Before Part 2, a couple of announcements:

  1. My dad had knee-replacement surgery on Tuesday, and he’s doing great!  He told me on the phone that he asked the nurses if he’d be able to dance after it was healed, and they said yes, to which he said, “That’s great, because I could never dance before.”  So he’s already back to normal.
  2. Tropical storm Edouard left Chris’ family unscathed, so all is well there, too.  Phew.

And onto more vacation fun.   For the second leg of our Heartland Tour, we stayed in Wall, SD (home of Wall Drug) and at Custer State Park in a little cabin with modern amenities (and by that I mean flat-screen TV), just our speed.  Being able to open the windows at night for fresh air was something I’d been waiting for for months; it was heavenly indeed. 

When we first planned the vacation, we thought it wouldn’t be too expensive, as we used frequent flyer miles and weren’t traveling to an expensive area, but what we didn’t anticipate (but of course should have) were the multiple entrance fees to museums, parks, and other activities.  We decided to rank our activities based on whether they were worth the entrance fee. The state and national parks, sure, worth it for a seven day pass even though we’d be using them for one day. 

Also worth the fees:

  • Wounded Knee Museum:  I feel this this should be required before people venture into the Black Hills so they can get full historical context of these contentious lands.  This museum was simple in that it was nearly all narrative, but we were there for an incredibly long time because of it.  It gives a Native perspective of much more than Wounded Knee.  (The museum is located in Wall.)
  • Ellsworth Air and Space Museum:  Well, I wouldn’t have gone here of my own accord, let’s be honest.  In less than an hour we went from a museum airing this country’s dirty laundry to an air force base where we toured the Minuteman Missle Training Launch Facility.  As someone raised in the shadow of The Day After and who wrote her senior term paper on The Great Peace March, this was a difficult tour for me (though a strange mother and daugher also on the tour were fascinating to observe and provided some levity).  I learned a lot here, too, though, as terrorized as I was. 

Not worth the fees:

  • Prairie Homestead:  Look, I’m a sucker for all things about Western settlement and the overland trails, so for me to say this is over-hyped is saying something.  But we paid $13 (total) to see this old house and a few prairie dogs, then a random scary mannequin in an outhouse. Creepy, right?
  • Crazy Horse Monument:  I’ll admit naivete here, and hopefully my historian friend who studies the Plains (if he’s still reading this blog) will leave a comment if I’m way off base here.  I once heard Lakota author Elizabeth Cook-Lynn speak, and she was outraged by this monument; the Crazy Horse Monument now has a gargantuan Indian Museum, and the video there claims that Lakota elders requested the monument.  All I know is that Crazy Horse was insistent on not having his image preserved, so carving a big mountain in his likeness seems like something he wouldn’t have been jazzed about.  But regardless, I saw this over a decade ago, and the monument is unchanged (they’ve been working on it for 60 years), only the sprawling “museum complex” wasn’t there yet, so it felt much less commercial.  Cost:  $20 per vehicle!  Too much when you could see the monument from the driveway and when the whole endeavor seems problematic at best.  But we went anyway, mostly because once we were at the gate, it was impossible to turn around. 

Other places we’d recommend, should you decide a Heartland tour is in your future as well: any highway through the Nebraska Sandhills, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Scotts Bluff National Monument (near Scottsbluff, NE), and Chimney Rock (near Bayard, NE).  I’ll confess, I got a bit teary when returning to Chimney Rock, just like I do during the Tunnel Walk at a Nebraska game.  It was the spot most mentioned by those on the overland trails, and it is a big Nebraska symbol (its  on the state quarter).  We are all about our phallic symbols in the Cornhusker state.

Tomorrow:  vacation finale in Colorado.