They all can't be "easy" runs.

Drove from Brookings SD to DeSmet SD to go tour https://www.ingallshomestead.com/ Spouse and I are old enough to have watched little house on the prairie when it was on TV.  The Ingalls family moved a lot, to many states. It is based on those experiences, that Laura wrote her books, which led to the show. One thing I hadn’t considered until visiting this spot – if there are no trees around, how do you build a house on your new 160 acre homestead in the late 1800s? You create a “dugout” cave, and line the walls with old newspapers. What a harsh life that was! Anyway, there was no one but us there. There was a sign on the gift shop door instructing us to lock the exhibit doors when we were done viewing them. South Dakota is another world, in terms of security! There was a lot of walking, but the views and the church were just beautiful. It is so strange seeing the horizon in all directions, but not being out on the water.

Drove to Mitchell SD to go to the Corn Palace. http://www.cornpalace.org/ On the way there, we saw a cool piece of civil engineering that we stopped and took pictures of. The Lake Mitchell Spillway.

Anyhow – The Corn Palace! I don’t mean to diminish the amount of work involved with growing 100 acres of corn, and then cladding that corn to a building, with a new design every year for the last 100+ years. It is really a fascinating work of art. However, the need to have a web cam? It is a web cam of a building that gets covered up by a new corn mural every year. We laughed pretty hard, thinking of the guy that watches the Corn Palace web cam all day! So, we decided to act like true imbeciles for the entertainment of a web cam viewing guy we will never meet. Highlights include me walking around like a gorilla for a bit and acting like I was picking bugs out of spouse’s hair. She has never been prouder of me, for sure. Good times. Good times.

The whole time in SD we tried to find Kuchen – the official state dessert of SD. Sadly, NO one sells it.

Drove from Brookings SD to Omaha NE to fly home. Because of bad weather, our flight was delayed. So we went to the Bob Kerry pedestrian bridge over the Missouri River. That was kind of cool. You can stand with one foot in Nebraska and one foot in Iowa. Then the rains came, and we got lunch. Then flew home. We got home after midnight. 

hood route. 6 am. still sore.