road trip america part one: iowa/south dakota

i figured the best way to deal with editing and sharing three weeks worth of pictures was to just focus on a state or two at a time. stay tuned for more soon.

3 friends

21 days

19 states

8,141 miles

= a lot of pictures

drew and i left nj on a sunday morning and ended up at a dive bar/pizza joint in dayton, ohio, twelve hours later. that's where we picked up chris, who had been touring with our good friends, black wine, for the last three weeks. we stuck around for a great set and some great townie dance action. the next day we hit up some antique malls as we made our way through indiana and ended up in chicago for dinner at the chicago diner, a vegetarian place with killer vegan milkshakes! didn't spend much time in the city, as the sun was starting to set and we had yet to find a campsite for the night.

the next morning we headed into iowa, where we made our first stop: antique archaeology in leClaire (american pickers). it was neat pointing out different items from episodes we'd seen before. heaps and heaps of weird junk and treasures to look at. i'm glad we made it there.

while on the road to our next destination, we were sidetracked by some more roadside junk: old cars on the hill , a graveyard for classic cars and heaps of rusty skeletons. it took a few tries to get there from the highway, but we found it eventually.

by the next day we reached mitchell, south dakota, home of the world's only corn palace. yes, that's right, a palace made out of corn. as you can tell by my lack of pictures of said palace, it was not as impressive as we had hoped, so we just walked around town for a while and hit some thrift stores before we made our way to the badlands.

unfortunately there wasn't much of a sunset happening once we reached the badlands. it was a pretty gloomy day. gloominess aside, words and pictures can hardly do the landscape any justice. it was one of the most incredible sights i had ever seen, until the storm rolled through, and then that was the most incredible thing i had ever seen. lightning for miles and miles against the rocky horizon. we were lucky that rain held out for a good hour and half so we could sit and watch with our cameras.

we were so absorbed in storm watching that none of us had for a moment considered the fact that it was about to rain, really hard, at any time, and we had plans to camp. so much for that! by the time we hit the park's exit it was pouring. after about an hour or two of driving, and dozens of "no vacancy" signs, we found ourselves at the starlight inn, in good ol' sturgis...