You’ve wondered what it would be like driving one of those long, long motor homes Out West, breezing along with the breeze. Haven’t you?
Us too.
On the other hand, The Wife — who actually dreamed up this little caper — is not a roughing-it person. Her perfect room has a hair dryer, pillow mints and doesn’t move.
And this was reaffirmed when, still at home, I told her about a spot I had reserved for us in Yellowstone National Park. The lady on the other end had advised me the site had no grills or fireplace grates.
“But most people eat inside their vehicles anyway,” she’d said.
“Could I use my own grill?” I’d asked.
“Well, no,” said the voice, “because this area tends to be a bear activity area.”
“Oh,” I’d said.
Which I explained to The Wife. Her big blue eyes got bigger.
“Hey,” I reminded her. “This was your idea.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “But this is going to be like . . . like CAMPING.”
And unlike anything we’ve ever done before.
DAY 1: NAPERVILLE-TOMAH, WIS.
The Cruise America depot on the edge of Naperville also rents trucks and other things. It is not fancy. It is a garage with phones that don’t stop ringing. A train runs by it.
Art Kuehl, who owns the place, leads us to a corner where, surrounded by clutter, a video is to explain to us the nuances of operating a 27-foot mini-motor home, which in RV-speak isn’t all that long but, to people who usually drive an 8-foot Civic, is enormous.
Then he disappears.
“However,” says the grinning narrator, who looks like Ned Beatty’s evil twin, “if for some reason you should have a momentary loss of power someplace, this check light may come on. That means the refrigerator is off at that particular time.
“When that happens, if it happens . . . “
The more everyone tries to reassure us, the more uneasy we become. Kuehl leads us though the vehicle.
“Ninety-nine percent of the places you stop are pretty level,” he says. Two hedges in one advisory.
Kuehl, on the RV’s shower and toilet: “Suggestion — use campground facilities as much as possible.”
What’s the main thing we should worry about?
Kuehl: “Right turns.”
I turn right out of the Cruise America lot. If there had been a curb, I would have crushed it. The Wife is not relaxed.
“It feels strange hauling a house behind you,” she says. “I feel like a hermit crab.”
Unlike most crabs, the house makes noises. Any minor bump brings clatter from various ysources.
A major bump brings a thud.
“What was that?”
“I’m not sure I want to know,” says The Wife.
The first crisis: an unmanned tollbooth, a sign with a schedule of payments and a line of cars behind us.
“What are we?”
I toss in 15 cents, the toll for a car. The green light lights and we roll, but I’m sure I’ve underpaid by a nickel. At the next booth, manned, the toll also rises.
Soon enough, we’re on Interstate Highway 90 and well into Wisconsin. We had left in mid-afternoon, it has become early evening, and in that light Wisconsin looks especially green.
It will be dark soon. This, The Wife and I agree, is no time for a first try at the campground thing. In the little Wisconsin town of Tomah, we find a nice, comfortable motel room.
“Nice rig,” says the puzzled desk clerk.
“I feel like we’re cheating,” says The Wife.
She’s right.
Day 2: Tomah-Mitchell, S.D.
The first shock: The gas tank is bottomless. Slightly less than half-full, the thing sucks up 35 gallons of mid-grade unleaded.
Later, I will do a mileage test. Our Ford-powered RV gets a cool 8.3 miles per gallon.
Wisconsin turns hilly as the Mississippi approaches; as we cross at LaCrosse, Minnesota’s bluffs, to an Illinois couple, are virtual mountains. Then I-90 for a time is the Great River Road — the Mississippi rarely is more splendid than it is here — before veering west toward the Great Plains.
The rain begins right after the veer, and wind makes it nasty. A friend had warned us about wind and RVs, and the rain makes me grip the wheel harder, but the RV holds its own, even when 18-wheelers zooming by us add to the confusion of air currents.
Then the skies clear. And then — the first Wall Drug sign. It comes at 11:18 a.m., just outside Dexter, Minn. And soon after that, The Wife takes a turn behind the wheel.
She’s not wild about this, but The Wife does fine.
“It doesn’t feel like a car to me, because it’s so high,” she says. “Everything seems out of whack. And the wind is kind of weird.”
A “bump” warning sign.
“Hang on,” says The Wife.
Clatter. Thud. This thud, like the last thud, is a campground directory the size of a phone book that shouldn’t have been left on the dinette table. Now, it’s safely on the floor. We roll on . . .
The idea of this day is to make miles. Get into South Dakota. There isn’t all that much in southern Minnesota anyway.
But then comes the Green Giant.
Peas have been packed in the town of Blue Earth since 1907. Green Giant has been here since 1925, which is why a 60-foot, fiberglass, giant Green Giant has been standing here in size-78 booties since 1979. Bus loads of foreign visitors on world tours routinely stop here, and no wonder.
He wears only the familiar green suit except around Christmas, when the town gives him a red scarf — and a couple of times a year, notably in August, when he gets a Harley-Davidson vest. Blue Earth is on the way to Sturgis, S.D., and the town welcomes bikers on their way to their annual black-leather bacchanal with open registers.
“There’ll be 3,000 of ’em want their picture taken with him,” says Marsha Anderson, whose craft shop and information center is in the jolly man’s shadow. “I’m amazed by the people who take obscene pictures with the farmer.”
The farmer is a smaller statue with an upraised thumb.
And then there was the time someone added some giant body parts to the Giant. They were blue.
“They were there a very short time,” says Anderson. “Believe me.”
And in a very short time, we’re in South Dakota. We know we’re in South Dakota because the Wall Drug signs have a new sense of urgency (“Wall Drugs, then Mount Rushmore”) and the signs touting the Corn Palace (“Prepare to be a-maize-d”) are getting very, very silly.
A strong, steady wind bends the prairie grasses, and the RV handles it well. At Mitchell, home of the Corn Palace, we leave I-90 and turn into a campground recommended by the thudding directory: Dakota Campground.
It is our first RV campground. We are nervous.
“Believe me,” Art Kuehl had said back in Naperville, “you pull into a campground and say, `I’m new. I need help,’ there’ll be 50 people out there trying to help you. It’s a different world.”
I cheerfully tell the man at the Dakota Campground office that I’m new. He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t smile.
“Does that mean you want me to help you back it in?”
He is surly.
We back it in ourselves. I drive. The Wife directs. Her hand signals aren’t perfected — there are some mis-moves — but it all gets done with no damage to the RV or to children racing tiny bicycles around the campground.
Remembering Ned Beatty’s instructions, we disconnect the power cable from the interior outlet and plug it into the camp outlet; connect one end of the RV’s water hose to the camp water spigot, the other to the RV; and connect one end of the discharge hose to the RV discharge connection and slide the other end into the site’s sewer tube.
Then we take a picture.
Later, we return to the office, buy two Corn Palace mugs and get better acquainted with Keith Doyle, the man at the desk and owner (with wife Jennifer) of Dakota Campground.
He turns out to be a nice-enough guy with a nice-enough campground: shade, pool, reasonably clean restrooms and showers. It’s high season; most of the RV spots are full.
Doyle’s peeve: People who drive too fast in the campground.
“They’re thinking they’re in their Ford Taurus or in their Intrepid and they drive their RVs against the trees — and then they get mad at us,” he says.
“And they cannot back in. Not because of a lack of practice — they just can’t. That’s what cracks me up.”
Best part about the RV life? The people, says Doyle, and one more thing.
“You can go where the party is.”
The Wife and I have our own party. We grill steaks. The Wife, a former Girl Scout, teaches me how to make s’mores, which do not go well with beer.
After which the guy from the RV next door, a fellow named Jack, is happy to show us which valve on our RV evacuates the dishwater and which valve evacuates the, um, other stuff . . . and we evacuate.
At last, we are RV people.
Day 3: Mitchell-Interior, S.D.
Well, not yet.
For reasons that aren’t worth getting into, disconnecting our water hose from the campground spigot gives The Wife an unscheduled shower.
We also discover the RV’s sewer discharge hose leaks.
A supply shop in Mitchell has a replacement. I feel like an idiot when I can’t attach the new sewer hose to the plastic thing that connects the hose to the RV.
The store clerk is gentle.
Minutes from the shop is downtown Mitchell — and the Corn Palace.
And what is the Corn Palace?
The Corn Palace is a 3,500-seat auditorium designed by the same guy who did New York’s Radio City Music Hall, except unlike the Radio City Music Hall (if I remember Radio City correctly), the exterior of the Corn Palace is primarily corn. Murals are fashioned from different colored cobs, and these murals are changed every year.
The theme for 1999 was “Building a nation.” The theme for 2000 will be “www.millennium.corn.”
The Mitchell public high school’s mascot is an ear of corn named Cornelius. Team nickname: the Kernels. Opposition’s favorite cheer: Pop the Kernels.
Dumbest question ever asked Corn Palace tour guide Sunny Backlund: “Does the corn pop on the outside of the building when it gets over 100 degrees?”
Which, on second thought and with the temperature heading toward 100 degrees, isn’t that dumb a question.
Answer: No.
Mitchell is also home to the World’s Largest Balloon Museum.
Back on the road. By now we are discovering more realities of RV life. Like, no matter how careful you stack and arrange, things (pans, cutlery, grills) invariably rattle at the beginning of a drive until they settle in at their chosen level. Then they only rattle when you run over a bump. Any bump. Even a pimple-size bump.
There are Sign Wars on I-90.
First, there was Corn Palace vs. Wall Drug. After Mitchell, Wall Drug relaxes a little while Casey’s Cafe and Al’s Oasis really go at each other. By Exit 263, it’s a frenzy.
Fortunately, the Missouri River separates Casey from Al.
More signs. Wall Drug makes a comeback, and Rushmore Cave and Reptile Gardens — and something called 1880 Town.
We stop at 1880 Town in Murdo because I thought it would be really, really stupid. It is, in fact, kind of neat.
It’s a collection of 1880-1920 South Dakota buildings moved here from around the state and arranged as a town. The buildings have been restored just enough to keep them from collapsing.
“If you fix it up too much, you just make it another tourist trap, in my opinion,” says Jim Kinney, in his third year as town marshal and dressed for the part. His wife, Mary Helen, rents period costumes across from the old saloon; for $2, you can dissolve into 1880 for an hour or so.
The horse Kevin Costner rode in “Dances With Wolves” is in the town corral. The movie was filmed in South Dakota near Pierre, and props from the film, including two fake scalps, are in a little museum — but it’s the street that works.
“This,” says Kinney, “is really a neat town.”
Back on the road. A thud.
“What was that?”
“Book.”
“OK.”
Off the interstate at South Dakota Highway 73. A succession of roads takes us into the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. To Wounded Knee.
In 1890, more than 300 Indians — most of them women and children — were gunned down on one frigid day by soldiers of the United States Army.
Once, the official sign on the site called it “Battle of Wounded Knee.” The word “Battle” has a new word pasted over it. The word is now “Massacre.”
“The tribe had to fight with the U.S. government to get it changed,” says Phyllis Lucero, who, like most of the victims, is an Oglala Lakota. “We had to prove it was a massacre and not a battle.”
They did, even though it’s pretty much agreed the first shot was fired by an Indian, a deaf man who evidently didn’t understand an order to give up his rifle. Doesn’t matter, says Kelly Looking Horse, another Oglala Lakota. “The whole intention was to kill them all anyway.”
We don’t say much as the RV rolls away from Wounded Knee.
We stop for the night at a KOA Kampground in Interior, S.D., near the east entrance of Badlands National Park and hook up just before the thunderstorm. When the lightning and thunder end, there is just rain.
On this night, the sound made by the rain on the roof of our RV is somehow comforting.
Day 4: Interior-Keystone, S.D.
Morning arrives leisurely in a campground, even on a sunny morning after a storm. In their patch away from the trailers and motor homes, tent-campers stir first, the muffled clanks of mess kits announcing coffee is on. Then, it seems, RVs with kids awaken, but the little ones, respecting the hour and the surroundings and with parents who have taught them well, speak softly if at all. The pool is closed until 10; the bikes get a rest.
The closest thing to a sharp noise is the occasional closing of the tinny doors universal to RVs.
Not until the trailers and motor homes begin to move out is this sense of peace compromised, and it is then that the transitory reality of RV life is kicks in.
Lifelong friends made hours earlier at a shared hookup vanish from each other’s lives forever. Kids wave blankly at other kids as they are hauled away.
So it goes.
After two nights, the ritual of disconnecting power, water and sewer already has become routine even for us. Alongside, a large shirtless man from Minnesota is storing thin wood boards he had used to level his motor home. We had thought all the sites, including ours, were level. But we accept eggs sliding together on one side of the frying pan; veterans don’t.
How long, I ask the large man, has he been into this?
“Since 1990,” he says, stacking the boards for storage.
Is there a downside?
“None,” he says. “Except maybe this.”
We get everything put away and pull out onto the road. On the first turn — thud.
“What was that?” Neither of us bothers to guess. We laugh and keep rolling.
The entrance to Badlands National Park is 4 miles from our campground. A volunteer at the visitors center suggests we take the park’s Loop Road but urges us to also explore a wilderness area that will take us to a prairie dog town and 500 bison.
The Loop Road, paved, takes us over glorious terrain — maybe lunar, certainly otherworldly, full of color. At the Pinnacle Overlook, a boy, about 3, is dazzled by what he sees below him.
“How did people make this?” he asks his mother. Twice. His mother doesn’t answer.
Not far ahead, a sign points to the road to the prairie dog town. Five miles to the dogs. It is a gravel road. There are unavoidable ruts.
A car ahead of us navigates the gravel and ruts and ridges with no apparent discomfort. Our rig rides like a rowboat battling 12-foot seas and sounds like a runaway buckboard loaded with cheap pots.
A mile into this, I stop the RV and look at The Wife.
“What do you think?” I ask. “Up to you,” says The Wife.
We turn back. For the first time, I resent the RV.
But it gets us to Wall Drug.
Well, the signs compel us and the RV to Wall, S.D., home of Wall Drug. The parking areas look like RV conventions.
How many signs are there?
“Seventy between Rapid City and Wall,” says a Wall food server named Cinda.
“Over 200. They’re all over,” says another, named April.
“I don’t think there’s a number big enough,” says another, Amber.
“No one knows,” says a clerk, Michael.
It turns out someone does. Claramae, who works at the drug store — a relative speck in what has become an entrepreneurial empire — calls the office.
Answer: 379.
“That would be the number the guys have to maintain,” says Claramae. Which doesn’t include rogue signs that show up in places like Kuwait and the South Pole.
Travel writers have been writing about Wall Drug for decades. Their stories (including at least two by Tribune scribes) are posted steps from the 6-foot rabbit, sealed forever in plastic. There is nothing more to write.
But if the square-dancing bunnies, a gorilla that sings “Alley-Oop” and a T-Rex that scares the bejeebers out of very small children — plus every imaginable Western-oriented gift item — sounds a little tacky, wait until you see the basketball-playing chicken at Reptile Gardens in Rapid City.
You may ask: What is a basketball-playing chicken doing at Reptile Gardens?
Answer: Playing basketball.
Adult woman to her husband: “You missed it! A snake eating a mouse!” We don’t stay long at Reptile Gardens.
We also pass on Bear Country and Jackalope Village.
We stop in Keystone, in the Black Hills, at a campground called Battle Creek. From there, above the trees, we can see George Washington’s head.
Minutes after we are hooked up, just after The Wife has tossed a load into the campground washing machine, the rain begins.
And when the rain eases and the clothes are in the dryer, we can see a rainbow.
Day 5: Mt. Rushmore/Crazy Horse
The minutiae on Mt. Rushmore is massive: numbers (Lincoln has a 20-foot nose), common links (Gutzon Borglum not only carved the mountain but also Chicago’s Phil Sheridan statue), mistakes (Jefferson originally was on Washington’s right but was blasted away because the head looked funny), myths (no, Reagan’s head won’t make it a quintet), etc.
No doubt about it, Mt. Rushmore is impressive. Hey, it’s Mt. Rushmore. Only slightly less impressive is a man outside the gift shop.
It had taken John Davis eight years to get his biology degree at Black Hills State University; having finally snared the degree last spring, he is, naturally, making a living impersonating Raymond Massey impersonating Abe Lincoln.
He not only is 6 foot 4; he knows the Gettysburg Address. I stop him at: “Now we are engaged in a great Civil War . . .”
He has been asked to pose with a rubber ant.
The Mt. Rushmore gift shop has no Crazy Horse souvenirs — which, with the Crazy Horse Memorial virtually down the road, strikes me as odd.
“If you want to buy Crazy Horse merchandise, you have to go to Crazy Horse,” says Shiloh Matousek, working a Rushmore register for the summer. Is the Crazy Horse Memorial worth visiting? “It’s OK. But if you’re not crazy about Crazy Horse . . .”
There seems to be a lack of love between the Mt. Rushmore people and the Crazy Horse people — but Crazy Horse is huge. His nose is much bigger than Lincoln’s. “One nostril,” says an introductory film, “could hold a five-story house.”
But Mt. Rushmore was completed in 78 months. Five survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (all from the winning side) watched the first rocks blasted from Crazy Horse’s mountain in 1948 — and it took 50 years just to finish the face. That’s about all there is, and in theory there’s lots more to come. In theory.
The designing sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, died in 1982; his wife and kids (there were 10) and grandchildren carry on the family business. One of the grandkids, Heidi Ziolkowski, works the sweet shop at one end of the restaurant across from the giftshop that sells, among other things, bookends made from rocks blasted from the mountain.
I ask her if it will be finished in her lifetime.
“I don’t know,” she says. She is 14. “Nobody knows. The technology is always changing. That’s why we haven’t set a date for it to be finished.”
“Oh, yes, it’ll be finished,” says Dr. A.C. Ross, an Oglala Lakota and scholar who speaks several languages (I hear him greet a Danish visitor in Danish) and sells his books at Crazy Horse. He is 60. “I’ll be here.”
But 50 years . . .
“Fifty years,” says Ross, whose Lakota name is Ehanamani (Walks Among), “is a blink of an eye.”
And in a more conventional blink, we’re back in our home — and rolling.
Next Sunday: Devils Tower, Custer, a truly great highway — and Yellowstone.
RV TO THE BLACK HILLS
– DAY 1
Naperville-Tomah, Wis.: 245 miles.
Overnight: Daybreak Motel, Tomah; $53.66.
Best grub: Broiled Canadian walleye, $14.95; Burnstad’s European Cafe, Tomah.
– DAY 2
Tomah-Mitchell, S.D.: 403 miles.
Overnight: Dakota Campground, Mitchell; $17.96.
Best grub: Char-broiled steaks, and sides (grocery).
– DAY 3
Mitchell-Interior, S.D. (Badlands N.P.): 357 miles.
Overnight: KOA-Badlands, Interior; $26.
Best grub: Buffalo burger, $4.50; Casey’s Cafe, Chamberlain, S.D.
– DAY 4
Interior-Keystone, S.D.: 116 miles.
Overnight: Battle Creek Campground, Keystone; $21.60.
Best grub: Bratwurst boiled in beer, then grilled (grocery).
– DAY 5
Keystone, S.D. (Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse Monument): 42 miles.
Overnight: Battle Creek Campground, Keystone; $21.60.
Best grub: Tatanka (buffalo) stew, $6.25; Laughing Water Restaurant, Crazy Horse, S.D.
Total miles, Part 1: 1,163
Mileages are actual miles driven and typically include some meandering. Lodging prices are for two people, including tax; campground prices include full hookups (electricity, water, sewer). Meals are per person. All prices subject to change.
———-
Alan Solomon’s e-mail address is alsolly@aol.com.
