Day Five: Hill City, SD

What an adventure we had on the road today!  Did you know that the stretch of I-90 between Sioux Falls and Rapid City is riddled full of strange attractions?  The theme of the day was definitely "we're too cheap to actually pay for this," but I did occasionally convince Colin that we should pull off the freeway to see something ridiculous.  Here were some of our favorites:

How creepy is this?  If you watched Hoarders this week, then you'll understand why our first reaction was, "this is a crazy lady mecca!"

My absolute favorite stop on the trip!  This is not only the largest, but also the only corn palace in the world!  For miles and miles we saw different billboards for this 8th wonder of the world, and the whole time we said, "it can't actually be built of corn!"  And guess what...it is!!!  They spend $130,000 each year to rebuild the exterior and change out the corn pictures.  I would highly recommend clicking on this picture to get the closer look.  This was the first stop on the "we're to cheap to actually pay for this" tour of South Dakota.


Attached to the Corn Palace was Mitchell, SD's city hall, of course.  While the palace is rebuilt at a ridiculous cost each year, the city hall appears to be made out of particle board.  If nothing else, these Dakotans sure do have their priorities in line. 


This is Cornelius, the Corn Palace mascot.  Not only does he have his own security detail (originally installed to protect president Obama on his visit in 2008), he has two faces, one on each side so that you can be taking picture, while another crazy family takes one on the other side. 

Aside from these awesome stops, we also made our way to the Petrified Forest and Wall Drugs, neither of which we actually went into/payed for.  Now for the more traditional tourist destinations:


After getting through plains and the badlands, we entered the Black Hills.  To say this area is surprisingly beautiful would be an understatement.  This is one of the tunnels carved out of a hill. 


The next stop along the "we're too cheap to actually pay for this" tour was Mt. Rushmore.  Sure, it's only $11, but when you can get such a good picture from the side of the road, why waste the cash and the time it takes to fight the crowds?  All in all, I'd say it was a little anticlimactic.  Did you know it was built by a Ku-Klux-Klan member? Yeah me either.


The Washington profile from another viewing area in the national forest.

This is my favorite picture from our Mt. Rushmore adventure...

And this is Colin's, because Washington is picture crashing right in between us :)

Colin in his natural element.

Even though you can't see it in this picture, all of those rocks around me were super sparkly.  Therefore, I deemed this my princess hill.

Our third stop on the WTCTAPFT tour was the crazy horse monument.  We actually had to drive into the park, tell them we weren't going to pay $20, and then drive in far enough while we were "turning around" to see the monument and get a picture.  This one was even more anticlimactic than Mt. Rushmore, but once if it's finished it's gonna be awesome.

Aside from the sites, this has without a doubt been our favorite destination so far, simply because of the hotel.  We've learned a great lesson at this Best Western Plus - there's a huge difference between a nice family hotel where people vacation, and a "staycation" hotel where people actually live.  Last night we stayed at a Super 8 in Sioux Falls that shared a parking lot with one of the sketchiest apartments we've ever seen.  Here, we are totally isolated in a nice little nook of the black hills, so the hotel is really more like a little mini resort, and worth every penny.  The saddest part is, it's only about $15 more than the Super 8 was. 

Besides all of the other awesome accommodations this hotel has (including a Seattle's Best coffee shop in the lobby!), it has a restaurant where Colin was able to get his first frosty mug beer in over 4 months.  That's a look of pure joy you see there.


The final thing that happened today will go down in history as the night Colin predicted the Apocalypse.  If you take a look up there at that happy beer picture, you'll see that it's bright and sunny out.  Now take a little peek at the photo below - they were taken about 10 minutes apart, and this wasn't even as dark as it got. Colin noticed that the clouds were moving in opposite directions (which is totally weird), and started talking about the end of the world.  Then, the rain, wind, and giant hail started.  This was all followed by severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings.  What an end to an exciting day!  Things have calmed down now, but we're in a watch zone until midnight.  Hopefully the worst has has already passed, but who knows. 


Tomorrow is our longest driving day at a whopping 8 hours (which between bathroom and gas station stops will probably be more like 9.5).  We'll be stopping in Bozeman, MT, but don't really have anything planned while we're there.  Hopefully we find something billboard worthy along the way! :)

Day trip to Massachusetts take two!

On our second day of Massachusetts adventuring, we headed out to Springfield - the city of firsts.  Just for fun you should look up Springfield, MA's wikipedia page.  The number of things invented in this town is just ridiculous.  What first drew us to Springfield was a conversation we had with a bartender in Glens Falls.  She had shared with us that it was her grandson's birthday, so she was taking him to the MA city for the weekend to visit the Dr. Seuss Memorial Gardens.  Upon hearing this I was instantly devastated that I hadn't heard of it earlier, and beyond sad that we'd run out of time to go ourselves.  "Luckily," the navy must have been listening, and granted us the opportunity to visit! (Silver lining, anyone?)

After some research we found out that they have what they call a museum "quadrangle," where you pay one flat fee ($12.50 a person, or $10.75 with military discount) to visit five museums in one day.  Of course we couldn't pass up a deal like this, and it made driving an hour just to see statues of Dr. Seuss characters more reasonable.  

Being a Green Eggs and Ham enthusiast, a picture with Sam-I-am was the highlight of the trip for me, but it was all pretty amazing.  The statues are excellent, and watching the excited kids run around the main characters of their favorite books is a great way to spend the afternoon.  As for the museums themselves, we only actually visited two - because of time, and because one was closed for repairs.  The Science/Natural history combo museum was by far our favorite.  It started out a little shaky with some rough exhibits of taxidermied animals, but by the end we more than enjoyed our time there. 

Life size T-Rex in the dinosaur exhibit!

The second museum we visited was the art museum.  It was definitely less than stellar.  Our biggest complaints were the lack of original art (nearly everything in their main room was a replica of the original piece), the lack of definition between Japanese and Chinese exhibits (they were mixed in all together, without information cards to let us know what was what), and that the majority of the museum was under construction until 2014!  The highlight was actually the architecture and detailed woodwork of the building itself.  Since one museum was closed all together (the Connecticut Valley History museum that houses the actual Dr. Seuss Exhibit :( ), and the art museum was pretty torn apart, we probably would have been upset had the tickets cost any more. 

Since we were starving and the regular art museum had major shortcomings, we decided to skip the modern art museum and find somewhere to eat.  Unfortunately, Springfield was majorly a little rougher around the edges than we had expected, and nearly everything in town was either closed or boarded up, so we went out on a limb and decided to stop in Hartford to eat on our way home instead!

Colin throwing up his "spud" gang sign :)

The only thing we really knew about Hartford is what we had heard on the news, which was gangs, gangs, gangs, and more gangs.  Nearly every time we turn it on (both in CT and NY) there is something about gang violence in Hartford, but we figured there had to be some good parts somewhere.  After a quick check of my foursquare app on my brand new iphone (woo!), we decided to eat at a hamburger restaurant called Plan B.  We figured it was fitting considering this was our literal "plan B" for the day.  Not to mention the reviews were nothing short of "this is the best burger I've ever had" etc. etc. 

After sitting down to order our plan b burgers, we found that those reviews were more than accurate.  These burgers are so good they could turn even the strictest vegetarians back to meat (I'm looking at you, Ms. Ross!).  Not only do they make their own ground beef in house, but they also use all natural free range meat (see picture below), and it definitely pays off.  We were more than pleasantly surprised.  It was definitely a risk we were glad we had taken. 

That pretty much concludes our memorial day weekend!  We took today to catch up on some reading and relax before closing out the evening with Kung Fu Panda 2 (Colin loves him some Kung Fu Panda).  It's getting so warm here that we actually had to use the AC in our room today, which is something we definitely didn't pack for, and the cat's surely weren't ready for (as seen in the picture below :D), but we're still loving the sunshine.  Here's to hoping this week yields some answers about our future!! Keep your fingers crossed!

Click in to see more pictures of us frolicking around the Dr. Seuss gardens!