Wow

Spirit Lake, Iowa High 73 Low 59

Yesterday morning we left Rapid City with clear skies. On the way to Sioux Falls, we stopped at Wall, South Dakota. We wanted to see Wall Drug and see what it was all about. Wall Drug takes up almost a city block and is like a Mall, except it is owned by one family. They have almost everything imaginable for sale to the tourists. This is the first wow.

There's even a small chapel inside Wall Drug.

We stayed at Cabelas in Mitchell. There are two large parking lots, one for trucks and one for RV’s. It was quite warm last night so we slept with the windows open. Everything went OK until about 5:00 AM a group of 5 RVers met outside their RVs and started talking very loudly. Of course they woke everyone around them up. I guess no one ever taught them Campground etiquette. Even though we weren't in a campground all they had to do was look around and take pity on those of us that wanted to sleep longer than they.

While we were in Mitchell, we wanted to see The Corn Palace. We watched a short movie about the history of The Corn Palace. All the murals on the outside of the building are changed every year, While, those inside are there forever, with whatever repairs that are needed. Right now, there is a major renovation going on so about half of the outside is just plywood. I didn't have internet yesterday, so I wasn't able to post. From the movie, we found out that there are 11 different colors of corn used in the murals and that it take about 100 acres to grow the ears of corn.

These 2 are an example of the murals inside. 

Today we left Mitchell with cloudy skies, and the further east we went, the darker it got. It finally started to rain, and wow did it every come down. For a way Cindy thought I was going too fast, but I could see OK to drive.

We wanted to see the Falls in Sioux Falls, and even drove to the Falls Park with the trailer on. It was raining so hard we decided not to stop and went back to the Interstate. After we got into Minnesota, the rain had quit and it was a smooth drive to where we turned off  I90 to go south to Iowa.

The next wow was this RV Park. It is extremely nice with a lot of amenities. It is on one of Iowa’s large lakes and seems to have a lot of nice spaces. We are here with our Coast to Coast membership. They also seem to have a lot of activities going on, although a lot of them are for the kids. We even got to see 2 families of Canadian Geese with 5 babies each. Cindy wasn't able to get too close because she was afraid the parents we going to attack her.

There is lots of neat log furniture in the Activity Center.

We needed a few things from Walmart which is not too far away. While we were shopping we could hear the rain coming down on their metal roof. Then the hail started and it was so noisy, we weren't able to hear much over the noise from the Hail. After we got checked out, the rain was coming down so hard, us and all the other shoppers waited to go out to their cars. Wow, I think they got more rain in 10 minutes, than the Salt Lake Valley gets in a year. When we finally got to leave, about half the parking lot looked like it was covered with water.

We had been hearing about tornado warnings all morning in Sioux Falls, right where we had passed through a short time before. The cashier at Walmart told us that a tornado had touched down just outside of Sioux Falls. Wow, we were sure glad we weren't still traveling through that part of the country. I've never seen a tornado and really don’t want to.

Thanks for visiting.