We joyously left the terrible Super 8 in Worthington (it puts the Super 8 brand to shame, seriously… never stay there, ever) this morning and soon we were in South Dakota!!!

On our way along I-90, we saw this:

Yep, it’s a giant cow head and also a giant flowerpot. Awesome! We wanted to take a closer look, but:

Alas, apparently this is some kind of awesome sculpture park, but we were thwarted by this sign. It was very sad, and I found the website so I know we missed some awesome stuff. Sad! But we had to persevere to our next destination:

The Corn Palace is a multi-purpose arena in Mitchell, S.D. The building features murals made out of corn. It’s quite a thing to behold. The murals on the outside are redone annually; they have a festival every year in August, and around that time, they start taking down the old murals and replacing them with new ones in the next year’s theme. A greeter at the palace explained to us that it’s tricky to get the corn just right — dried out just enough so it’s workable but not brittle.

The 2008 theme was Everyday Heroes (firefighters, police officers, etc.). 2009’s theme is, and I am totally not kidding, America’s Destinations!! The murals are going to feature the Corn Palace (natch), the Kennedy Space Center, the Statue of Liberty, the Space Needle in Seattle, Mt. Rushmore, a D.C. collage (holla!), the Crazy Horse memorial, the Hoover Dam, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Alamo, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Grand Canyon. How appropriate!!!

They’re in the middle of putting up the new murals right now, so we had some of 2008’s murals and some of 2009’s to see, as well as some partially completed murals. Here is the front of the palace as it is today:

Here’s the Corn Palace’s mural of itself (very meta, Corn Palace). You can see the actual corn cobs here:

And here I am in front of the partially finished D.C. mural. The Corn Palace is big!

That’s going to be Lincoln on the left. Awesome!

We kept heading west on I-90 and eventually reached Chamberlain. Lewis and Clark made a stop here, and Ambrose and Clark did, too. Check this out:

The east side (which is the near side in this photo) is like normal midwesterny-looking farmland with grass and trees and the like, then you cross the Missouri river and suddenly you’re in rocks and hills and crazy South Dakota landscape. Brian and I could not get over it. And things just got weirder from there.

We had been seeing signs for miles for “1880 Town” and we weren’t planning on stopping there (honestly, we thought it looked pretty trappy from the copious billboards), but when we got in the vicinity, we realized we needed to take a break for nature, so we stopped. We still weren’t planning on going in, especially since they were semi-closed when we arrived, but things took a turn and we ended up going there. And guess what? IT WAS AWESOME!

It’s a bunch of actual buildings from the Old West (that were moved to 1880 Town) including actual antique furnishings and relics. You can go in the buildings and sit on the furniture and everything. I totally felt like I was walking around a real Old West town. There is an amazingly restored saloon that is the highlight of the place:

It’s beautiful and you can buy South Dakota sarsaparilla and sit in there and pretend it’s 1880. They also have costume rental so you can dress up and go take your own photo anywhere in the town! Awesome. We didn’t do that, but if we had arrived earlier we totally would have. You can see Jim the bartender in the photo above. He and his wife Marcie are working in 1880 Town for the season and then continuing on their RV travels around the country. We talked to Marcie for a really long time about our various travels. Marcie and Jim are awesome!

By the way, 1880 Town also has an entire huge setup of props from Dances With Wolves, if you’re into that sort of thing.

After we left 1880 Town, it was starting to get kind of late, and by the way Brian was really not feeling all that great at this point, but we made kind of an interesting decision once it was clear we needed to drive all the way to Wall if we wanted to find a decent place to stay. You see, there’s a little road that takes you off 90 down through the Badlands and back up to 90 at Wall. So we went that route even though it was a bit out of the way.

I really don’t know how to describe what was going on in the Badlands and how utterly surreal and bizarre it was to drive through them in the dark, especially without having ever seen them in the day. In fact, I haven’t even seen very many pictures of the Badlands. Since Brian and I figured out where we wanted to go on this trip, we have avoided looking at photos of the places we want to go as much as possible so we don’t get too spoiled. The road through the Badlands was almost totally deserted, and there are no lights or anything obviously, so we just had the bright moon and starlight, and we were driving through this weird road into these VERY weird-looking rock things that we could barely see at first. I was totally freaked out, honestly. I mean, it was like we drove to another planet, except that we kept seeing deer. We saw like 10 or 12 deer in the Badlands tonight. We saw a bunch of rabbits, too. That was a crazy juxtaposition, like, I think of deer and rabbits as being something I would see in Maryland or Virginia, not on Mars.

Once we started getting to crazy-ish looking stuff, we pulled the car over and broke out the tripod. This was before our eyes fully adjusted to the light, and we didn’t even really know what we were looking at, so when the camera finished its 10-second exposure, we were shocked, delighted, and in awe to see this:

All these photos from tonight are lit entirely by moonlight; we didn’t alter them in any way (though you can see some red in some of these from Pearl’s brake lights)! The camera is able to see a LOT more than our eyes could. Look at that sky and those stars!

I was so scared that I literally ran back into the car right after we took that one. I don’t know what it is, but whatever these rocks or whatever are (we’ll find out when we go in the daytime and can talk to people at the visitor’s center) make me nervous. I guess it’s that they are so foreign and so imposing… and also the fact that the utter silence and stillness out there kind of made me feel like I wasn’t supposed to be there or something. It’s hard to articulate, but hopefully you can get the sense of what I mean. It’s overwhelmingly strange in the Badlands.

Whew! I can see why a friend of mine got goosebumps just mentioning the Badlands to me when she heard about my trip. Brian and I are planning on returning in the daylight tomorrow or the day after (depending on how he’s feeling), and I bet we’ll have a completely different experience. Crazy Badlands!

Tonight we’re at a Motel 6 in Wall, S.D. It’s a bit touch and go at the moment in terms of Brian’s health. We’re definitely planning on staying two nights here so he can chill out and try to recover. Besides going back to the Badlands, we also have to visit a particular drugstore here in town. After that, we have tons of things on our list for South Dakota, so everyone please cross your fingers for Brian and hopefully we can move on on Tuesday!

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