A Ghost Town, Native American Statue and Lots of Corn

We woke up this morning to a mix of snow and sleet.  That confirmed that we would not be going to the park for a second day.  Instead, we decided to confine ourselves to things we could do from the car, quickly, or indoors.  Of course, it also had to be things on our way southeast, and South Dakota has so many opportunities, we did all three!

Our first stop was just a few miles down the road.  Okaton is a true ghost town, not one of those attraction ghost towns.  We programmed the GPS for the city center of Okaton, and it took us past a crumbling building and a junk yard of old equipment and cars and down the frontage road of I-90.  When we saw nothing else besides farmland until Google Maps said we had gone out of "town", we went back and took the road between that building and junkyard.  It was seriously creepy.  Someone has obviously taken some care, as they apparently run a bush hog over the grass periodically.  There are some well-kept grain silos, and maybe three well-kept homes.  There were other crumbling homes that were lived in.  I counted around five or six obviously inhabited buildings, which I didn't photograph because that's just creepy.  The other buildings were fair game.

This is the old grain elevator.  If you look closely, you can see where "Bingo Grain Company" was painted on it for filming of a movie that was never released.

This is the side of the old General Store.  A couple moved here from Illinois many years ago and tried to turn the area into an attraction-type ghost town.  These are just facades and not real doors on most of them.  Obviously, this venture failed.

This is the front and the other side of the old General Store.  

This head was just spooky, even though it was close to one of the better maintained homes in town.

We rolled up the windows and headed on down the road.  Our next stop was at a rest stop in Chamberlain, South Dakota.  The statue Dignity: of Earth & Sky is an imposing installation celebrating the Lakota and Dakota and other Native American tribes in the area.  She stands 50 feet and is made of stainless steel with reflective panels, mostly on her blanket.  She is easily seen from the road.  Coming up the sidewalk, I really liked the way she appeared through the trees, as if she will not be silenced by other forces.  I felt very small against her.

Her blanket is covered in reflective panels to make her just as imposing at night as she is during the day.

The museum in the visitor's center was closed while we were there, but the views behind the center and behind the statue were breathtaking.  You can see how the river is high.

Our final stop was a second visit to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD.  For those of you who missed our first drive from Florida to Washington, we stopped here a couple of years ago.  As promised, the designs were different for 2018 than they were a couple of years ago.  We were lucky to get here before they tore down the 2018/2019 designs to put in the new 2019/2020 designs.  The city of Mitchell (probably with some state subsidy, but I don't know) spends roughly $130,000 per year decorating the palace.  Apparently, this is just for the outside, as the inside was still decorated the same as it was the last time we were here.

2019

 2017

In 2017, the theme was Rock of Ages, paying tribute to musicians.  This year, the theme is A Salute to Military.

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You can tell the crows and other birds have been feeding on the designs over the winter.

Instead of spending time in the shops across the street from the Corn Palace, we paid more attention to the other businesses in the area.  The Back 40 was an interesting spot, but we weren't hungry, so we didn't go in.

Based on the flooding in the midwest, I wasn't sure which direction the GPS was going to take us.  Some of the interstates were closed when we left Washington, and it had been raining since we crossed the Cascades.  But, the GPS took us down I-29 to Sioux City, where we stopped for dinner at the Sgt. Floyd River Museum and Welcome Center.  The Sgt. Floyd is a boat that has been retired from service with the US Corps of Engineers.  She has been dry docked and retrofitted to house a museum of the Missouri River.  She was apparently named after Sgt. Charles Floyd, a Kentuckian who was initially with Lewis and Clark until he died of a ruptured appendix in Sioux City.

The river was pretty high, but it wasn't flooding outside the banks by much.

The visitors center had a park where children were playing, a path around the river, and at the dead end, the Betty Strong Encounter Center, a museum where art and maps can be encountered.  They were closed, but we enjoyed encountering the statues on the front lawn.

As we left Sioux City, dark was falling, and so was the rain again.  So we just went a little farther down the road before stopping for the night.