Day 11 - Sept. 7, 2011

After eight nights at our cabin in Custer State Park, it was starting to feel like home; so, it's time to move on. We're not exactly sure where we are going to spend the next night, but we know we want to go to the world's largest drug store in Wall, South Dakota, just down Interstate 90. Let's hit the road!

It was 1936. Druggist Ted Hustead owned a struggling store in the town of Wall, South Dakota. The Great Depression gripped the nation, and the Dust Bowl made things doubly bad on the high plains. But Ted and his wife, Dorothy, had a bit of luck on their side. Their town and their little store happened to be about 75 miles east of the place where a man named Gutzon Borglum was carving likenesses of four presidents out of a Black Hills mountain. Dorothy figured tourists would come to see Mount Rushmore, and she figured the trek across the dry, barren plains would make those tourists hot and thirsty. The drug store should offer free ice water and her husband should put up signs along the highway to advertise it.

The dinosaur in the photo above is one of the many unique signs on I-90 advertising the free water at Wall Drug. We saw the first sign about 350 miles from the store, just as we left Iowa and entered South Dakota.

This old photo of the original store hangs in the history gallery of the current store (shown below) which now consists of 76,000-square-feet of fun and shopping. So successful is Wall Drug that the town of Wall, populated by a mere 800 residents, reported gross sales of nearly $37 million in the “retail trade” category in 2007. There is even a lovely little chapel in the store where loyal customers have been married!
After shopping in the store, we headed out to the Backyard, a free, outdoor, park-like area packed full of every kind of western-themed curiosity imaginable. I came face-to-face with a growling, smoking T-Rex who was interested in his feeding time.
Sid managed to take a ride on the world's largest jackalope. The jack nearly bucked him off, but he held on. I think the two of them had a great time. We plan to exchange Christmas cards this year with Sid's new friend.

Out in the parking lot, Sid proudly attached his new Wall Drug bumper sticker to the back of the trailer.



We saw this billboard of a Black Hills postcard in the Wall Drug Backyard, just after Sid's ride on the jackalope.
After leaving Wall Drug, we traveled across South Dakota to US Highway 83, which runs 1,885 miles from the Canadian border just north of Westhope, N.D. to Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexican border. It is one of the last and longest stretches of highway in America and little of it is spoiled by soulless four-lane Interstate. It's a road that passes through communities, by courthouses, diners, schools and family farms. It's the kind of by-way we prefer to travel, providing the opportunity to meet folks and hear their stories. We expect to travel three states via this route.
We stopped for the night in Valentine, Nebraska, at the highly-rated Trade Winds Motel. The nearby Niobrara National Scenic River is one of the top ten rivers for canoeing and kayaking in the US. We are planning to do a little kayaking here tomorrow.