Westward Ho! First stop - Mitchell, South Dakota

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 My friend, TB2, and I have taken road trips the last four or five years, and those antics have been chronicled in these virtual pages. Nothing has been quite like this, almost six days on the road, hoping for good weather since we were going to be outside most of the time. I've been wanting to head to South Dakota for a few years, and she and I started talking about doing it after last year's trip to the Mississippi headwaters. We waited until mid-October, hoping that whatever families were out traveling would be back home for school, limiting opportunities for me to be a cranky witch. It sort of worked. I thought we might cancel after COVID-19 started spiking in South Dakota because the governor doesn't believe in science. But, since we were going to be outside, we just masked up where necessary or where it made us feel safer, didn't touch things, or doused ourselves in hand sanitizer. I don't want to dwell on the no masks, but I do want to point it out: a lot of tourists were wearing masks, even where they weren't required by the business, and several restaurants and shops also had employees that were wearing masks. We always made a toast when we had this experience. We also did avoid areas where it seemed dominated by maskless and careless people. Science, people, science. Overall, we had a very enjoyable time, the weather cooperated (mostly), the scenery was incredible and we had some delicious meals.

We started out on a Friday afternoon and got to Mitchell, South Dakota around 10 pm. Mitchell is pretty much a required stop along the way, and I wanted to see the Corn Palace. The Corn Palace is an active venue for sporting and music events. It's free to walk around and see the corn art. The Palace is redecorated every year with twelve different colors of corn, natural colors, by the way. There is a fun giftshop across the street. I thought it was really cool, hard to believe that the pictures you'll see below are done with corn. 





With that, we were on our way to The Badlands. Stay tuned.

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