A Full Day

Day 2:  Columbia, MO to Rapid City, SD (850 miles)

Its 10:30 PM (EST), I'm in my nasty room at the Best Western Hotel in Rapid City waiting for my room service and I'm toast.  And if I'm toast, KC, after driving for 14 hours, must be burned toast. 

Burned Toast

Today we traveled 850 miles from central Missouri to far western South Dakota.  We weathered driving rain, a persistent "Check Engine" light, a flat tire on the trailer and around 14 hours of travel time.

On the positive side we drove safely, had a great Mexican lunch and got through a little over half of the audio book, "Indianapolis"...the story of the USS Indianapolis' delivery of the first atomic bomb to its staging area in the Pacific and its eventual sinking by a Japanese submarine.

We got an early start after a really good breakfast at the Hampton Inn.  The woman preparing the food was a sweetheart named Dolly,  a 22 year veteran of that hotel, who called me "Sugar".  Its been a looong time since I've been called that.  By 7:00AM we were on the road in a light rain.  Almost immediately KC announced that he was getting a "Check Engine" light and we decided to seek out a Ford dealership. 

Check your engine son

We were able to find one just 5 miles down the road and even though they weren't supposed to open for another 35 minutes they ushered us right in and plugged in a computer to read the error codes.  The search provided no error codes and KC and the mechanic concluded that we'd gotten some bad gas and we decided to try to find better gas next fill up.  In the end putting the truck on a steady diet of 91 octane gas from gas stations that looked prosperous enough to have fresh gas cleared the code and made the truck run like a top.

At Kansas City we took the perimeter route I-435 which had very light traffic and connected us to I-29 N. After we'd passed through Omaha we stopped for gas and discovered that we had a flat tire (one of four) on the trailer. KC was well prepared for this and we had the wheel removed, replaced with a spare in five minutes. 

KC, hand me the whatchmacallit.

Move along folks, nothing to see here.

It was about this time that we'd finally out run the weather system that had been streaming up from the south and we could see lifting skies and happier times ahead. 

This naturally made us start to think about lunch and since we'd dodged both an engine issue and a flat tire, we decided Mexican food would make us happy.  Mind you, we were in the middle of the American Heartland.  Not exactly the center of the universe with respect to Mexican food.

But, dear reader, we remembered that Google Is Our Friend and with a minimal effort we located a Mexican restaurant named Mi Familia

Mi Familia...our favorite Mexican Restaurant in Iowa

Crossing the Missouri River in Sioux City

a mere 75 miles ahead in Sioux City, Iowa. And we're glad that we did.  Both lunches were, as Sherry would say, "DUH LISH USS".  We arrived at 2:15 and had the joint to ourselves.  Nice.

Following lunch we made tracks for Rapid City, a mere 428 miles away.  The drive was pleasant enough, blue skies, relatively light traffic and no construction delays.  The route took us through endless corn fields (like 800 miles of it..seriously)...much of it drying before harvest, endless soy bean fields and some other crop neither of us could identify.  We saw dinosaurs at Wall Drug

and some very odd sculptures at The Porter Sculpture Park along I-90.

Approaching Rapid City we had glimpses of the Badlands to the south and we promised ourselves that we'd try to see it on our return home. As we closed in on Rapid City on I-90 the sun slipped behind the hills ahead of us and darkness settled around us.

Its late, I'm tired and its past my bedtime by a LOT.  But there's nothing I wouldn't do for my gentle readers.

Night y'all