Iowa City to Murdo, SD
Day 2 of Two Dads on Land Yacht
-6:00am Wakeup Call
Breakfast in our super cheap hotel was exactly what we planned it to be. Disgusting. I got yelled at by the hotel worker for standing and eating at the same time because apparently that's a bad thing to do. Slick Rick claims his breakfast sandwich was rubber, and he was willing to bet the eggs weren't actually real.
-6:30am Departed Iowa City. Headed towards Sioux City, IA
-11:00am Sioux City "Hu Hot"
Slick Rick was really hype for this lunch, saying that I would Mongolian BBQ and definitely love it. I was skeptical. This place was indeed hype, you walked in and filled a bowl with meats and vegetables and noodles and whatnot that you wanted, and then they would cook it all on a big stove in front of you. Slick Rick was right. Never doubt a fellow dad. Food was stupid good. 9/10
-11:42am Back on the road. Slick is pissed we are 12min behind schedule.
-11:51am Enter South Dakota
Previously in all the other states we had driven in, we had seen a handful of cops, and the speed limit was usually 65 or 70 mph. I'm convinced in South Dakota there are no rules, and there are no cops. Speed limit is 80mph, and if you're actually going 80 you're getting passed by Grandma and Grandpa. Time to make up those 12 minutes...
-1pm
After driving (more like flying) through South Dakota for a while we started to notice these small black diamond shaped signs on the side of the road. They would either say "THINK!" or "WHY DIE?" and they would be placed sporatically throughout the drive, sometimes there would be 4-5 of them all at once, and sometimes you wouldn't see any for miles. Slick Rick looked it up, and since 1979, the state puts these signs up every place a person dies in a car crash. I guess when you mix high winds, lots of snow, and basically no speed limit, people crash.
-2pm Mitchell South Dakota
Putting Land Yacht into overdrive, aka setting cruise control at 95mph with the rest of the yahoos out here for a little while, we wound up getting to our destination of "The Corn Palace" about 4 minutes ahead of schedule. Slick Rick's nerd itinerary was back on track. The Corn Palace was located in this weird little town with only a couple traffic lights, a small main road, and the center of attention was this corn palace. The palace is more or less an auditorium in the center of town that is decorated on the outside with literally only corn. Every year the design changes, and the people of the town come together to make the design for the year. Pictures do it more justice than me explaining:
-2:30pm Back on the road. En route to Murdo, SD
Driving across South Dakota is boring as hell. There is no other way to put it. It's just farms with way too many cows climbing in mountains of their own poop, with no barns or farmer's houses in sight. We figured that SD would be flat and boring, but holy crap this was 300 miles of one singular dead straight road and no civilization for miles. Just truck stops.
-4:00pm
Arrived at the Pioneer Auto Museum. Super cool place with a ton of old ass cars and antiques and just plain weird stuff. They had multiple different barns on the property, each filled with a unique genre of car or tractor or oddity. The lady working there said that the place had been featured on the Discovery Channel show "American Pickers" a couple times and that didn't surprise us at all. Below peep Slick Rick checking out the actual car from the movie Dukes of Hazard, a barn full of old cars, and some wacky car a dude put on the frame of a school bus:
-5:30pm Dinner @ Rusty Spur Restaurant for Bison Burgers
-6:45pm Journey into the middle of freakin nowhere
After dinner we decided to drive around for a little while, and I had found a cool looking dirt road on Google Maps so we took it. The road went on as far as you could see, running in between cattle ranches, irrigation ponds, abandoned railroad tracks, and cell towers. At one point we saw a Pronghorn in the road ahead, and once it saw us it took off like a rocket. I mean this thing full sprinted at 60+ mph. I've never seen an animal run that fast.
-8pm
Drove around some more and found this town nearby called Draper, South Dakota. Not a single paved road in the town, not a single person in the town. Just some grain silos and a church. Slick Rick was thoroughly confused where all the people were...
Overall Day 2 was really interesting. Corn Palace and Pioneer Museum were both cool and glad we checked them off the list. Slick Rick says that Day 3 will be a hell of a long day, and that his nerd itinerary is in hyperdrive. We shall see.
This is the first time I have real internet, so check out the below timelapse to see our drive from Philly to Iowa the other day compressed into 30 seconds: