Wednesday, June 2, 2010

"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.


06-01-trip1

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.


06-01-trip2

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

It didn't work.






06-01-trip3

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.






06-01-trip4

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





06-01-trip5

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:

walldrug

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!



06-01-trip9

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





06-01-trip20

Ok, what?

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

No thanks.






06-01-trip8

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.

06-01-trip6




06-01-trip7

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}

5 comments:

Tracy said...

I love your 900 vacation slides teehee. It is just harder to comment on them all.
I saw that corn building on TV.
There are people fighting the wind turbines here in town, funny thing is the people that are fighting it live by the airport and are afraid that they are going to be to loud LOL.

Tracy said...

Oh my dughter has been asked to shoot a wedding and is nervous (to say the least).
I was wondering if she could contact you with some questions she may have?
Thank you

Janice Grinyer said...

lol the interstate is not the cats meow for pictures, just oddities! Good photo capture of that :). We usually take hwy 212 as there is not much traffic at all, and its a two laner, with little towns like Gettysburg and Faith,stopping for gas and ice-cream drumsticks...Have to make sure you are always gassed up though!

Cant wait to "hear" and see more!

LisaDay said...

Abandoned houses always make me sad. There are lots of stories there.

Enjoy your trip.

LisaDay

Anonymous said...

My husband's family comes from Chamberlain, SD, which you would have driven right by after Mitchell. (Love the Corn Palace! :)) Chamberlain is worth a drive into town if you go that way again - beautiful river views, quaint little town.

Related Posts with Thumbnails