Day 6: Minnesota/Sioux Falls

Falls Park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

The first few days of trip were jam-packed with scheduled activities, but now we're in a lighter part of the trip where we're just trying to find enough to entertain ourselves as we travel toward Mt. Rushmore and some of the other sites I wanted to check out in western South Dakota. Since we didn't have anything planned for the afternoon, we slept in a bit and then had a buffet breakfast in the hotel.  We figured it would be a good day to get in some laundry (I had put a limit on how much clothes Allen could pack for space reasons in the car), so we found a local laundromat in Rochester.  We killed an hour or so playing War and Ms Pac-Man while waiting for the laundry to be done and then we hit up I-90 again.

We were only on the road again for another half hour or so before we decided we had to stop again.  Just off the next exit was the Spam Museum.  Located in Austin, Minnesota, the Spam Museum is THE source of knowledge about everyone's favorite canned meat product.  It also includes interactive games, a movie, and of course, a gift shop.  After about 40 minutes of Spam-intensive entertainment, we were starting to feel hungry for lunch.  So we went to Subway for some Spam-free sandwiches, and then hit the road again.

The drive to Sioux Falls took about 4 hour, and we got in around 6 pm as a rainstorm was starting up.  It was another fairly boring drive of endless fields that we've been seeing ever since leaving Chicago.  At least the music has been good throughout. Allen and I have pretty similar tastes, so we've been using one of those radio tuner accessories for our iPods most of the time instead of searching for radio stations in the middle of nowhere or replacing cd's every 45 minutes.

A lookout tower in Falls Park

We went to Famous Dave's for some bbq dinner.  As we entered the restaurant there was a heavy thunderstorm and extremely high humidity, but by the time we left the sky and humidity had cleared up and there was an interesting colorful glow in the area as sunset was approaching.  Before the rainstorm we had been planning on stopping by Falls Park in Sioux Falls to see their evening Sound & Light Show.  We got to the park around 9 pm and saw that it had already been canceled because of the rain, so we walked around and looked out at the park from the observation tower for a bit.  The park had some nice waterfalls leading into a river, and the whole area looked even better with the lighting at the time.

Miles traveled today: 255 miles
Miles traveled total: 1,603 miles
Total States Traveled: 9