She Lives!

Nope, not dead. Didn’t fall down an open man hole. I’m still here.

As you know, I didn’t blog from the mini vacation last weekend… then I returned home and kept the schedule of a whirling dervish. This morning is the first chance I’ve had to update you. And I’ve got thirty minutes because I’ve got to get to the gym, walk on the treadmill, come home, shower and change, and then head to work… ick.

My mom, dad, aunt, and I took off Friday night about forty-five minutes after work ended. We drove almost eight hours to Wall, South Dakota. If you don’t know where Wall is, you’re not alone. It’s not someplace you accidently stumble upon. Basically, if you’re in Wall, it was on purpose. Wall, SD… population 818. Saturday morning when we awoke, it was rainy, drizzly, and foggy. FOGGY?! It felt like I was about two miles from the beach instead of being smack dab in the middle of North America. Weird. I would’ve referred to it as a marine layer… except there was no marine to be layering. Anyway, we scrapped the original plans to go to Mount Rushmore and redirected our efforts to Minute Man Missile National Historic Site and Badlands National Park.

Minute Man is a decommissioned missile silo from the Cold War. Pretty interesting, actually. The plan was to tour it. Unfortunately, they had availability for two and we were a party of four. So? Off to Badlands…

Badlands is interesting in the fog and drizzle, actually. The last time I was here was August of 1993. August is not when Badlands puts its best foot forward. Neither is May when its drizzling and foggy. Nope, parts of the park looked like a gigantic mud hole. We stopped at various scenic overlooks and I plodded through to get a handful of pictures, but visibility was limited in most areas and decidedly not gorgeous.

One exception to the gorgeousness deficiency was the Yellow Mounds within Badlands. The minerals within the rock and soil create an exquisite palette of colors… iron makes the red, manganese makes the purple, and the green is the prairie growth that hasn’t died under the harsh summer sun yet. In August the park looks gray and brown. I shot a number of photographs in and around Yellow Mounds due to the abundance of color. This was my favorite and may yet be enlarged for matting and framing with the rest of my vacation travels (I have photos dating back to 1994 that I display in my library–I just bought twenty new 11×14 frames to enable me to keep it up).

Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos from Minute Man because the Visitor’s Center is on the smaller side with nothing in particular to photograph… I officially need to head back up there in the next year and tour the complex. When I do, photos will abound!

After slowly making our way through a soggy Badlands National Park, we made our way back to Wall to get some lunch. Now, the reason the city of Wall is significant is that it houses Wall Drug. While Wall may not be a destination, Wall Drug is.

Druggist Ted Hustead purchased Wall Drug Store in 1931. Business was awful. Like I said, no one accidently stumbles into Wall, South Dakota. After a while, his wife, Dorothy, got the idea to offer free ice water and then other items for purchase. They put up signs off of the highway and people started pulling over for the free ice water and then purchasing other items. Now, Wall Drug sees up to 20,000 people a day during the season (late spring, summer, early fall).

I had a hot roast beef sandwich (the bread is laid out and the roast beef and gravy are placed on the bread with mashed potatoes off to the side). It was delicious. Mom and Dad ordered the same while my aunt accidently ordered just the roast beef, mashed potatoes, and gravy plate. We all had the homemade donuts for dessert. The donuts, my friends, are worth the trip. And you pay a nickel (five cents) for a cup of coffee. It’s done on the honor system. You don’t order coffee, you simply pour yourself a cup and drop a nickel in the jar. Oh, I took a picture of the dining room in order to show the ceiling which was lit with Tiffany glass. However, an employee yelled (well, not “yelled,” but strenuously objected) at me because you’re not supposed to photograph the paintings. Fine. Didn’t want pictures of the paintings. Didn’t like ‘em. (Wall Drug has the largest collection of privately owned western art in the United States.) Wanted the ceiling. However, in deference I will not post the photo! (It’s not the first time this has happened to me (once in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and once in the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas) and all I can say is that posting a sign larger than four inches by five inches with type that is less than an inch tall will probably garner better results at keeping folks from snapping pictures!)

After wandering through the different areas of Wall Drug for the better part of an hour, my pops was tired so we headed back to the motel (not a hotel) where we were staying. It was nice, though! Mom, Auntie Pat, and I watched Forrest Gump on television while Dad napped. We then went to dinner at the only restaurant we could find and had a very tasty meal before heading back to our motel to hang out for a little while. It was early outs that night after getting in at two o’clock in the morning.

Sunday, we were up at seven and raring to go… with sunshine and clear skies!

Iambic Pentathlon

Someone I know was posting a tribute to Maurice Sendak, the acclaimed children’s author and illustrator, and was saying that he isn’t very good at writing poetry or iambic pentathlon… oh dear. It gave me a fit of giggles. William Shakespeare, the Bard, wrote in iambic pentameter and not iambic pentathlon (which I guess could be a rhymed and rhythmed contest involving five different athletic events). Anyway, that misspoken word gave me the giggles. Call me a big ol’ nerd who knew that Houston had a problem, but I don’t care. Serious giggles.

Day 3 of being a good girl for the sake of my girlish figure sees me goin’ strong. The girls and I had Ronald Star Day today as we do every Wednesday at lunch. Believe it or not, as long as I figure out my plan before stepping foot in a restaurant, I do very well. Yesterday was so busy Vicki and Cheryl wanted out of the building so we took a field trip to Noodles & Company, after which we all got a small ice cream at Cold Stone. I got a small Japanese Pan Noodles with steak at Noodles and sweet cream with fudge and caramel blended in at Cold Stone. Then? Oatmeal for dinner. The good news is that while oatmeal can balance out a higher number of calories earlier in the day, the added bonus is that I love the stuff. I really do. In fact, it’s what I ate for dinner again tonight.

I haven’t been able to hit the gym yet because the nerves in my legs have been firing on a daily basis. No bueno. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about it. And really, it sucks. On the flip side, the activity in my legs has been decreasing in minuscule increments, but some is better than none. I haven’t had any meds in my system for a few days so I’m not too upset.

But enough about diets and uncomfortable physical conditions… on to more travel adventures:

When I left Daniel in downtown Boston (he gamely volunteered to take the somethinerother line (I don’t remember its name) back home–I’m pretty sure he didn’t want to hear me bitch and moan about the worst drivers in the universe), I set out through the most irritating streets ever in search of the freeway. I am from southern California. I do freeways like a world champ. However, I don’t think I’ve ever been sooo happy to see a freeway in my entire life. Well, except when I found the Autobahn after being led on a giant wild goose chase in Germany when the GPS was trying to be “helpful” and insisted I drive down a street that was CLOSED instead of letting me go home. I admit I was very happy to see the Autobahn after a very stressful forty-five minutes or so.

So after locating the freeway, I headed to Hanscom Air Force Base, right smack dab in the heart of Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. I encountered one of two GPS issues when it insisted I go in the back gate instead of the front gate. However, once I located the front gate (with the visitor’s center where I could get a pass from the MPs (Military Police) allowing me to come and go), I was home free. It was a blast to arrive and see Mark and Saundra.

See, Mark is four years older than me. I’ve known him since he was four. Not joking. And after being commissioned as an officer, Mark and Saundra’s first post was in southern California where they spent a handful of holidays and baseball games with us. As we were catching up, I mentioned to Mark that the relationships between our two families and two others are weird in that we’re truly more like aunts, uncles, and cousins. He agreed. After all, this is the guy who made a seven- or eight-year-old girl promise not to close her eyes when the faces all melted off at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I may have been nine, I’m not sure. But it was in the den of the house I grew up in, that I can tell you! How’s that for serious history together?

After catching up a bit, Saundra threw me in the car and we drove to Minute Man National Historical Park. All mile or so from their house. Long drive, I know.

First stop? A stamp in my passport. Saundra was so impressed, she got passports for her three boys. Cool beans.

After watching the last showing of the movie for the day, we wandered outside and walked part of the Minute Man Trail. The photo at the top is the spot where Paul Revere–the Paul Revere (one if by land, two if by sea)–was arrested that infamous night. The engravings mark the time and date of his (and his two cohorts) capture. We then drove down to the Old North Bridge where I got a picture with a Regular. Yup, that’s what they were called. As you can see, I really do clean up nice when I want to. And that’s the outfit I wore to church… at Park Street Church. It’s possible I was the only person in jeans. And I know I was the only person sporting Vans tennis shoes. The congregants survived.

The Minute Man Statue was sculpted by Daniel Chester French (remember that name, we’ll come back to it later). He stands at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. What I didn’t know about this statue is that it is the logo for the National Guard and was used on World War II War Bonds as well as U.S. Savings Bonds. There wasn’t a particular person used as a model for the sculpture and it was meant to represent the average farmer who left his home to defend it.

Massachusetts is inordinately proud of its revolutionary history. Frankly, I think they have a right to be. I’ve said for many years now that the United States of America is a young country, especially when you look at European or Mediterranean history. However, for being such a young country (the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and we grew from there), we’ve packed a heck of a lot into the past (almost) 400 years. I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed studying U.S history so much. To me, it’s absolutely fascinating.

I can’t wait to take this vacation again. I’ve still got more to tell you about, but I would love to go back again in a year or two and do this all over again, filling in the holes I missed this time around. Why not, right? You know me… any excuse to travel!