Category: Day 0 trip
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Day 315 – Duluth, MN
There’s a strange cosmic connection between Seattle, WA and Duluth, MN or at least Minnesota generally. A large contingent of Duluthians have moved to Seattle including the core of my long standing Burning Man camp, Buddhacamp. And likewise I’ve known more than one Seattlite to be drawn to Minnesota. There was even a Duluth…
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Day 314 – The SPAM Museum (Austin, MN)
Where I grew up, SPAM was considered a ghetto food. I mean I grew up poor on bologna sandwiches but my mom wouldn’t buy SPAM. I probably started eating it as a backpacking food in highschool where I developed a taste for the salty savory treat. (Not to be confused with the SPAM knockoff…
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Day 313 – The Grotto of Redemption (South Bend, IA)
The Grotto of Redemption Believed to be the largest grotto in the world, Father Paul Dobberstein, a German immigrant, began building the shrine in 1912 after promising the Virgin Mary to build it if she healed him from an illness. Construction continued continuously for the next 42 years. A grotto is either a natural…
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Day 313 – Porter Sculpture Park (Montrose, SD)
Porter Sculpture Park About 30 miles west of Sioux Falls in the middle of corn fields near Montrose, South Dakota, you pass the silhouette of a 60 foot, 25 ton iron bull’s head welded together from railroad tie plates. We found this place online for roadside attractions. If we hadn’t we would have driven…
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Day 313 – The Corn Palace (Mitchell, SD)
The Corn Palace The Corn Palace is a concert hall / sports center in Mitchell, SD, that is decorated with elaborate murals constructed from different colors of dried corn. Each year a new theme is chosen and murals designed to match the them. This year the theme was “homegrown” with murals featuring people and…
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Day 311 – The Badlands
For over 11,000 years the badlands region of South Dakota has been inhabited by native people. The soft sedimentary layers of soil once under a body of water are easily eroded, currently at the rate of 1 inch per year, which leads to deep winding valleys and buttes striped with color. Originally authorized in…
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Day 310 – Wall Drug and Dinosaur Park
There’s not much to see on the drive across South Dakota. Fortunately enterprising folks have been constructing roadside kitsch since the newly created National Parks drew visitors from all over after the turn of the century. Today there’s a lot less of them and the remaining sites are often in disrepair, but still some…
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Day 304 to 309 – Driving through the Black Hills: Devil’s Tower, Deadwood, Mount Rushmore
We drove into the Black Hills setting off from Little Big Horn. An island of Ponderosa pine covered granite mountains and hills rising up out of a sea of flat farmland on all sides. The granite was pushed up as part of the same geological events that created the Rocky Mountains and the area…
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Day 301 – St. Xavier, Montana – “My lands are where my dead lie buried.”
I’m sitting in a small hunting cabin in St. Xavier, Montana in the middle of the Crow reservation, population: 83. We dipped down off of I90 at Billings across a dry landscape and flat farmlands. We hadn’t given it much thought. An AirBnB in a convenient location with room to park the Rialta and…
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Day 295 – Grand Teton National Park
[Mile 1,820 to 2,200 ] Directly below Yellowstone National Park sits Grand Teton National Park. The two parks nearly touch but are separated by a narrow stretch called the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway. Exiting the south entrance there’s not even an entry gate into Teton. Only the familiar park sign. The…