IOWA

The past two days have been quite a lot. Time goes so quickly, and yesterday seems like a month ago. It's a strange feeling. So, Monday morning we woke up and drove once more past Mt. Rushmore towards Crazy Horse. His memorial will be about 5 times the size of Mt. Rushmore. Since it's privately funded, it's been a work in progress for over 50 years. Crazy Horse was a warrior at the Battle of Little Bighorn. One family has been working on it the whole time. It was very impressive, and if I ever hit it big, I will donate to the cause.

From Crazy Horse, we stopped at Jackson's favorite store, Cabela's. It's like Wild Animal Park, only stuffed. From there we drove east to Wall, SD. Wall Drug has become a well-known stop on I-90. Story is that a husband and wife were trying to make their little pharmacy successful. They weren't doing well. On one hot summer day, the wife thought to put up a billboard advertising "free ice water." People came in from everywhere. Today, an average of 20,000 people stop on any summer day. It was pretty fun, and the kids loved it.

After Wall Drug, we moved on to Mitchell, SD, home of the Corn Palace. As you may have guessed, it's made of corn husks. It was sunset, and the Palace was closed. I had a hard time hiding my relief. No gift shop shopping for us, thank goodness.

Now with the new time change, it was already dinner and well past 8pm. We were supposed to make it to Sioux Falls, but we called it a day and found a KOA for the night.

Today (my brother's 50th birthday!), we drove across 3 state lines; S Dakota to Minnesota to Iowa. The kids were troopers and kept wanting to drive on. So we did. Nine hours later, we ended up in Cedar Falls, IA. I couldn't find a campground anywhere, so I found a Days Inn. I was trying to save some of the food in the fridge, so I used the lobby micro to heat lasagne for dinner. While I got the kids set up in the room, I "cooked" a pizza in the RV stove. Well, that didn't go so well. When I got back from the room to get the pizza out of the RV, it was basically on fire. Forgetting that the broiler unit is MUCH closer to the over rack, the pizza was a mass of black charred crust. The entire RV was full of smoke. As I opened the doors and windows, people in the parking lot came over to see if I was okay. Kind of embarassing to say, "no, I just burnt the pizza." Is it a bad thing to make dinner in an RV in a hotel parking lot?? I threw out the pizza, grabbed my last beer, the toaster oven and went up to the room.

Dinner was lasagne, kiwi and toasted bagels. And beer. Now we are watching "Field of Dreams" since tomorrow we go Dubuque, IA to see where the movie was filmed. It's nice to have a movie night, the first of our trip. That's it!