Day Two: Keystone, SD to Winona, MN 669 mi.

I’m writing this on my laptop in the car as the sun is setting and we are speeding past apparently endless fields. Some of the fields are crops, some are grass for cows or sheep. We’ve been busy today, and are (yet again) racing the sun toward our crashspace.
Stupid time zones, messing with how long it takes to get places.
Today’s been busy. We started the day by hitting Mt. Rushmore – we were among the first people there, I think – our level of the parking garage had about three other vehicles in it. Heh. The mountain isn’t quite as aewsome as one might be led to believe by photos – for one thing, it’s a lot smaller. But it was still neat. I took photos of Twon crushing the heads of various presidents on the mountains (KitH shoutout!), we wandered around the various giftshops, and then we headed off to I-90E.
Next up: Wall Drug. We’d been seeing billboards for it for miles and miles (including a few yesterday!) and Twon had told me stories about it before, so we had to go. Wall Drug is one of those places that’s famous for being famous. If you’ve never been there, it started out as a little drugstore and now has grown to encompass the entire building of storefronts it occupies as well as a building behind it. Good grief. It has loads and loads of kitch for sale, plus food (I had pumpkin ice cream!) and various drugstore-type-stuff.
SD-240 splits off of I-90 in Wall and loops through the Badlands, so we took that (when Twon came through there on his grand circle roadtrip, he wound up doing so at night and thus missing the Badlands, so we had to see them). They’re spectacular – the rolling green prairie gives way to bizarre rock formations and gulches for quite a while.
Apparently rivers in the area millions of years ago deposited oodles of volcanic ash there and then it got compacted into sedementary rock, so the erosion looks really bizarre. So cool. I took a ton of photos.
After that, it was time to head down the highway to Winona, where our friends Annie and Nate are feeding us and giving us crashspace in their spiffy new house. Yay.
Of course we hit plenty of construction, dammit. I swear, it is impossible to drive more than a few hundred miles in any one direction on semi-major roadways without hitting construction. Grrr.
O Well.
That’s about it. Time to sort through the day’s photographs so I can just upload these entries and the photos when we get to Annie and Nate’s. Yay.
ETA: By the time we arrived at Annie and Nate’s, I was in the throes of what appeared to be food poisoning. I’m better this morning, yay.
ETA: Photos!