Day of Driving/Murdo, SD

So today was our longest day of driving since getting out to Pittsburgh. It wasn't too bad, though. We had a nice morning in the Twin Cities and breakfasted at Mickey's Diner in St. Paul. It's a pretty famous place where a lot of celebrities have been. It has also been featured in Arnold Schwarzenegger's holiday classic JINGLE ALL THE WAY. We sat at the counter to get the full diner experience and found out that the diner itself was actually built in Elizabeth, New Jersey! We had to drive all the way to Minnesota to get a down-home Jersey diner meal! All of the diners in Jersey have gone from "authentic" to "tackily mirrored" (Somerset Diner) or "ironically retro" (Skylark) so it was nice to see something that wasn't new or had been garishly redone. The counter guy/waiter was a hoot and I swear he made my eggs over easy perfectly, which is an extremely challenging feat.
After breakfast, we got back in the car and made the extremely long trek to South Dakota. The terrain was very flat for the first half our the ride. The weather wasn't too great either. We were driving right into a storm and, being on the prairie, there's no shelter from the wind. Robert was not happy about being blown all over the highway and neither were we because we had to steer him back on course through pelting rain and unfamiliar road conditions. To take a break we visited the Corn Palace. Weird place. The locals are very enthusiastic about it. The facade of the entire building was made of corn. They've been making new designs for it yearly since the 1890's.

Upon crossing the Missouri River, we stumbled upon rolling hills that can only be described as Tolkien-esque. I kept on checking the map to see what Reserve or Park we were passing through but there was nothing--just ten miles of verdant, steep hills with no trees to be seen for miles. This picture does not fully capture the majesty of the geography. I took some pictures with my film camera--hopefully I can scan them onto the blog eventually. It was an absolute gorgeous surprise and a nice change from the flat prairies of Minnesota and eastern SD. You can see a good picture here. South Dakota's speed limit (on I-90) is 75 mph. Granted, there were not many cars on the road at all but it was scary at times. I've also noticed that Wisconsin has some speed demons on the interstates. But damn, did we make good time!!
The town of Murdo has about 600 people and is literally a cluster of hotels and houses a half a mile from I-90. And that's about all there is to say about Murdo. The End.


Tomorrow we go on to Wall Drug, The Badlands, Mt Rushmore and the Black Hills!!! Excitement!