Wandering Around in Flyover Country

When last heard from we were heading northward toward our home base of Rapid City, South Dakota to spend ten days of “housekeeping”, a visit with our lawyer, renewal of drivers licenses, catching up on miscellaneous other chores.  Rapid City is just the right size, big enough to have at least one of everything you might want and small enough to be non-threatening to those of us with urban phobia.  It also has Prairie Edge, the most fabulous store we’ve seen to date.  You can find more about it in a previous report from Rapid City. 

Somewhere along the line I became intrigued with the city of Belle Fourche and insisted on a visit there.  No particular reason except it tickles my tongue to say “bell foosh” and I’m fond of telling people it means “beautiful foosh” in French.  In fact it means beautiful fork and refers to an area where the river, also called Belle Fourche, forks.  It is also the more convenient geographical center of the United States, the actual center being some 18 miles out of town on private property.  This only became the geographical center after Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union; before that, the center was in Kansas where it should be.  At the time of our visit, Belle Fourche was gearing up for their big rodeo extravaganza over the July 4th weekend.  Luckily we heard someone mention the cattle drive that was due to go right past the antique shop where we were trolling about and so we hastily returned to the car and escaped before the traffic got too bad.  Or we got cow stuff on our tires.  How can the running of the bulls at Pamplona compare with the running of the cows in Belle Fourche?

Our visit to Rapid City ended on a rather sour note when we learned that our long-held phone number had been stolen by someone wishing to take advantage of an upgrade in equipment at our expense.  After two 20-mile round trips into Rapid and two hours on the phone with Customer Service and the Fraud Department, plus postponement of our departure date, we were reunited with our original phone number and our old phone.  Being able to have the same number on the same phone was important to us inasmuch as the phone company no longer offers heavy-duty devices that can survive being stepped on, sat on or having several sacks of groceries piled atop. 

All this nonsense made us a day late arriving in Murdo, South Dakota.  It was a blessing in disguise since there is nothing to see or do in Murdo beyond what we saw and did.  The premier attraction in Murdo is the Pioneer Auto Show and Antique Town.  The entry fee was substantial but the promotion promised an endless array of classic cars.  Unfortunately, there are so many of them crammed together in low-light barns that it was difficult to appreciate what we were seeing.  Most of the cars have not be been restored, at least not recently, and were perched on wooden blocks and/or flat tires.  Only two vehicles were enclosed in glass showcases, a motorcycle belonging to Elvis Presley and a Cord owned by the old-time movie cowboy, Tom Mix. 

We like to think of this little home-made beauty as the Lemon Pledgemobile.  You can’t very well take it to a car wash lest it warp so you would just have to keep it dusted.  Wonder what’s under the hood?  Not one but two 500 ci Cadillac engines.  There was a list of components nearby; by far the most interesting was the 5 gallons of Elmer’s Glue that it took to produce this beast.  The rest of us do-it-yourselfers just use duct tape.

But cars aren’t the only attraction.  There are plenty of old buildings to wander in and out of, including a general store, a church, a train depot and a one-room school house.  Everything smelled musty.

A quick drive around town led us to the four corners which sported a hand-made sign indicating a four-way stop and a farmers market that was to open at 5:00 p.m.  So shortly after 5:00 we went back to town to see what sort of produce might be had.  Nobody else showed up, including the farmers.  We went home to an early supper.

Our next stop was Tea, South Dakota which is a suburb of Sioux Falls.  That’s where Roger and Cathy spend their summers getting their grandkid fix and we were able to score a campsite fairly nearby so we could hang out for a few days and enjoy their company.  One muggy afternoon they took us in to pay homage to the falls on the Big Sioux River.  Due to plenty of rain, the falls were running fast and hard, making them about twice as wide as is usual for this time of year.  For some reason, I remember the water flowing the opposite direction the last time we visited but Cathy assured me that was faulty thinking.

Tea is home to a pair of nifty antique shops so we did a very thorough job of scouring through them in search of treasures.  Suffice it to say that I now have more eggcups to find shelving for and Howie seems to be starting a collection of glass shoes, chickens and hats.  We’ll have to shop for curio cabinets as soon as we get back to Geezer Gulch. 

Roger and Cathy had commitments to attend a family reunion out of town so we said our goodbyes and all went our separate ways.  Our way took us 50+ miles south to the town of Vermillion, home to the University of South Dakota.  What a pretty campus!  The main hall has been recreated to retain the character of the original but the East Hall is the original and a very substantial original at that.  A wide variety of trees shade the campus and line the residential streets nearby.  It’s fairly certain that Tom Brokaw is the most famous alumnus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The purpose of our visit to Vermillion was to tour the National Music Museum which we had learned about only recently.  Housed in a handsome Carnegie Library, the museum was founded in 1973 and owns a jaw-dropping number of historical instruments.  We were given iPods with a pre-recorded tour so that we could hear how the instruments we were looking at sounded in the hands (or lips) of talented musicians.  One can only wonder how the Stradivarius guitar would sound when played by a virtuoso like Willy Nelson.  Words cannot begin to describe all the treasures and low-light areas precluded decent photos but we urge you to check out the website and take the virtual tour if you find yourself with some spare time.

       

So so we bid adios to Siouxland, which our GPS likes to refer to as “Sigh-you-ex land”, not “soo-land”.  It’s such fun to take her places – she’s such good company and always good for a laugh.

We are on our way to some RV rallies in Wisconsin, which means we have to go across Minnesota.  That entails driving on what must surely be the worst roads in the United States.  I don’t know what they do with their tax money but they sure don’t spend it on infrastructure.  I’m not saying I-90 was a complete washboard but my pedometer did think I walked 8.5 miles on the short trip from Sioux Falls to Albert Lea.  And I was sitting down the whole time. 

And so now we are taking a brief respite at a fairly isolated campground near Spring Grove, Minnesota.  It feels a bit like living at the bottom of a quarry surrounded by hardwood forests, Amish farms, a babbling brook and a thousand screaming children who think playing miniature golf in a steady rain is good fun.  Broadcast television is spotty but PBS comes in loud and clear so we have endless cooking shows to watch, the phone signal is so weak we can’t even get phone calls from Verizon and the nearest grocery store is miles away.  This situation is due to change tomorrow when we pack up and head for civilization and The Dells.

Pueblo–Cheyenne–Lusk

Very rarely do we stay at KOA (one wag said it stands for Keep On Adding)  facilities.  For the most part, they are over-priced and crawling with children but sometimes we just have to bite the bullet and accept what’s convenient, safe and offers the amenities we require at any given time.  And that’s why we opted to stay at a KOA south of Pueblo – further south than we originally figured but at least it was handy to an easy-access fuel stop with good prices on diesel fuel.  On our first trip in to the city of Pueblo, we visited The Rosemount House, a late 19th-century mansion built by businessman John Thatcher for his wife Margaret and their four children.  Margaret had a thing for pink roses, hence the name of the estate.  Roses feature prominently in many of the furnishings and on the painted ceilings.  Photos are not permitted in the house so you’ll have to go to the website to admire the décor.  Unlike most similar museums, Rosemount is not decorated “in the style of the period”; nearly all the furnishings are original to the house when it was inhabited by the Thatcher family, including ceiling frescos, drapes and other such perishables.  The woodwork is nothing short of spectacular and includes some species of wood that simply aren’t available now.   It was one of the best museums of its type that we’ve seen.

Pueblo is situated on the Arkansas River (pronounced Ar-can-saw just like the state) and boasts a very handsome river walk.  Paddleboats are available for the hale and hearty while the less athletic among us can hire boats with pilots that don’t require a great deal of effort.  It was a blazing hot day so we opted to wander in and out of a few antique shops instead.  We tended to select the ones that were air-conditioned. 

We thought about driving to the town of Florence to sample their antique shops but decided against it and, for our second day, returned instead to Pueblo to scope out the library, the Goodwill and the remaining antique shops.  The Friends of the Pueblo Library used book store is a free-standing building that is bigger than a lot of libraries we’ve seen.  This book shop is so good that we actually made two visits and came away with a big stack of books.  I’m devoting this summer to reading Pulitzer Prize-winning novels and the Friends’ shop had many of them all conveniently arranged in one case so I snatched as many as the pocketbook would allow, concentrating on those I’m unlikely to find elsewhere.

While trolling through a crammed-to-the-rafters antique shop we bumped into Marcia, a friend from back in Geezer Gulch who is also a member of my Questers group and on the Friends’ board.  Small world, huh?  Happens all the time to RVers.  Actually, we knew we’d all be in Pueblo because I’d e-mailed her to suggest she visit Las Vegas on her way home and casually mentioned we’d be stopping in Pueblo.  Long story short, we made arrangements to meet in Pueblo for lunch on Sunday at a venerable Pueblo eatery called Gray’s Coors Tavern.  Somewhere along the line we’d heard that the restaurant has been featured on Guy Fieri’s show on the Food Network where presumably he sampled the restaurant’s most famous dish, The Slopper, but we could find no proof of this on the Internet.  Too bad – he’s really missing something.  The ambiance is nothing fancy but, my friends, The Slopper is just plain good food.  It’s hard to describe so perhaps you’d better check it out on the Web.  Recipes abound but the secret ingredient is the green chili.  Get that right and you are on your way to hog heaven.  While The Slopper may sound dangerous to the digestive tract, it isn’t, but you might want to take along your own side of Alka-Seltzer just in case.

It was overcast when we departed Pueblo but we didn’t encounter any rain.  Our route took us right smack through Denver, right past Mile High Stadium, and then along the Rocky Mountain Front and into the prairie lands of eastern Wyoming, our next stop being Cheyenne.  This was our third or fourth visit to Wyoming’s largest city and so we concentrated on hitting as many antique shops as we could.  We scored a goodly number of eggcups, leaving several lovelies behind which were seriously over-priced.  And the others that got left behind were ugly.  The clouds continued for a lot of our stay but we were spared any heavy T-storms or downpours which unfortunately hasn’t been the case for many areas just ahead of us.

Our next stop was Lusk, Wyoming which is in the eastern half of the state about halfway between Cheyenne and Rapid City.  It had been devastated with a serious flood just a few weeks ago.  Shops and homes near the railroad tracks were badly damaged and the bridge on Highway 18 which crosses the tracks had been washed out.  And that’s exactly the way we needed to go.  Fortunately a brief detour had been devised and we were well under the weight limit allowed so we didn’t have to go a long way out of our way.

There isn’t much to see or do in Lusk but the town does boast some pretty flamboyant characters from the past.  There was the good bad guy (or was he a bad good guy?) Tom Horn who was immortalized in a film of the same name starring Steve McQueen.  And of course Butch and Sundance spent some time in the neighborhood.  And then there was the more recent celebrity, Dell Burke, who operated a pleasure palace across the street from the railroad station.  The Yellow Hotel was demolished not long ago but Dell’s  reputation lingers.  Her feather boa decorates the Ladies’ Room at a local campground. 

We paid a visit to the Stagecoach Museum.  The Cheyenne-Black Hills Stage featured here in front of the museum is a replica but there’s a real one inside.  We were told the only other surviving stage from that route is in the Smithsonian.  Aside from the stagecoach, the museum features a two-head calf, a one-room school house, a general store and a very faded shirt commemorating the first Air Mail Service in the United States.  Niobrara County received the first Air Mail back in 1938.  We were fortunate enough to meet up with one of the museum’s directors who filled us in on all sorts of wonderful tidbits of information.  We were all stumped with the question of who starred in the Tom Horn movie but fortunately a pair of computer savvy volunteers was able to Google the answer for us.  Now if we had a smart phone…..

Bidding farewell to Lusk after only one full day, we headed north and then east toward Rapid City.  The sky was clear, the road lightly trafficked and there was plenty of pretty scenery to see.  This section of Wyoming and South Dakota is grassland, undulating like waves on an ocean, broken up with streams and gullies, stands of trees here and there and enormous vistas so that you can watch the cloud shadows develop and fade  And then, off in the distance to the left, lurk the Black Hills.  And they’ll be featured in our next report.