Thursday, May 29

I’m up early (still being on the Eastern time zone), and I think I got going about 6:30 this morning. After doing some more rentals, getting the truck packed, and having a quick bite to eat, I’m back on I-70W going to Kansas City.

I did get a big surprise early. What I have found after just one day is that there is a lot of bridge construction going on for almost every freeway. Just shortly after I got onto I-70, traffic comes to a complete stand still. Obviously there is an accident, but that is strange because there was so little traffic on the freeway. How could these people run into each other with so few cars. But I sit absolutely still for about 10-15 minutes, and with the price of diesel, I definitely turn off the motor. Traffic starts up again (we were very close to the accident), and in less than a half mile – another accident. I get through that one, and another half mile I find the cause of all this trouble. A tractor trailer is overturned in the ditch.

From Kansas City I head north on I-29 which eventually goes into Iowa – again, very flat, full of corn fields and not much else. I eventually get to Souix City where there is a beautiful river. But this town stinks!! And I mean literally. It really smelled. Lots of smoke stacks with white smoke coming out. It could have been quite nice, but this just killed it. Don’t want to live there – don’t even want to stop for a visit.

So now I’m into South Dakota, which I actually had thought was more rolling. But it is quite flat and again, lots of corn fields. I reach Souix Falls, a much nicer town. They too have a river and I pulled into the town to see what it was like. The downtown was cute, but all the eating places had stopped doing lunch at 2:00. So I’m hungry but don’t have any food.

But I’m probably just an hour from Mitchell, SD. I decided to stop here since the family name is Mitchell. And they have a “Corn Palace” and a Cabella’s. I must see what a corn palace is – in this case, it is a large building which is a basketball court on the inside. But the outside is totally made out of wheat shaft and ears of corn. There are murals all over the building and inside the building, and they are all made of ears of corn. Quite ingenious, although I’m not sure why you would want to do that. But Mitchell must be of some note as I heard Obama will be at the Corn Palace on Sunday, and President Clinton will be at the University in Mitchell this weekend also (it is the South Dakota primary on Tuesday).