Custer State Park (in Custer, SD) was recently named one of the world’s top 10 wildlife destinations by a well-known adventure travel company. We saw a crazy amount of critters there: bighorn sheep, pronghorn, prairie dogs, cute little red squirrels, white-tailed deer, mule deer, and of course, bison. Lots and lots of bison. About 1,300 of these critters live in the park.
Heavy Traffic
Rufus would just love to eat some bison
Summer was suitably embarrassed to be photographed with some random Rapid City chicks.
Rachel smiled for the above picture only with the promise of chocolate ahead…
Rachel praying to the god of chocolate
Just down the street from Wall Drug was the Wounded Knee Museum. It was definitely an educational experience for the girls.
Wounded Knee Musuem
We sure had a hard time finding a parking spot at “the #1 Roadside Attraction in America”…
The “World Famous” Wall Drug
Summer & Rachel with creepy Annie Oakley at Wall Drug
The girls found enough snow to make a friend.
Check out the miles and miles of sunflower fields! (makes us really miss our friends at SunFlower school!)
lots of yummy sunflower seeds here
We saw them harvesting some of the fields and assume they have let the flowers go to seed for those yummy sunflower seeds.
Oh yeah, we just passed over the Missouri River.
Missouri River
Peter asked for a latte. I pushed a button to make one appear while he was driving. (that’s somewhere in South Dakota out the window).
I’m sure there are other people who travel with their espresso machines, but I haven’t met any yet.
Did you know Maytag Blue Cheese is made in Newton, Iowa? It was serendipitous that we stumbled upon these tasty crumbles after just visiting the Anchor Bar, where buffalo wings were invented.
We had a nice little tour of the factory & saw workers actually wrapping the cheese wedges by hand! We were treated to a 15 minute video filmed circa 1960. Not much has changed in the way of production at the Maytag Farm. Except that instead of shipping 250 lbs of cheese each year, they ship one million pounds!
Cheese heaven, straight ahead
Handwrapping the blue cheese wedges
The farm has caves where they age the cheese for six months
We held physics class at the Science Center of Iowa. We were the only people in the whole science museum. Seriously.
Cornfields of Iowa
We left Michigan on Monday (official state motto: “if you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you”, our unofficial motto: “when can we leave?”
We drove through a sliver of Indiana, blasted through Illinois, and ended up in Iowa. Yes, Iowa. State motto: “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain”. We suspect it’s code for “we grow corn. lots of corn.”
We did see some bison at a wild animal refuge, and they sure saw us too.
Iowa, where the bison roam
FindTheFords 