Day 2, part 1

We just pulled into Reno safe and sound. 922 miles. We're gonna find a cheap prime rib and take some pictures and maybe play some blackjack and crash.

Here's the first part of day 2.

In Rochester everyone at the hotel, it seemed, was there for medical related reasons. Conversation at check-in and at breakfast rotated around spots on lungs and heart failure. The clerk had just finished discussing CT scans with the dude in front of me.

The Odyssey in the Odyssey would continue west.



Well, we escaped without any questions about the survivability of stage IIB lung cancer. A quick jaunt into downtown to see the object of everyone's pilgrimage:



And then on the road. More farmland through southern Minnesota, including impressive wind farms. Quite a ways to go before our big waypoint, Mount Rushmore.

n
Eventually, we reached South Dakota. We tried to get a picture of the Minnesota sign because we passed into Minnesota sometime late at night the night before.




South Dakota is filled with national monuments, striking scenery, and tourist traps. These often overlap. But there are quite a few notorious tourist traps. We just drove past the first one, the World's Only Corn Palace.



More farmland until we crossed the Missouri River in Mitchell, SD. From there, the landscape began to break into more rolling hills.




From there, we made our detour into the Badlands. We took too many pictures there to post here, so I put them on Facebook over here.



I'll post part 2 in a bit.