Listing Through Life

My wife was disappointed with Wall Drug. I wasn’t — chiefly because it was exactly as stupid as I expected it to be. And it can’t be said that we didn’t give it a chance. We walked through most of the stores, took advantage of several of the photo opportunities, and ate in the cafe. We even bought drugs.

I realized after we left that the one store we totally missed was the bookstore.

I’ll give them this — there wasn’t a lot of unused floor or wall space.

The Traveler’s Chapel — empty except for one guy who stood in the doorway and glared at me when I tried to get inside to look around.

Thinking that the Apothecary Shoppe Museum was the only place to buy drugs, we stopped in and bought a bottle of Tums.

One wonders … Do they sell a lot of mounted Jackalope heads at $99.98 each?

The Backyard Mall was almost empty. One end of the hallway was filled with a T-Rex head poking over a concrete wall. Moments after I took the first photo, the lights began flashing and the head lifted up a few feet and it began roaring at a painful volume.

One of the features I didn’t see advertised on any of the billboards along I-90 was the hallway filled with photos of the Hustead family. It’s even hard to find on the map — it’s listed as “Memorabilia” just above the T-Rex head. In the nearby Skinky Saloon, I discovered the “Wild Bill Wax Display.” Bill doesn’t seem too upset — he’s resting his gun hand on the table. But on the other hand, anybody who wears pants like that other guy deserves to be shot.

The animatronic Chuck Wagon Quartet in full voice. When we’d had our fill, we ordered supper and ate in the dining room.

I had a ham and cheese sandwich that wasn’t too bad — at least the ingredients were fresh. My wife had roast beef and mashed potatoes that she described as “all right, mediocre.” We split a piece of cherry pie that was much the same.

And of course we had a free glass of ice water.

We bought a few more things, including a package of plastic cowboys and Indians, in the original section of the store where all this started. It’s still a fairly normal drug store.

There is apparently a law stating that one MUST stop and view the Corn Palace when traveling to the Black Hills on vacation. I wasn’t enthusiastic about stopping, but what could I do? Besides, my wife wanted to see it.

What we saw was the third Corn Palace. The first was built, and decorated in 1892 “to prove the fertility of the soil and to attract immigrant farmers to settle.” It was soon too small, and was replaced by a second Corn Palace in 1905. There was concern about fire in the large wooden building, so it was replaced by the current, concrete building in 1921.

As you can see from the photos, they used to decorate more of the building than they do now. This disappointed me. I wasn’t taken in by the gaudy paint job. The theme this year was “Saluting Youth Activities,” which I also thought was lame. I wanted to see murals of agricultural or western scenes.

I thought this mural was particularly unattractive.

We went inside and found a basketball court that was also covered with corn murals. These were a little better.

The hallways were lined with photos of past years. Here are the designs from the years we were born.

The 1907 design featured a swastika, which they hastened to explain was really just an Indian good luck symbol.

That was pretty much it except for a gift shop and a snack stand where we ordered corn chips and corn dogs, just to get into the spirit of the thing.

The most interesting part of the experience was watching a guy create a Halloween-themed mural on the outside wall. The picture was lined in white on black, with the colors of corn to be used marked on the panel.

Seven days later, we were headed east across South Dakota and stopped in Mitchell for a break. Since we were so close, we drove over to the Corn Palace to see the completed mural.

I think the idea of a Corn Palace is a fine one. But it felt like everyone was a bit tired of it and just doing it for the tourists. Like us. But don’t let me discourage you from going to see it for yourself. Like I said, I think it’s required.

I discovered The Pantry on roadfood.com, but I wasn’t planning on stopping — it didn’t seem worth extra effort and we weren’t going to be in the neighborhood until late in the morning.

But as we got closer to Yankton, I mentioned it to my wife. “It’s a kitchenware store with a coffee counter in the back where they sell muffins.”

She responded, “I would like to buy a zester. If I had one, I could make lemon meringue pies.” I’d never heard of a zester, but if it could produce lemon meringue pies, that settled it for me.

We walked into a maze of folksy clutter.

A woman (she wasn’t the owner) came from the back of the store and asked if she could help me. I told her my wife was looking for a … I couldn’t remember the name, so I called to my wife across several other customers. She came over, and the woman showed her three or four options. I then asked about the muffins.

According to roadfood.com, the woman who owns the place put a kitchen in the back for cooking demonstrations. And since she has a kitchen, she figured she might as well offer coffee and muffins for her customers. But she likes to sleep late, so her husband gets up early every morning and makes the muffins in individual crockery pots.

My wife got a coffee, and we each got a muffin. They were light and tasty, with tons of fruit — probably 50% fruit — with a crisp, sugar-covered top. And they were very tasty. And that’s the zester in the photo.

A man appeared mysteriously from out of the clutter and sat down at the counter. He acted like he belonged, so I asked him if he made the muffins. He admitted that he did, and that he likes to use a lot of fruit.

We got to chatting about where we were from and how we happened to be in Yankton. I asked him how old the building was, and he said it had been built before South Dakota became a state, which was in 1889. He was full of suggestions about things we should do on our vacation, and long after our muffins were done, he was still talking. We got up and headed out of the store, and he followed, talking until the moment we exited. In the half hour or so we were there, we felt like we had really gotten to know the muffin man.

From Yankton, we headed north toward Mitchell, and as we drove I had the distinct impression that the world had turned pastel.

I plan our vacations. My wife is generally happy just to go where I take her. Which means that she’s gone to a lot of battlefields and places to see birds. I thought it would be nice to take her somewhere she would enjoy more than I would. I think it worked out that way, although I enjoyed this place much more than I expected to.

The National Music Museum is on the Campus of The University of South Dakota, in Vermillion, in the southeast corner of the state. We arrived just as it opened and had it pretty much to ourselves. Admission was $10/person, which included a player and earphones we could use to hear some of the instruments being played.

There are more than 15,000 instruments in the collection, but I’m guessing that less than half of them were on display. Some of them were incredible works of art even apart from the music they made. I wish the displays gave more of the human history instead of concentrating on the technical details.

Anyway, what follows is about half the photos I took. Hold your cursor over the photos to read what I know about the instruments, if anything. In some cases, you can read the display cards if you click on the photos to enlarge them.

While my wife looked around the gift shop, I got the red chair and took the photo at the top of the post and this one. The piano I chose was a semi-grand built in London in 1876.