Day 2, part 2

We have arrived in Albany, CA, safe and sound. Children and wife and M-I-L all here and suitably exhausted.

This puts me two days behind on updates. Mostly due to lack of 3G coverage in the AT&T network as well as the obvious fact that casinos don't give you free wifi in their rooms as they don't want you to be in the room.

So, I left off when we branched off of I-90 for the 35 mile Badlands loop in South Dakota. You come out of the Badlands loop at around Exit 110 on I-90; we backtracked to Exit 116 to see a Minuteman III missile in a silo:




"That thing will suck the paint off your house and give your family a permanent orange afro!"

Anyone who's ever been to South Dakota will know about Wall Drug. As I mentioned, South Dakota is filled with national monuments and tourists traps wanting to be national monuments (Sturgis, Crazy Horse, the aforementioned Corn Palace, etc). Perhaps the epitome of the tourist trap for tourist trap's sake is Wall Drug. There are literally thousands of road signs for this store.



It is ostensibly a drug store, but it has expanded to be a veritable shopping mall crammed with all of the tchotchkes and Westernalia that one could ever want. Of course we stopped by, bought a trinket or two, split a burger, and we were on our way.

At Black Hills, we came upon the vast Ellsworth Air Force Base and branched off to the southwest, into some ominous looking clouds. Through some mild thunderstorms. About 30 minutes southwest, we came across the next tourist trap:




It started to rain as we left, so we made a dash to the car and got some nice pictures of Rushmore getting wet.



From Rushmore, we could navigate directly to our destination in California, no more off-course waypoints or big detours or such. The nav pointed us southwest onto a South Dakota state road and soon we were in the middle of nowhere, headed towards Wyoming.



The one thing that had started to become clear is that vast swaths of this great country are The Middle of Frickin' Nowhere (TMOFN). I'd say that it dwarfs more common designations, such as the Eastern Seabord or New England or California. We had tasted bits of the TMOFN in South Dakota, but from South Dakota, through much of Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, we may have well been in the high steppes of Kazhakastan or Mongolia. Sheep, antelope, cattle, a few fences, and not much else. I'd almost started to expect some Bactrian camels. I know it sounds city-slicker cliche, but it was impressive to watch 3G in Minnesota drop off to EDGE in most of South Dakota, to only occasional GPRS as we went further west. It's amazing to see how dependent we've become on a technology that we didn't use 3 years ago. For most of the time past the Badlands, we were lucky to have any signal on either AT&T or Sprint. If the car had broken down, we would have had to walk our ass -- imagine that!

Anyway, we drove and drove, through impressive thunderstorms including a hailstorm. Shortly after punching through the storm line, we stopped for gas in Lusk, Wyoming, and made it a night in Casper. We could have gone longer but we were unclear about the weather, and we knew that we had another 200 miles on state roads ahead of us.

Day 2 was probably our best day on the trip in terms of stops, scenery, and overall driving enjoyment. The South Dakota and Wyoming TMOFN would certainly be a nice place to return and spend some time. Just don't count on cell data service.