I was sad not to see neighboring Iowa City – supposedly it’s nice, but our schedule beckoned us forward. I reflected on the lives of truckers and touring bands as we re-entered I-80; what must it be like to spend so much of your life on interstates without getting to see the sights? Frustrating, I’d imagine.

Today the plan was to traverse almost 700 miles, the longest drive of the whole trip. We drove across Iowa, turned north for a couple of hundred miles, passed the smokestacks of downtown Sioux City, and found ourselves in South Dakota. There were fireworks shops at the Iowa-SD border, which eventually gave way to avalanches of roadside signs for kitschy tourist attractions. Some, like Wall Drug, the Corn Palace and "The Rushmore-Borglum Story" ("He Carved The Mountain!"), appeared every few miles, despite the fact that the actual attractions were hundreds of miles away. Many of these signs were actually freight cars, painted and left along the highway.  I've never seen another stretch of road so willing to line itself with tacky billboards, let alone exploit its state's history and Native American past for a few tourist dollars.  (And yes, this includes my beloved NJ roads.)  At least they were for local businesses rather than sneakers or cigarettes.

There were so many of these road signs that I began keeping count. Here are the ones I counted within mile markers 281 and 192.  (I'm sure I'm missing a few.)

But of course Wall Drug held the most allure based on the sheer volume of signage alone. They appeared every couple of miles literally from the moment we crossed into South Dakota. Most signs listed specific attractions ("Great Hot Coffee 5 Cents," "Western Art," "Veterinary Supplies," "Homemade Donuts," "FREE Ice Water") or cute slogans ("Have You Dug Wall Drug?," "Save Energy – Shop At Wall Drug," "Wallways In Season"), with the Wall Drug logo always at the bottom. There were signs boasting of media coverage in Time, International Herald Tribune and Western Horseman, and alerting travelers to Wall Drug signs spotted in London and Kenya. I wonder if Caught In Flux will get its own sign once the Wall Drug management sees this article. Failing that honor, I invented a couple of new slogans that Wall Drug should feel free to use:

• FEELING SINISTER? STOP AT WALL DRUG
• W-A-L-L-D-R-U-G IS THE HEAVENLY OPTION

I know, probably too Anglophile for the Badlands. Anyway, I digress even more than usual. Before long we approached Mitchell, SD, home of the Corn Palace. Callie had passed the Corn Palace on her last trip through this stretch of America, but didn’t have time to stop. Me, I vaguely remembered hearing of it. We turned off the highway, drove past an enormous concrete smiling boy in front of the Happy Chef restaurant and into a small downtown area dotted with little houses, souvenir shops and small mini-casinos. (These little video gambling parlors existed everywhere we visited.) The Corn Palace turned out to be right there on the Norman Rockwellish main street.

Originally built in the late 1800s in celebration of the annual harvest, the Corn Palace is today an exhibit hall and a shrine to agriculture. Every year, a local artist decorates the entire exterior – four walls, a marquee, the spires and roof – using nothing but ears and husks of corn. We’d arrived just in time to see the 2000 exhibit, titled "WWW.MILLENNIUM.CORN." Inside there were pictures of past Corn Palace designs and various maize-related exhibits, as well as a huge auditorium  (also decorated with corn). It was actually a tidy and tastefully-decorated place, though it smelled overwhelmingly of syrup and popcorn. We had a short look around and hit the gift shop across the street for the obligatory postcards and refrigerator magnets. On our way back to the highway, I noticed two additional concrete animals: a pair of bulls in front of neighboring motels, each staring threateningly at the other.

corn palace

The sun began to set. Unfortunately most of the best road signs aren’t illuminated, which took a lot of the fun out of the drive. We listened to a great NPR program about an alienated teen’s audio diary, and pulled into the evening’s lodging, the Super 8 in Wall, SD. We snuck the cats in literally under the front desk clerk’s nose and went to bed hungry. There just isn’t much for the hungry traveler to eat in Wall after 7 pm.