Day 21

Our day started nice and early at 5:30am when Benjamin (our monkey sleeper) fell out of the bed, landed on a nightstand, and got a bloody nose!  Poor guy!  We had planned to wake up around 6am, so we decided to go on and get up.  Harvey had big things on today's agenda, including driving over 400 miles with three big stops along the way.  Our stops were the Badlands, the Corn Palace, & the Homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder, all in South Dakota!  Well, we got it all accomplished and ended our day with more mediocre food at "Taco Johns," a chain we have seen scattered across the midwest.  Now that we have experienced this mexican food/hashbrown combos, we are good...really do not need to eat it again :).

The Badlands were beautiful.  We met a Park Ranger from Charlotte, who is a chemistry teacher during the school year.  We completed, you guessed it, yet another Junior Park Ranger program!  The weather was great, not too cold and not too hot.

Our next stop was the Corn Palace.  Every year this building is decorated with plants, flowers, weeds, & corn.  A local artist designs the outside and workers work on it for five months, starting in June, ending after the corn is harvested, usually around September.  It was fascinating!  Of course, we had to buy some popcorn while we were there :).

After our visit, we got back in the car again and drove to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Homestead.  It was interesting to see the artifacts from her family, visit her parent's last home, and sit in her former schoolhouse!  One interesting fact was that when historians started tearing away wallpaper from the schoolhouse, they found a blackboard with a face drawn on it in chalk!  They have it preserved behind plexiglass.

What did not work: South Dakota food!  Sorry, I know there is good food here, at least I think there is, we just have not been fortunate enough to find it :).

What worked: We bought a hard drive before the trip, so almost every night, we upload the photos from our cameras onto it.  Trey has a file and we have a file.  It is great, because we can easily upload photos onto our blogs and our camera memory cards are not getting too full!

This verse:  "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." 

1 Corinthians 13:7

Carried by His grace,