Day 8 -- Hitting the Dakotas

What I learned today:

1. Do not EVER call a motel 2 miles from Mt Rushmore on the Saturday before Labor Day and expect to get a room,. Recession or no, that was a dumb move on my part, and why I am writing this from Wall, SD, and not Keystone or Rapid City.
2. Do not ever go to a Mexican restaurant in South Dakota. How do you ruin a Margarita? And, how do you make fajitas & enchiladas that are totally bland? Just go to a place with no Hispanic presence!
3. If you go to Mt. Rushmore, make reservations way ahead (as mentioned in #1), and go at night when they have the lighting ceremony. There really isn’t much to do except look at the mountain (very impressive, much better than photos), so you might as well go at twilight. If you go at 6 PM, it seems silly to hang around for two hours, so we didn’t.
4. This is a magnificent, diverse country. We have seen so many different types of scenery! Eastern MT, and ND & SD are beautiful, and you see where the term “Great Plains” comes from. Not as flat as I had expected, but you can see forever. It is very arable, so different from the desert and the mountains. I feel unbelievably lucky to be making this road-trip.

We did achieve two milestones. Carl and I have been on a mission to get to every state. I had never been to North Dakota, and he had never been to SD. We left Miles City, and headed straight for Bowman ND, and arrived there at lunch time. Our rule is you have to actually eat in a state to count it, and we had a delightful lunch in a local diner. Just comfort food, BLT and grilled cheese sandwiches. We talked to a couple –Roy & Lois, who’d lived there all their lives (about 60 years), and they said that they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. A real slice of Americana.


Then we headed down to the South part of the Dakotas. We went to Deadwood, at the north end of the Black Hills, which is a restored town dedicated totally to tourism & gambling. The main street was like out of the old west, except with casinos and t-shirt shops everywhere. We did find a sports bar owned by Kevin Costner who made Dances with Wolves nearby. It was the only place to have a snack that wasn’t part of a casino.

Then began our big adventure to find a place to stay, in anticipation of visiting Mt. Rushmore tomorrow. Every place we called was full,. We sat in a parking lot in Rapid City and called just about every place in the AAA book, to no avail. I almost had the feeling the people we spoke to were laughing at us for even trying. We tried Rapid City, Keystone, Custer, & Spearfish with no luck. At that point, we decided to visit Mt. Rushmore today, and then travel on to Wall, about 50 miles down the road. Thank goodness Mt. Rushmore is open until 9 through September. Wall is famous for Wall Drug, which evolved from a place to get a drink of water on the Plains to a huge tourist joint. Supposedly there are billboards advertising it for many miles down the highway, but we couldn’t see them in the dark.[ed note: these signs do exist; your editor saw them when she made this trip in the opposite direction] We are going there tomorrow, and I’m looking forward it. Our plans tomorrow are just to go as far as possible in SD, but make it an easy day.

• New Out of State License Plates seen: Indiana, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, Alberta
• Days till we see Lucy: 5
• Days till we see Toby & Beruria: 12
• Days till we see Paige: 28