The Kirks

We stayed in the middle of the South Dakota Badlands at a small guest ranch called the Circle View Ranch. It’s run by the nicest couple in the USA called Phil and Amy Kruse and we had a great time relaxing there. The Badlands are yet another area of fabulous geological formations which are so unearthly that there have been a number of sci-fi films shot there.

The ranch is next to the tiny town of Interior,SD. It’s very hot and very quiet. We saw tumbleweeds rolling down Main St! Here’s the “city jail”.

We explored Wall, SD home of Wall Drug an incredibly kitch store which is one of the biggest tourist magnets in the area. The history is quite interesting though and they really do still sell coffee for 5c a cup. There’s also some weirdly interesting signs in this part of the world. Spelling can be a bit random

and in a country which combines odd businesses like Casino and Second Hand Furniture Store this must be the strangest combination of businesses….

We decided to split the 950 mile journey to Chicago into two bits. Day one was a relatively short 300 mile drive to Sioux Falls. Or a “Grandma” as we call it. (It’s 300 miles from Cambridge to Grandma and Grandpa’s house near Berwick so a “Grandma” is a useful unit of distance).

Once you cross the Missouri River, it’s just corn all the way. Huge rolling fields of maize stretching as far as the eye can see and going on for 300 miles. Since we had some time, we turned off at Mitchell, SD to see the Corn Palace which was truly awful. It used to be a huge building made out of corn cobs. Now it’s a concrete convention center with some corn cobs stuck on the front. Sioux Falls was a bit disappointing. The falls themselves are kind of uninspiring and the Sioux River is pretty polluted. We did some shopping in a mall and then just slept.

The following day it was up early for the “two grandma” drive to Chicago. Minnesota was, once again, just corn. Lots of little identical “toy town” farms amid the rolling fields. This was a long drive and as we started to get closer to Chicago, everything I’ve written in a previous blog about the driving being enjoyable evaporated as the roads suddenly got busier and harder to negotiate. However, we made it without incident and spent a night in Chicago. We then dropped off our trusty Chevrolet Trailblazer (not Tahoe as I said earlier) after 3400 miles of driving or 11 “Grandmas” and flew to New York on the consistently and reliably awful American Airlines.