Sioux Falls, SD through Rapid CIty, SD

Nick: If you’ve been following the blog the last week or two, you will have discovered that there’s been a fair degree of normalcy, stability, and ordinary happening lately. In other words, life as we’ve come to know it on this trip has become completely crazy and mixed up, and we hate it. This sixty-first day put us back on track with the aforementioned Wall Drug in addition to a very strange area of the country known as the “Badlands”

Brian: Like many destinations on this trip, the Badlands was a recommended stop by a CouchSurfer we spent an evening with, though we’ve stayed with so many people I can’t remember who to credit. Nine times out of ten these recommendations are at worst quite interesting and at best freakin’ awesome. One times out of ten the recommendation is Fargo, North Dakota.

Nick: I leave the numbers to Brian.

Brian: So we left Matt and Pam’s place after Pam made us all a delicious waffle breakfast, bringing our consecutive home-cooked meal count to 2, a record for the trip. We hit the road soon after and pulled onto I-90, which is comforting because we could potentially take it all the way to Seattle. Driving through South Dakota is the most boring thing ever, except for the billboards every 15 feet advertising some crazy attraction. Reptile World, Deadwood (Olde Western Towne), and the infamous Wall Drug. Feel free to jump in if you remember some more.

Nick: Something about the world famous wood carving museum. I don’t know anything about it other than it’s the place where wood comes alive. Yikes. When we got to the Badlands, we were greeted by a sign inviting us to please stop by the visitor’s center and deposit fifteen dollars for the privilege of driving on the road that went through this wacky terrain. Seeing as how we’re on something of a budget, we politely disregarded the invitation and cruised on through. The landscape was pretty zany: rock formations, weird lake shapes. Things that make land difficult to cross, farm with, and build on. Bad lands. We walked around, found no snakes, hopped back in the car to continue our trek.

Brian: Yeah, it looked like the kind of place snakes would hang out. But I wasn’t too worried. They were the Badlands, not the Worstlands.

Nick: Eh…

Brian: So after driving through the Badlands the road conveniently pooped us out at the town (barely) of Wall, home of the notorious Wall Drug. Nick and I didn’t really know what to expect, but we followed the signs and soon found ourselves in a massive empty parking lot, with a sign claiming Wall Drug was only half a block away, just around the corner. And when we rounded the corner, what did we find? At first glance, Wall Drug seems to be a dinky little drug store with trashy overpriced souvenir trinkets, but upon entering the establishment you find that it is actually a massive chain of dinky little drug stores with trashy overpriced souvenir trinkets. There’s also a crappy animatronic dinosaur that “feeds” (lights up and moves around a bit more) every 12 minutes. We grabbed a bison dog and a homemade doughnut each and bounced out of there pretty quick.

Nick: Wow dude, this is kind of surprising to me actually. I thought we liked Wall Drug. I liked Wall Drug. There was a lot of cool stuff to see: an awesome animatronic dinosaur, a rideable jackalope, historic photos, creepy statues, a machine that played five instruments at once almost together and almost in tune, a Moxie salesman, and an overall lingering sense of complete insanity. Which I like. They also had all the free water you could drink. I will say that there was likely one component of the visit I think we both could have lived without, and that would be the most terrible bug or food poisoning we acquired during our time there. That evening was one of the worst I’ve had in a long time, if not ever.

Brian: Well, Wall Drug was crappy in that, “I definitely am glad we went there,” kind of way. Yeah, as soon as we left Wall for Rapid City I started to feel a little queasy but played it off as the side effect of a long day of driving. We met up briefly with our host, Chet, who works two jobs and showed us around his place. He works as a bar manager at night and invited us to grab dinner and a drink at his bar later that evening. We said sure and kicked it at his place and shot some pool while waiting for our Canadian friends to show up. There’s not that many people in South Dakota so in retrospect I’m not surprised we ended up surfing the same couches two nights in a row. That’s where things get a little fuzzy for me. A fever hit me hard and fast and I retired to the bedroom circa 6:45 pm to try to sleep through the night.

Nick: An interesting side note before the gruesome events of the rest of the evening: Chet, in addition to managing a bar, is also a fully licensed contractor. Which is interesting considering the fact that once we showed up at his house, he immediately leapt onto the roof and for the next fifteen to twenty minutes or so frantically repaired a less then stellar roofing job with tarps and old tires. The shoe maker’s son runs barefoot, as they say… Anyway, the Canadians showed up, we chatted, and as he said, Brian hit the sack. At this point I was also not feeling so hot, but I wanted to see if I could tough it out. Chet had invited us to go out to his work place at night for some food and fellowship, and I’m usually pretty down for both. Mistake. As the phantom illness had hit my traveling companion with little warning, I too was crushed with a screaming fever, pounding headache, and vicious cough suddenly during the middle of 30 Rock. I went to the room Brian had already secured which was at this point somewhere around 80°, no doubt his doing in an attempt to stop the intense shivering we were both experiencing. I don’t remember everything from that night, but I do remember not being able to sleep for more than ten minutes at a time and batting frantically at what I thought, in my feverish, delusional state, was a bat swooping down on my head. It wasn’t pretty folks.

Brian: I too slept very little that night. It was awful and I wanted my mom. I felt like somebody was hitting me in the nuts with a frozen sledgehammer. Nick and Brian, out.

Nick: Wait, that’s how you’re going to end it? Dang, this road trip just got real y'all.