Big Day!

I'll let the pictures do most of the talking this time.

From Murdo, SD, to the Badlands, to Wall Drug, to Mt. Rushmore, to Crazy Horse, to Deadwood.

There isn't a word in the English language for the experience of seeing the Badlands. Awesome is so inadequate. They are another planet. They seem to go on forever. We took about 160 pictures and if I posted them all, it would be nothing compared to what's really there. In the Badlands, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce managed to elude something like 10,000 mounted soldiers searching for him and the remaining young, old, women, and children of his tribe for a very long time in their attempt to escape to Canada.

We even saw and photographed some young bighorn sheep, which was a rare opportunity.

Then we went to Wall Drug, a famous collection of tourist stores near Rapid City and on the way to Mt. Rushmore ... a stop that should be on everyone's bucket list, especially since the impossibly grand plan of the Crazy Horse sculpture is basically around the bend. (Okay, so it's maybe a dozen miles away - that's around the bend out there.) It is so huge that I've lost track of the comparison to Mt. Rushmore, but the sculpture, which is really the reshaping of an entire mountain, is supposed to show Chief Crazy Horse on his mount, and just the head of the mount is to be bigger than the entire Mt. Rushmore carving. But it's a long, long way from being finished, as our picture will show.

We are spending the night in Deadwood, where Wild Bill Hickok was famously shot and killed in a bar while playing cards. He's buried here. We're going to visit his grave tomorrow.

Also, Kevin Costner owns a restaurant here, which we plan to have breakfast at later this morning.

The last thing for this post?

We took a back way to Deadwood through the mountains of the Black Hills National Forest.

That's where we saw the full grown bighorn rams right next to the road. One of them was eating maybe ten feet off the road. We stopped beside him. He stood there chewing and eyeballing us. Mike took his picture. He didn't flinch, but I was ready to punch the accelator if he made a move towards us. I'm sure he would have made a mess of the side of our car with his huge battering horns. He was too close to truly avoid, but we might have restricted the damage to avoid damage to the door had he charged.

What a lucky break it was for us to see them in the wild!

unlooked for fun

After a series of long days of travel, we finally took it a little easy. We went from Sioux City, Iowa, to Murdo, South Dakota, where we made an unplanned stop at the Pioneer Auto Museum, around 300 miles from Sioux City.

What an unexpected find!

If you are interested in anything, you'll probably find something there to your liking. I cannot possibly do the place justice in this writing (Pioneer's website certainly doesn't ... but how could it?), still let me give you a little sense of the place.

Sitting here, I realize I don't know where to begin. Here goes, anyway:

It's not a formal museum. It's not even an informal museum. That's not only part of its charm - it's part of its greatness. It rambles in and out of a couple dozen (?) buildings, sheds, garages, open air ports. The wind constantly rattles many of the buildings.

In those buildings you will find a little less than 300 cars (no suprise there ... it is a car museum - but wait for it) almost none of which are refinished, refurbished, re- anything. They are however great to look at and lined up to tell you part of their stories: How much they cost originally? What kind of car they are? When they were made? How rare are they? Some, indeed, are extremely rare. And some have a special interest all their own. A few examples:

The only surviving original Dukes of Hazzard car (General Lee). A movie with Jessica Simpson playing Daisy Duke was based on the TV show and the car was as famous as any of the actors.

Elvis Presley's motorcycle. (Oh, didn't I mention the motorcycle exhibits ... and the truck exhibits and the farm equipment and the old Western Union office and gas station and ... ?)

Tom Mix's Packard. (Who is Tom Mix? He's the original Hollywood cowboy. Take your top five actors/actresses now, and he was twice as famous as all of them combined.) The car is fabulous and famous on its own, also.

At auction, these three items might sell for five million dollars, or ten, or twenty.

It's impossible to place a value on all the other cars, some of which are in a way rarer than the above mentioned items.

Now here's the "wait for it" part.

There is a toy exhibit of Walt Disney characters and many, many more. The value of the toy exhibit probably exceeds the total value of the cars. And there's a mineral, fossil, and dinosaur bone exhibit whose value might be more than the toys, and scattered throughout (and tucked away privately) there are autographed pictures and letters - yes, you guessed it - that might be worth still more.

Let me finish by saying there's still much more, that the current proprietor of the 75 year old museum is a mixture of Jason Robards and Will Rogers*, and that there is almost as much in storage waiting for a place to go on display as there is being shown now.

We spent the night at a very nice Days Inn in Murdo, went swimming in the motel's indoor pool, spent time in the hot tub, and relax more than we had at any point on the trip so far.

We also both had buffalo steak with our dinners. First buffalo for me. The "steak" is actually buffalo ground hamburgers, as I am told that buffalo steak is too tough. I liked it a lot. My description of the taste is that it is much like hamburger, kind of smoky tasting, leaner, ... but there is some other quality I can't describe. Not gaminess as has been told to me in the past. Whatever it is, it is good.

We are headed for the Badlands, Black Hills, Mt. Rushmore, and Crazy Horse later this morning. (Yikes! It's now 6:30 am. I should try to get some more sleep.)
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*I got to spend a fair amount of time with David Geisler, the above mentioned proprietor, and the son of the founder of the museum. He is way cool. And for most, or all, of you my comparing him to a mix of Robards and Rogers will mean zippo. That's too bad in more than one way: Robards was a great actor and narrator. Dave looks a little and moves about and sounds a lot like Robards. Dave does much of the self-guided tour narration and it completely fooled me - I was sure it was Robards. The Will Rogers similarity is that he greets everyone as though he already knows them and likes them. And usually he does. It was amazing hanging with him for a while. He kept interrupting our conversation and asking me to wait while he talked with yet another person, couple, or group that wandered by (whether in the front of the museum, the cafeteria, or the gift shop). Rogers was a hugely famous cowboy comedic observer of the human condition who was known for, among many other things, as having said that he, "never met a man he didn't like." That, to me, pretty much sums up Dave Geisler (who in his absent-minded and genial way, walked off with my glasses in his pocket, until I realized what must have happened).