Home Sweet Home

We are home safe and sound. We traveled 3621 miles in about 3 weeks, and had a wonderful time all the way.

Many thanks to our Readers who kept us company along the way!

We’ll keep this blog open, and add to it each time we go camping. But we’re going to rest for a few weeks first.

Coming Soon – You can read my weekly RV Travel column at BoomerTravelPatrol.com. The website is scheduled to debut in December, 2012.

Happy Trails!

T & R

Wander Indiana

Columbus, Indiana
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We cruised all the I’s today – Iowa, Illinois, Indiana. This was a big day on the road, and for the first time we couldn’t find a place to camp overnight. We made it to Indianapolis, much farther than I thought we’d have the stamina for, only to be shut out of the two campgrounds in town. Indy doesn’t have a lot of choices, and neither did we. So we had to continue moving south, which kept us on the road well after dark.

It’s been a bit of an adjustment coming from the sparsely populated western states back to the bustling Mid-West. We got used to having the wide open spaces to our self, seeing mostly RVs, motorcycles, and cowboy pickup trucks on the road. It felt like a camaraderie - yeah, we’ve all spat with the rattlesnakes and shat with the grizzlies. There’s dust on our tails from the long, long trail.

But now that we’re back in the citified world, we seem out of place. Rolling slowly along in our cumbersome coach, wearing grubby jeans and a flinty look in our eyes. We get stares instead of a nod, honks instead of a friendly wave.

We left on our Wild West excursion in late summer, and are now returning at harvest time. Farmers are busy with their giant corn picking equipment, leaving the fields shorn and stubbly.

  

We’ve been asked a bunch of questions about our trip already. Here’s the most popular -

Did you have a good time?

   Boy howdy!

Did you meet any interesting people?

   No. Two reasons why -
    1. Campers are on the move. They pull in, eat dinner, and close the curtains.
    2. We're not friendly.

How did Shadow like being on the road?
   He hardly complained.

Didn’t you get on each other’s nerves?

   Seldom was heard a discouraging word.

And then our favorite, from strangers in various towns…

Did you ride that scooter all the way from Kentucky?
   Nope, only halfway.

Boot Scootin’

North Liberty, Iowa

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Got delayed leaving South Dakota because of the condensed-soup fog that draped the area until 10am. Nearby was Ellsworth Air Force Base, and we could hear the fighter plane afterburners somewhere above us, but couldn’t spot them through the mist.

We tamped down the miles today, despite the late start, skating through half of South Dakota, all of southern Minnesota, and a big diagonal across Iowa. We’re camped close to the border of Illinois.

Minnesota and Iowa are surprisingly progressive in their commitment to alternative energy. We saw enormous wind turbine farms, stretching for miles across the Plains. Remind me to buy stock in the company who makes these giant turbines – they’re making a fortune out here!

For hundreds of miles we’ve been seeing billboards for the Whoa N’ Go truck stop. For days I’ve been looking forward to stopping there, figuring it would be like another Wall Drug. Quite a disappointment when we got to Jackson, MN and found it’s just a crummy gas station, and a small one at that.

 

The high desert and prairie land are behind us, and now we see hardwood trees and corn farming. This is big agri-business at its prime. Thousands of acres meticulously groomed. The thing that’s so striking is there’s no variation in what I assume is genetically modified corn. All the plants are exactly the same size, color, and height. You’d think that once in a while a single plant might distinguish itself – a little taller, a little greener, maybe got more water or some extra raccoon poop fertilizer. But no. They’re all identical. It’s both freaky and monotonous at once.

Bustin’ Sod

Sioux Falls
South Dakota
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We’re traveling east across South Dakota today.

Just outside Badlands National Park, we stopped at Prairie Homestead which is an actual Sodbuster house and farm from the turn of the century. The government handed out land parcels for a small fee to encourage western migration into what was once Sioux Indian Territory. You needed to live on the land a few years in order to “prove it” – meaning own it permanently.

The homesteaders had a saying: “The government bet you 160 acres of land against $18 that you will starve to death before you live on the land 5 years.”

Most homestead claims were abandoned within a year. Limited water and poor grazing were the main causes, not to mention the brutal climate out here. It’s called Bad Lands for a reason.

 

Prairie Homestead also hosts a village of rare white prairie dogs. Recalling the sign we saw yesterday, we avoided them like the plague!

As we headed east, the landscape changed again from arid desert to high grassy plains. Somewhere around Mitchell the topsoil improves and we started seeing cornfields again. Just to make it official, we visited Corn Palace.

Corn Palace is an entertainment venue “Since 1892” and likes to bill itself as the largest display of folk art in the Plains. The façade is decorated with 275,000 corn cobs, cut in half, and nailed to the building. They tear it all off and make a new design every summer.

 

Badlands

Badlands National Park

South Dakota
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Our dog, Shadow, attracts a lot of attention. Wherever we go, people want to touch him, take his picture, or ask questions about him. We call this ELS – Everybody Loves Shadow. This trip we’ve added a new phenomenon: ELC – Everybody Loves our Coach. At least once a day we’ll encounter a gent walking slow circles around our motorhome, whether it’s parked in a campground or sitting in a lot by some attraction. They eye it up and down, and typically start the conversation by asking if it’s gas or diesel. I usually let Tim handle the questions. But this morning a guy startled me as I was having coffee at our picnic table. His question was, “Where do you buy one of these?” Not being properly caffeinated yet, I mumbled something about the factory in Florida, and beat a hasty retreat inside.

Today we did the obligatory stop at Wall Drug, in Wall, SD. This self-famous attraction started out as a simple pharmacy in 1931 and quickly learned the value of billboard promotion, not unlike See Rock City. We’ve been seeing their signs since Yellowstone, so of course we had to look around.



Our Mood Pencils!



We proceeded on through Badlands National Park, where we are camped for the evening. The Badlands is leftover volcanic terrain, strange and beautiful, but most inhospitable. There’s hardly a living thing out here except rattlesnakes and prairie dogs. Upon entering the park, a large sign warns "Prairie Dogs Have Plague" !!

In 1907 railroad tracks were built through this valley and homesteaders flocked to the Badlands for what ended up being called Starvation Claims. They dotted the prairie with sod and tarpaper shacks, couldn’t make a subsistence living in this arid wasteland, and abandoned the claims shortly thereafter. Nobody lives here now.

Mt. Rushmore & Crazy Horse

North By Northwest
South Dakota
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From Behind

We toured the Black Hills today, and yes, they really are black rock. We were also followed all day by seven, count ‘em 1-2-3..7, busses filled with Asian tourists. Bless their little hearts, they just don’t have the same concept of personal space as Americans. They crowded us, surrounded us, stop and go walked in front of us, and are in all our pictures. At one point, late in the day, I had an odd sense of calm sweep over me. “The Asians are gone,” Tim noted. Ahhhhhh. So.



Tim & Friends

First stop was Crazy Horse. This is a mountain carving, half finished, of Chief Crazy Horse and his pony. The project is privately run by the Ziolkowski family. Back in 1947, four Indian tribes approached Korczak Ziolkowski, assistant sculptor for Mt. Rushmore. The tribes wanted their own monument in the Black Hills to commemorate the native peoples. Korczak accepted the mission, and started work all by himself in 1948, with no outside help. He married, had 10 children, and died in 1982, doing nothing else but work on Crazy Horse monument. The family is still trying to complete the project.

When it’s finished it will be many times larger than Mt. Rushmore. Just the face of Crazy Horse is bigger than all 4 heads in Rushmore. Frankly, I think it’s going to take another 3 generations of Ziolkowski’s to complete this carving. Korczak’s vision was undoubtedly ambitious. He once said, “When dreams die, there is no more greatness.”

Crazy Horse To Date

Artist's Model



Work to be done

Mt. Rushmore, on the other hand, was completed in 14 years primarily because it was federally funded. There is one sculptor still alive today, Nick Clifford, age 91. Tim met him at the gift shop autographing his book Mt. Rushmore Q&A.

Rushmore is a National Monument and entry is free, however parking will set you back $11. A stone plaza walkway with all 50 state flags leads you to a viewing deck. We had lunch at the park restaurant, hoping it would be as swanky as Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint found it in the Hitchcock movie, but alas it’s just another cafeteria run by Xantera Concessions.

Aces and Eights

Deadwood, South Dakota

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We galloped on into Deadwood today. This town is famous for its Gold Rush days, circa 1875, and for where Wild Bill Hickok was killed in Saloon No. 10. Wild Bill was seated at a table with his back to the door, a position he was always superstitious about, when the coward Jack McCall shot him from behind. He was playing poker, holding aces and eights, which will forever be known as Dead Man’s Hand.

We hung out in Saloon No. 10 and watched a reenactment of the scene. Then I played some cards there, just so I could brag about it later.

Deadwood is a lot like Bardstown, only with steep mountains and gambling in every possible building; restaurants, coffee shops, hotels and motels, wherever they can stick a slot machine.

Wild Bill and Calamity Jane are buried next to each other way up on Boot Hill, in Moriah Cemetery, where the wind howls just like the song:

                       “Moriah makes the mountains sound
                        Like folks were up there dying”

We are camped at Whistler Gulch, the site of a former gold mine. The campground is situated on a hilly slope, and at the top are the slag heaps of ore tailings and the old mine entrance. We rummaged around in the piles for gold findings that may have been overlooked, but I think all we got were just rocks.

Gold Mine Tunnel



1903 Mining Compressor