Along our trip we have been getting a lot of our ideas about what to check out from this book that Joe found called 1000 Places to See Before You Die, USA & Canada. As we drove into South Dakota our first stop was a town called Mitchell. Mitchell is famous for their Corn Palace. (we found out about the Corn Palace from the “1000 Places” book) The first Corn Palace was made in 1892, they decided to build it for the Corn Belt Exposition, which was where the town showcased their most important resource, corn. When you first see the building it is kind of stunning in that weird art sort of way. When you get closer you realize that all the art on the walls and the columns are made out of corn. They grow over 180,000 acres of corn just to decorate the palace, using many different colors and species of corn. The Corn Palace has a different look and theme each year. When they first started local artists would just make geometric patterns and then they began making murals out of the corn. This year’s theme was “destinations”, it was incredible, they had Mt Rushmore, Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco, Washington DC, Crazy Horse Memorial, the St Louis Arch, and the Statue of Liberty. The artist makes a “corn by number” map for the volunteers who actually attach the corn onto the building. It takes them almost 3 months to remove the previous year’s corn and put up the new “palace”. We actually watched some of the volunteers ( local high school kids) cutting and attaching the corn to the building. They still have an exposition every year after they have finished the palace, bands come and perform, it is a huge party!
We were lucky enough to get some real good advice about visiting South Dakota from a gentlemen that worked the info desk at the Corn Palace. He gave us a map where he highlighted different spots along the highway where we should stop as we were heading to Badlands National Park, and then onto Custer State Park and the memorials. He suggested we stop at a view point halfway between Mitchell and the Badlands, right before you cross the Missouri river, where you had an amazing view and could take some cool photos, also if you went into the info center you could learn some about Louis & Clarke’s travels,. We stopped and took some photos, the Missouri river was huge in this part. We headed on further down the highway, changed time zones, and then finally arrived at the Badlands National Park. I forgot to mention but as soon as we got on the highway in South Dakota we kept seeing these signs for Wall Drug. They were seriously almost every quarter mile, Joe and I were both like what the heck is wall drug and where the heck is it? Because we drove a couple hundred miles and did not run into it. Joe also thought he had heard of it before so I checked in the “1000 places” book and low and behold it was in there. We went and checked it out while staying in Badlands… I get to that in a moment.
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