There she is finally getting her knee fixed from a January fall in Breckenridge. Hopefully she'll be back on the links and the slopes in no time.
With the Covid I'm not allowed to wait around at the hospital so...
I made a pilgrimage.
They say 10,000 pigs meet their maker every day in Austin Minnesota. Hormel calls SPAM "ham and pork shoulder" but I don't know. That leaves a lot still on the hog as they say. The interstate surface is pounded by hog haulers and there's a healthy local industry power washing out the trailers after delivery. They say animals know when they're going to slaughter, You can guess the results?
Blue Earth MN is home to whoever now owns the Green Giant Company. City fathers put this up in the 70's in hopes to keep the canning plant. Might have worked. Minnesota River valley is big in agriculture. Remember the jingle? "From the Valley...Ho Ho Ho, Greeeeeen Giant."
Stayed in Sioux Falls, South Dakota at the Hotel on Phillips. Below is the bar. A gem. The downtown was hoping. Lots of fun.
And what better dinner entree selection after the SPAM museum but pork belly? Yum. If you've never had it, it's kind of a blend of meat and fat. The fat is trying to look like meat and the meat is trying to look like fat.
Once you get into South Dakota you'd think their primary industry is fireworks retail outlets. I love fireworks but I know a handful of folks who are afraid of them. Several to be exact. They say dogs also are afraid of fireworks. I forgot to get a picture of the outlets but this old shot will have to do. This is the point in this blog where I learned that if you send phone pictures to your laptop via GMAIL and AOL they arrive in different sizes. Don't really care to fix it so just live with it.
One of the first attractions in SD is the Mitchell Corn Palace. I guess they put corn ears on it every year to celebrate something. They call it the only Corn Palace in the world. Wonder if we should fact check that. They're probably safe with the claim.
Eventually you get to The Badlands. It's something to see as the geography just changes in a snap. I broke down and purchased the Lifetime Pass for our National Parks. $80. When I was 61 yrs the Senior (62) Lifetime Pass was $10. Now at 63 yrs its $80. And you ask why I took Social Security as soon as I could before the rules change?
We have home movies of this part of the park when visiting with the Floods 20 plus years ago. You can hear Robin saying..."Danny. Don't go any higher. Come back here. Be careful."
You may have heard that in the middle of a pandemic the 80th Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was still on.
They were everywhere. Any convenience store etc. had a scene like this.
I skipped the congested Sturgis part. Based on the tee shirts and patches on their jackets I'm pretty sure how they all are going to vote. Democrats are hoping for a major outbreak following the rally. Will see. Certainly wasn't a mask crowd. The area is known as The Black Hills and sacred to the Sioux (or Lakota if you prefer.) Two years before the Battle of the Little Big Horn the Seventh Cavalry sent 1000 men and Custer into the hills to chase out homesteaders. It was Indian seeded land. A few of Custer's men found gold in the French Creek (right here. honest) and that was it for Indian seeded land. The Black Hills Gold Rush was on.
Custer State Park is the 5th largest state park in the county and a gem. I stayed the night in the State Game Lodge. You really need to check it out. The 1927 Summer White House (Coolidge) was here. Dwight D. Eisenhower stayed here too during his presidency. I got the Eisenhower Room. Only room available for 100 miles so I REALLY paid for it.Very nice.
This is the Ike toilet. Made me feel kind of special.
The restaurant is gourmet by my standards, but we still have Cheyenne WY food to talk about. Below is Buffalo Tenderloin rare. It was fabulous.
Now I don't know if the 34th President of the United States had this same entree when he visited, but if he had, below is the view he'd have of Mamie very shortly after dinner.
The next morning I took a sunrise jeep tour of the flora and fauna in the park. A lot about the birds and the bees. Here pronghorn antelope male and his harem. He gets several mates.
There is about a 1500 head of North American Plains Bison in the park. Driver Matt had to drive around a bit to find this group. Always on the move. Couple of miles during the day and a couple of miles at night. So the buffalo do roam..., and the skies are not cloudy all day. "Buffalo" is a bastardized word from what the French explorers called them. Le Buf meaning meat. Water buffalos are actually buffalos. Below is more courtship going on. Male on the right. Much bigger head. Bison's brows are flat to plow snow away to get at the grass in the winter. He gets 30 mates.
They have wild donkeys left over from 100 years ago donkey rides. Tourists can feed these. It's OK. Don't feed the bison. A lady got trampled to death last year.
In 2017 they had the second largest fire in park history. Also a beetle took out many of the pine trees. But who hasn't had massive fires and beetle invasions? Here's one for the climate changers. You need three cold winters in a row to keep the beetle in check. The park had 15 warm winters in a row and the beetle thrived. Here's one for the climate change sceptics. Three years ago they had the first of three cold winters. Beetle gone. Something for everyone in this blog. Hillside below is common in parts of the park.
Here's Matt the driver. He mentioned they have a round-up on the last Friday in September every year. 200 cowboys and a couple helicopters chase the herds into a box canyon for medical checks and sale of some. 20,000 people come to stand on a fence line and have a buffalo stampede run within feet of them. The earth does move he said.
The city of Custer SD is right outside the park. Bikes everywhere too.
When in the area be sure to see Mount Rushmore. Here's a view from a gas station.
On the way into Wyoming I came upon a historical site where conestoga wagon wheels ground ruts into the sandstone. The Oregon Trail. Be it travelers to homestead the Columbia River Valley of Oregon, Brigham Young and friends to Utah, or the California Gold Rushers, they took the same route through here. Split after the Rockies.
This is nothing other than a picture to send to a friend that I went to school with named Lusk. Town in WY is the only one in US to have a monument to a prostitute.
Next up was Cheyenne Wyoming. Not many masks here either. I've gotten used to it frankly. I used to think those Asian women always wearing masks looked odd. Now we all look like Asian women and it looks normal. Being a fan of historic hotels, I found the 110 year old The Plains Hotel right downtown. It's a little tired and I don't think they're going to make it. Too bad.
But...the 120 year old Elks Lodge was across the street. It's a little tired and I don't think they're going to make it. Too bad.
Here's their fancy meeting room in the lodge. 1902. Classic. Now I can't afford to get kicked out of another club so don't share this picture of the secret room with anyone. Giving up the secrets of BPOE gets you banished to the hinterland to wander alone forever...or something like that. That's an alter in the middle. Think of all the paddling since 1902.
This is where I got the gourmet restaurant suggestion. It was a chain. Went to a bar instead which was great. Sat with Larry who works for Union Pacific Railroad. It was interesting to hear a working man's view of business, the economy etc. Good guy.
What does a guy like me do after a few drinks and nice dinner in a railroad town? Well, watch trains in the yard of course.
You may think of Cowboys as I did when you hear of Cheyenne but it was a railroad town first and still pretty substantial one today. It's the halfway point on Union Pacific's east/west route so gets lots of maintenance facilities. Cheyenne is referred to as "The Magic City of the Plains" because it just kind of popped up overnight. Below is the Cheyenne yard in the late 40's. The remaining section of a roundhouse in my yard picture above is the full one in this photo below. Plains Hotel is at the left end of the bridge that's spanning the yard.
Great museum at the Cheyenne Depot Museum (1887). Has a world famous (but not The Only One in the World) HO scale train layout if you're into that sort of thing. I am a little and this was pretty big. Interesting to me as it recreates all the mining towns on the line from Denver up to the mountains... Idaho Springs, Empire, Silver Plume, Georgetown and the like. Great detail.
Yet being a cowboy town also I took the opportunity to get my duds for the Flood wedding in CO at The Wrangler. Picture is kind of awkward. How did Anthony Weiner do it? Oh, now I recall he did have frequent practice.
From Cheyenne it's 10 miles to the Colorado border. This strip club sits on the WY side. Now I don't know much about these things but it's location on the state line struck me. I bet you can get something here that you can't get at home.
Oh. I almost forgot. She did fine. Dr. Todd Swenson is a miracle worker.
The End
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