Part One of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Two of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Three of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Four of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Five of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Six of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Seven of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Eight of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Nine of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Ten of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Eleven of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Twelve of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Thirteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Fourteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Fifteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Sixteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Seventeen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Eighteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Nineteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Twenty of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Twenty One of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Twenty Two of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Twenty Three of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Twenty Four of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Twenty Five of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Twenty Six of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
So we hit the road again, heading East out of Rapid City SD. After awhile we saw our first sign.......
In true Burma Shave style, we started passing the signs at regular intervals.....
Oh look! Only 42 miles to the town of Wall SD......
And a bit later we hit the sign for "Entering Wall Drug Country".
Only 11 more miles to go.....
Exit 109 for Wall Drugs just ahead.
More Wall Drug signs at the exit, one behind the other.....
And then we arrived at the famed Wall Drug Store, in business since 1931.
Lots of kitschy stuff, like carved statues of totem poles, native Americans........
I made a new "friend" though she wasn't very friendly but maybe me making bunny ears behind her had something to do with her disposition. lol
Hubs standing next to a strange cowboy.........also not friendly.
This place which started out as a regular old drug store became over time a tourist destination. There were so many little shops and cubby holes in the building, each hawking a different category of wares. A Jewelry Emporium? Hmmm....not some place I'd go to buy jewelry.
Hubs in the bookstore shop....of course! lol
Me making more "friends". This one was armed so stay back fellas!
Hubs getting a little too friendly with a scantily clad hoochie mama, saloon gal......
We dropped a few dollars here for souvenirs and headed back outside to see this........
Those bikers we left behind at Deadwood, Rushmore and Rapid City had caught up with us!!
A bison keeping watch over an awning at Wall Drug. We didn't see the giant Jackalope here because the place was getting very crowded and Hubs didn't feel like driving around the parking lots looking for it so no photo op with it. sigh.
And here's a dinosaur statue along the highway leaving Wall Drug......
You probably can't make this photo out but it's a field of sunflowers.
More silos along the road heading East.....
We stayed on Route 14 toward Pierre, SD
While in Pierre I learned how the locals pronounce it. It's not PEE-AIR like you would think, but pronounced PEER. My take on this is that it's so darn cold here most of the year that the residents call it PEER because it doesn't require you to open your mouth as much as saying PEE-AIR. lolz
Somewhere along desolate stretches of route 14 we encountered a wild turkey after it had crossed the highway. Had we been packing a firearm we would have had a nice turkey dinner but alas, hotels don't have facilities to dress and cook a turkey brought in by someone staying the night. ;-)
More straight stretches of highway with nothing to see.........
Passing a spot on the map named "Hayes" named for early white settles John and William Hayes.
Being an agricultural region there were crops everywhere. But I was surprised to see so many fields of sunflowers.
We saw this statue with an American flag somewhere between Hayes and Pierre SD. Couldn't make out what it was or about online. Anyone out there know?
We drove into Fort Pierre.....
...Before making it to Pierre SD proper. Population 14,032 in 2017. Capital of South Dakota and county seat of Hughes County.
As we drove to our motel for the evening we passed this business sign.......
They must get a lot of Hail out this way or the universe was tuned into our trip, what with our death defying 4 wheeler adventure back in Ashton Idaho with Kim, Joel and his sister and brother in-law.. I sent Kim this photo as it made me chuckle. lolz
Hubs probably went out and got us some dinner which we ate at the motel and it was off to bed after another long day.
**I'll be out of commission for a couple of days but should be back up and running by Friday(medical stuff). I had this post ready in the chute so enjoy. 8-)
Part One of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Two of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Three of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE Part Four of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
And the topography took on a decidedly different turn.
After a while we came to town........
The site of "Carhenge"!
I apologize for the sound quality but it was quite gusty that day.
This America's answer to Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in England is mathematically/geometrically the same as the famous antiquity in the United Kingdom.
The man who decided to build this used junked American built cars instead. American Druids come here to celebrate the Solstices and Equinoxes.
And unlike the one in England, it's not cordoned off so you can't get close to it, you can wander all around and through the grounds to your heart's content.
They also had other quirky art installations made from metal. Like this fish.
We didn't get close enough to these art pieces to figure out what they were. Remember it was blazing hot out that Summer!
This was cool. In their small gift and snack shop they had a wall with every state's license plate on it.
The lady manning the shop said Alliance NE was dead center in the path of the Solar Eclipse that blanketed North America that Summer. We were also traveling westward that Summer and just a week or so ahead of it's arrival in most every place we stopped. The site was expecting about 15,000 people camping in the fields surrounding Carhenge on the date of that Solar Eclipse. Not liking crowds I was glad to get a t-shirt and move on NOW! lol
Oh look! A sign for another Runza restaurant. lol
A sign for Buffalo Bill's Ranch. We didn't have time to stop there in North Platte, Nebraska but you can read about it HERE.
OMG! How did we get this close to Hershey?! Oh wait, this one isn't in PA. ;-)
We stopped for the night at a little hole-in-the-wall motor inn called the Meadowlark Motor Inn outside of Bridgeport, Nebraska. Nothing fancy but they had a restaurant and a liquor store attached to it. lol
Home Sweet Home for one night. You know you are in a part of the country where they get a lot of snow when your room has both an outside facing door(shown here)plus a backdoor in the room facing an interior corridor that feeds out to a central entrance/exit.
Hubs went into the liquor store(that's where you checked in)and found a great deal on a bottle of bourbon or whiskey or something of that ilk.
We also got a discount coupon for breakfast the next morning. The clerk there also told us that if we lost our room key(??)after the store and restaurant closed up for the night there would be no one to let us back in our room. So once we had dinner we stayed in the room.
It was by no means a 3 star motor inn(do they even give stars for motor inns?)but it was roomy by modern motel standards, had a bathroom, a bed and a tv. What more could you ask for?
Thus ended Day Five of the Journey Across the Country.
