Across the Country - Day 4

Rapid City, SD - Missouri Valley, IA
Mileage - 498
Miles Driven - 1,706

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The original plan called for a brief excursion down to see Mount Rushmore. Unfortunately, we started a little late again and decided to skip it.

The antelope population continued to amaze us at first, but this gave way to rolling fields of grain.

We'd heard about it before hand, and were disappointed that we didn't see them up to this point, but the disappointment soon ended: we started seeing signs for Wall Drug. At first, the signs were alone and far apart, but as we approached Wall, the number and frequency rapidly increased. To be honest, I really was curious to see what all the fuss was about, but when the exit approached, we drove right past. From the road, there really wasn't much to see, but there was on old-time town on the hill that looked very interesting as we left Wall behind.

Later, we started seeing similar signs for Al's Oasis. This time, however, we were starting to get hungry so we decided to stop and check it out. Susan wanted to eat in the restaurant, but I wanted to sit outside in the sun, so we grabbed some sandwiches from Al's grocery store and sat out by the buffalo statues.

After lunch, we crossed the Missouri River into Chamberlain. While driving through town, we saw a park with a playground. I dropped off Susan and Andrew and went to buy gas. Twenty minutes later, we were back on the highway.

At Sioux Falls, we finally said good-bye to I-90 and started south towards Omaha, Nebraska. Outside Omaha, we stopped for the night at another Super 8 motel. By now, Andrew was getting pretty good at spotting the big 8's from the highway. We went to dinner at a country family restaurant, but walked away unimpressed by the lack of home cooking.

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