Driving Across the Midwest

We spent all of Wednesday driving across Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota. It was an extremely long day, leaving at 9:30 AM and arriving at our hotel around 9:30 PM. It was also amazingly dull. The midwestern states are extremely flat, with the exception of Wisconsin which had some rolling hills that looked like they belong on the Windows XP wallpaper. In the beginning, it was interesting to see the huge fields of corn and soybeans, but towards the end we were getting tired of seeing the same thing over and over again. Especially when we got to the grasslands of South Dakota. It seemed as though the scenery had just gotten progressively bleaker. However, we did see an interesting sunset while driving in South Dakota, and we picked up cheddar cheese curd in Wisconsin.

Then there were the road signs in South Dakota. Sign upon sign of lovely tourist trap delights. The corn palace, world's largest bull-head sculpture (which we took pictures of from the road), country stores, Wall Drug Store (which was actually quite interesting), Reptile Gardens, Mt. Rushmore Cave, Mt. Rushmore Motels, 1880 town, Cosmos Mystery Area, and so many more. All of these signs started advertising at least 300 miles before the actual location. There were more billboards than people on the road, or houses on the landscape, combined. The slogan for South Dakota should be "land of billboards." Also, the rest stops along I-90 all had Tipi's in South Dakota.

All-in-all a somewhat boring day. We would never want to live in any of the places we drove through on Wednesday.