"It's not the Journey, it's the Destination..."

Bullcrap.
It's totally the destintation! If it were the journey, I'd just do laps around Maryville for 8 hours and call it a day.

However, one of the things I love to do when traveling, is to take pic of the weird stuff along the road that you find. It's kinda like Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations, Lana style. More like Roadside distractions.

Most of our trips start with a drive through the wind turbine fields just west of us. I LOVE this place it makes me happy for some odd reason. Have you seen these things? They are HUGE. *one* blade is almost the length of a football field. I find it amazing that we're just pulling "free" energy right out of the air.

Awesome.

Sometimes I think, this would have been the perfect place for my husband to have proposed, but *that's not what happened* Men and romance. ugh.

Somewhere along the interstate, some gimmicky thing to get you to visit some Pioneer town, or autoville, or craptacular "museum".

It didn't work.

A palace.

Made of corn.

Actually, it's kinda cool. Not destination cool, but a passing through town so you might as well drive by kinda cool.

We actually stayed our first night in this town (Mitchell SD) as we passed through.

It's also where we started noticing this phenomenon. The casino combination.
Gas Station/cheesy little casino
Gas station/DQ/cheesy little casino
Laundromat/cheesy little casino

South Dakota is a no property tax state so I guess they try to make up for it with casinos? It was odd and most of the casinos looked more like adult book stores or strip clubs. Kinda icky.


We also saw this times 100:

I had never heard of this place, but soon, we started seeing all these signs. Annoying signs, every half mile for THREE HUNDRED miles! Of course, we finally decided that we needed to stop at Wall Drug after seeing all those signs. In the end, it was just some giant souvenir type gimicky shop. We had some ice cream, and Gene and I did a photo booth, and then we left.

I was never so glad to stop seeing those stupid signs!

Sadly, I saw dozens of these. I could totally picture these houses in their heyday out in the middle of the grasslands.

Ok, what?

Lots of metal sculptures that you can pay to see.
Uh.

No thanks.

See that dot on the horizon about 49 miles away? Yeah, that's where we're going, and then plus that 10 times.

I found the topography of SD very strange with lots of rolling hills and grasslands. It seems you would drive forever and not even see a cow. Farm houses miles apart. There's no driving 8 minutes to get a gallon of milk, so I will stop complaining now kthxbai.

Finally, at the end of a lonnnnng trip, we made it to our lovely temporary home, aka, Holiday Inn. I was never so happy to see a duvet cover.

Something tells me Gene was happy to be "home" too.

{more coming soon, I'll try not to bore you with 900 vacation "slides" type presentation}