April 6 - StonefacedSouth Dakota is primarily known for one thing and one thing only: those great big president heads blasted into stone with dynamite. Can't blame them, if I had great big president heads blasted with dynamite, I'd market the living daylight out of them. So we headed to Mount Rushmore that day.
I'd always had this vague impression that Mt Rushmore is this sort of roadside attraction where you drive along the mountain road and suddenly bam, presidents around the curve. But we can't have that here, can we now? There were slews of giftshops and restaurants and motels for miles leading up to the monument, and then we paid an arm and a leg to get parking. (Someone else's arm and leg. I'm after all not that unreasonable.) And then went past another slew of shops to the viewing platform.
It's nice, I'll give them that. Heard somewhere that the original idea was to make full-size presidents but they ran out of money and general world peace (construction stopped as WWII rolled along) so they were left with the heads. It kinda shows. Lincoln is pretty blocky. On the bright side, the completed monument might've looked a bit awkward, since Jefferson gives Washington no personal space whatsoever.
Jefferson: Heeeey. George. Geooorge.
Washington: Dude. Not cool. Stoppit.
Roosevelt: I'MA KEEL YOU ALL
Lincoln: Hey guys? Guys? I'm all alone over here, guys D: We also bought a puzzle. And managed to fit it in the car without effort. I'm considering a follow-up career as a Vegas magician.
On the way back, we stopped at a few more promising-looking roadside attractions, but they were all closed for the season. We did, however, get to hear about the Badlands, that're apparently about an hour's drive from Mt Rushmore.
Me: "The wut now?"
Fraze: "Aw heck yeah Badlands we need to do that."
And so we did. A longish drive later, the prairie suddenly ran out and turned into a huge lumpy rocky hole in the ground, and we adventured our way into the campground. At least they had something resembling a bathroom. I call that luxury.
April 7 - Up the WallThe Badlands are nice and all, but we decided not to trail around them too long. They look their best when viewed from above, but wandering around in them is likely to have less of a view, plus we wanted to press on.
So we went shopping instead.
Okay, so we fell victim to marketing. The Badlands are off the town of Wall, and most of that town is employed in Wall Drug. They had billboards and signs up in every direction to Wall for a good fifty miles, amounting to a good thousand signs. We got curious enough to check it out, and it's actually pretty awesome. It's effectively a mall, but an oldie-time Wild West type of mall with a maze of pathways leading between the stores. Got a buffalo burger from there. Fraze got doughnuts.
Hit the road proper way too late, drove a lot. Were bored. Drove some more. It was mostly flat. South Dakota has its pretty bits, but is primarily flat. At one point I noted that we were about to roll over to seven thousand miles, and with nothing else to do, we awaited to finally see the fabled moment (since we'd kept missing it the last six times it rolled over a thousand).
We did get to see it. And it was awesome. We cheered.
Fraze: "This was probably more lame than cheering for New Year's."
Hunty: "Nah uh, it's actually less lame. You have no merit in New Year's, it happens with or without your input. This here, this is something we
did."
Fraze: "Yeah, but 7000 is just a number. It could just as well be 9786 miles and we could cheer for that."
Hunty: "I suppose. But, well, there's something to be said about neat numbers. (We'd discussed Colorado being the Centennial State just earlier that day.) Mankind as a whole seems to be geared towards neat rounded things."
Fraze: "Boobies."
*long, heavy pause of silence*
Hunty: "And thus he sums up the entire mankind in one word."
April 8 - The what now?Drove a lot, got to Minneapolis, went to bed, the end.
...what?
No, really, that was the day. Told you it was a long boring stretch across the North. On the bright side, this day marked the end of that stretch as we got to Fraze's family friends' place in Minneapolis and could enjoy a bit of civilization once more.
April 9 - More shopping!We do that a lot. I don't even like shopping. In our defense, this wasn't just any mall. This was Mall of America, on account of us being in Minneapolis. This entire day was dedicated to going around that mall.
And we did. Got food at Panda Express (my first time there), went through this awesome mirror maze, wandered around seeing things and bought a few things and you know how malls work, I don't have to paint you a picture. It was a pretty neat mall. Among other things, it has an amusement park, a minigolf course and a wedding chapel. Not sure if you can actually get married in the latter, but they'll sure as heck get you a minister.
Yay mirror maze! When we got back, Fraze dragged me to the backyard for this glorious American thing called s'mores. Which I'd never had until that point. (I'm a foreign heathen, remember.) We'd had smoresmakings in the cars for the past thousand-or-so miles and never had the right sort of campsite for it. That day we finally got around to it. And they were delicious.
When our hosts went to bed, we went to the basement level we got to occupy and I dragged Fraze to this glorious Estonian thing called a sauna. Which he'd never been to until that point. (He's a foreign heathen, remember.) The owners of the house usually use it at around 160 degrees, which is cold in my book. Really, I've been to a 160-degree sauna. I got cold. So I was all "this isn't how we do things around here" and fired it all the way up to 200. Didn't go higher than that, unfortunately.
And it was
wonderful. (It'd been way too long since I'd last been to a sauna, usually went at my grandparents' and they sold their cottage with the sauna a number of years back.)
April 10 - Ninjas will be shot on sightLeft Minneapolis, drove to Madison, WI, met Crystal, the end.
...whoever said that I have a textwalling problem?
Crystal lives in an apartment surprisingly close to Madison's Capitol Hill, which made me kinda uneasy about parking. She claimed up and down that nobody's ever towed from the parking lot next to her house. To be fair, we didn't get towed, but I maintain that we just got lucky.
Still, we got to her place and had pumpkin bread. It wasn't poisoned. She must be losing her touch. (Not the touch in cooking, however, it was bloody good bread.)
The fabled two-headed ninjapirate.
"Did you poison my food?"
"Did you poison my
food?" April 11 - Downtown DairylandLike all boring and respectable adults, Crystal had work that day and disappeared from the apartment at around midnight. Okay, maybe later than that, but anytime before 11 a.m. is stupidly early in my book. Whereas Fraze and I are lazy slobs touring the country like the homeless vagrants we are, so we got up before noon and went to town to hunt for food.
Madison has a lovely downtown.There isn't a whole lot hugely touristy to see, but the place itself is spacious and nicely designed and has a sort of welcoming feel to it. We wandered up and down looking for this mysterious Wisconsin foodstuff consisting of cheese curds and fries that no local appeared to have never heard of. We ended up settling for a fairly good burgerplace and then got ice cream. With Wisconsin being America's dairyland, we couldn't well skip the ice cream.
It was amazing ice cream. We went back to the Capitol with it and sat down reading the Onion Fraze had tracked down on a street corner and was very enthusiastic about. There were a lot of protesters with signs out and about. We couldn't figure out what exactly they were protesting.
Since it was a lovely day, we made our way down to the pier and sat by the lake, getting generally sappy. Because that's what lovely days are for.
We got back just before Crystal, headed out again for supplies, and had another round of baking. Because it'd been far too long since our last steamfried buns and sour cream cake stint.
(I didn't poison her batch either. We're both losing our touch, m'afraid.)
April 12 - Epic Systems are EpicThe plan for the day was simple enough: get up, pack up, pop by at Crystal's work to say goodbye and such, then head out of town in the general direction of St Louis and Missouri and Stal.
It was a good plan, and it held well, even incorporating stray factors like Crystal leaving her phone behind: she called it on someone else's phone and we took it along as we went there.
Problem being, Crystal's workplace isn't something you just pop in and out of. It's called Epic Systems, and they're not remotely exaggerating.
Obviously we are epic visitors.
If you pulled the head-lever, the tunnel started making huge-boulder-rolling-toward-you-to-crush-you noises.
Crystal in heaven. Obviously.
Rocking Ralph, because every workplace needs one.
The Dragon's Lair. It's a classroom.
More classrooms. They all have names. It's literally "Okay folks, we're meeting next Thursday at 5 p.m. in Mordor."
And of course there's a slide. By the time we were done scouting around the place, it was around 4. We headed back, packed up, left town in a hurry and a few hours later were going through our usual routine of looking for a campsite. Most of them look to open in May, the wussies. So we found a motel instead.
April 13 - Overarching plansWhenever we have a long-driving-day, we consider that to be a driving day and nothing else. We get from point A to B and crash. If we get something else done after that, bonus points, but we don't expect to.
Today we got from Nowheresville, Illinois, to St Louis. Stal had warned us against getting anywhere near the part of the city that's in Illinois so we blazed straight through. It's mostly green and pretty..
Fraze: "Look at this, this place is beautiful. Wonder what's so dangerous about it?"
Me: "Ninjas, probably."
We got to town at around 5, amazingly (having to check out from the motel at 10 a.m. played a significant part) so we still had time to reroute to the Gateway Arch that stands just by the Mississippi. It looks impressive. It's one national monument we were both willing to accept as one: it's big, well engineered, looks elegant in its simplicity, and has a significance to bear (Missouri and St Louis were where the westward expansion of the US started, what with the Oregon Trail and Lewis and Clark and etc.)
Some men just want to watch the world burn. There's a train going up top every howevermany hours but we got there barely before closing time so there wasn't a remote hope. I was more interested in the museum anyway. They have a pretty thorough display and it's free. Free stuff always gets bonus points from me.
As we got kicked out of the Arch, we looked around downtown a bit (they have a lot of horse carts drawn by dejected-looking horses wearing hoof glitter) and then tracked down our motel. We have it for two nights, so of course it comes with no microwaves or coffee makers or free internet. We may need to find other, pre-internet means of entertaining ourselves tonight. Hitting each other upside the head with rocks and clubs, probably.
April 14 - AmuseumFor the record, we have been on the road for two months now. Amazing, really.
Today's plan of action was the St Louis City Museum which Stal had recommended, and yay for that. If we'd read about it in a tourbook in a flurry of other sights of the city, we'd have skipped that quicky. "Bleh, another museum, we've seen a ton of those, do they have a cathedral or anything?" and then spent the day wandering around the downtown aimlessly.
The City Museum is essentially just that, a collection of St Louis excavated stuff through the ages. There're some pretty nifty things, it used to be a medievalesque sort of city. But what it primarily is is a huge amusement park.
We climbed around for hours, and wiggled through holes we didn't really expect to fit through, and had the sort of fun I frankly hadn't expected in this day and age of overregulated triple-platinum-childproof attractions. There were slippery parts and pointy bars, and low ledges and tight holes, and pet-a-shark tanks, and statues of mermaids who'd never heard of Ariel's two seashells. Really, if you want to give your kid something a bit more genuine than rounded-corners plastic playgrounds, that museum is the place to be.
Representative doorknobs.
Fraze climbing down the blue wiggly tube.
A speakeasy.
Whut? Once we'd climbed over and under and through everything, we headed to downtown St Louis in search of a Starbucks for the sake of interwebs like the hobos we are. The first one we found was too crowded, so we couldn't sit down anywhere. The second was closed (what kind of Starbucks closes at 3 pm on a Saturday?) The third, justabout next to the Gateway Arch, was just right. Confirmed when we walked in and the guy at the counter saw my One Piece shirt.
Guy: "Oh wow, you have a pirate shirt. Awesome."
Me: "Aw heck yeah. It's an awesome shirt."
Except when I got my iced milk coffee, the cup read "
Pirates vs NINJA!!!"
Crap. They're everywhere.
We bravely hobo-ed our way into their internets regardless of the threat of a ninja infestation. After all, they'd bowed to the power of the awesomeness of my pirateshirt, so they'd stay pacified for now. At one point into a skypechat with Fraze's parents, the guy popped over again to bring us a plate of Rice Krispies treats. Just for the heck of it, no money involved.
(And that, gentlemen, is why you side with pirates. What has ninja-dom gained you recently?)
The Starbucks closed at 7, after which we walked back to the car through downtown St Louis, which is really rather pretty, and stopped for dinner at a diner on 12th Street, which has pretty good prices for a city downtown.
T'was a good day.