are readily available, they need to be shipped somewhere so Chris let me ship it to him here. I’ve been watching the weather all week and trying to avoid any rain because without the shroud, when it is raining outside it can also be raining on my bed which is a serious problem. Thankfully it’s been a dry week and now I can let out a huge sigh of relief with that taken care of.
Chris had to go to work in the evening, so I went and got some work done in the library and then headed out to Toby’s Supper Club for dinner. A “supper club” is usually a fancy place, but in Wisconsin it is its own thing altogether. A Wisconsin supper club is a casual restaurant with good, hearty meals at a reasonable price. They usually have steaks and seafood and there are plenty of options for appetizers and sides. I started with a classic Wisconsin cocktail, a brandy old-fashioned. For dinner, I had some fried lake fish (bluegill) and some shrimp with a baked potato and a cup of creamy tomato soup. The whole experience was excellent and cost me about as much as a burger and a couple of beers would have cost me in Oregon. After dinner I headed back to meet up with Chris after work and we sat up late chewing the fat and talking about our plans for the coming year.
I can tell you that sleeping in an air-conditioned house was wonderful after the last couple of months in the heat. I slept very well. Chris and I spent the day continuing our conversation until he headed off to work and I headed here to the library in Middleton to finish up this week’s post. Tomorrow I am going to cruise north to Appleton to see some friends up there and then shoot down to Milwaukee for the Wisconsin State Fair over the weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing my Uncle on Monday and catching up with my cousins as well while I’m there. I haven’t seen them in a few years and it will be great to see what they’re up to. I will likely still be in the greater Milwaukee area at this time next week, enjoying cooler days and ice cold beers. It’s sure nice to be out of that western heat dome, and I’m really looking forward to autumn this year. Have a wonderful week and thank you, as always, for reading.
-Mike