Wall, South Dakota
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
We started our day at the roadside legend,
Wall Drug. Famous since 1931 for serving $0.05 coffee and free ice water, Wall Drug is a fun-filled tourist trap.
We took a whirlwind tour of the complex which includes:
-- An indoor street of shops
-- A Frontier Town complete with classic Western arcade games, whimsical squirting water fountains, a horse-drawn wagon, a giant
jackalope, and even an animatronics T-Rex!
-- A soda fountain and cafeteria-style restaurant
-- Travelers Chapel
-- Room after room of everything from Black Hills gold jewelry to chocolate fudge, and bobble-head elks to Frederic Remington bronze sculptures.
Our “must-haves” included a Wall Drug coffee mug and history booklet,
magnets of the states we’ve visited so far, and a complimentary Wall Drug bumper sticker. Of course, we had to partake of the free ice water which was indeed ice cold. With espresso malts from the soda fountain and a buffalo burger from the restaurant, we headed westward once more across the Great Plains.
While we were exploring Wall Drugs, our friends from home—Bruce and Kimberly--were winging their way across the USA to join us for the next ten days of the trip. Once we arrived at
Rapid City Regional Airport, we had a mission: rearrange the van and clear out the back seat so Bruce and Kim won’t have to ride on the roof. We wondered what airport security must have thought as we dragged bins, books, blankets and more out of the van and onto the pavement, scurried around a bit, and then stuffed it all back in again.
Dressed in our matching “
Cheese Days” shirts and cheese beads, with Ted in his cheese fez and Laura in her Viking hat (all from Wisconsin), we stood right next to the TSA entry/exit area awaiting our friends’ arrival. We were so thrilled to see them when they came through the gate. They probably wondered what they had gotten themselves into when they saw the pair of us!
It was such a happy reunion as we piled into the van and headed eastward to
Badlands National Park. The four of us were breathless as we drove through the vast expanse of brightly striped, sculpted sandstone buttes amid the grass prairies. The colors of the sandstone changed dramatically as the sun dropped lower in the sky. The beauty was both vibrant and stark.
After the Badlands, a stop back at Wall Drug seemed even more surreal than our morning visit. But we didn’t want Bruce & Kim to miss this wacky attraction. Then, the
Red Rock Restaurant in Wall welcomed us with a homey atmosphere, great hospitality, and some tasty food including buffalo rib eye steak (that’s buffalo as in bison not spicy wing sauce). Bruce and Ted tried
Fat Tire Ale for the first time and were quite impressed.
We headed west once more to
Custer, SD to check-in at the
Holiday Inn Express. This was not the average business-style chain hotel. The décor was reflective of the area, particularly in the Great Room, which had a vaulted, timbered ceiling, log-style furnishings, a towering stone fireplace, and floor-to-ceiling windows framing the hills and waterfall behind the hotel.
Welcome to the
Black Hills of South Dakota!
-- Ted and Laura
