Day Two started at our stinky Best Western. We both slept well but were glad to already be awake when the shrieking children hit the hallways. The poo smell had dispersed, but we still figured it was safest to skip the "colonial" breakfast, as our friend Clint calls it.
Downtown Wisconsin Dells is pretty well jammed with tourist traps -- Indian jewelry, fudge, Ripley's Believe It or Not, and so forth. The Riverwalk was pretty though, and if you got off the main strip the town seemed kind of pretty.
Wisconsin through the river valley is really lovely, with big pillars of yellowish brown rock. It looked like sandstone but we don't know what it was. We saw a wind farm that stretched across most of the horizon. We haven't figured out why some of the windmills turn but some don't. Minnesota was much flatter than Wisconsin, and actually kind of boring along I-90.
I spent most of the time looking out the window or knitting. I finished Matt's scarf and started on Kim's. I love that Knifty Knitter, dammit! Matt is now calling me the Knit Wit. Matt did 100% of the driving as usual, and has decided that he'd never buy a Mercury Montego. I really like having a full sized car -- SO much more comfortable -- but I agree abt the Montego. It has all these weird rattles and the hood bobs up and down in the wind like it's not fully latched. Maybe that's more a problem of it being a rental car. After being disappointed by our inability to bring either the XM or the iPod, we didn't turn the radio on all day. Guess the honeymoon's not over yet if you can still spend the whole day chitchatting or sitting in companionable silence.
It took us about 10 hrs to get to Wall, South Dakota. South Dakota has beautiful rolling hills with farms and grazing cattle. Sometimes it's really flat, but mostly it's just endless gently rolling hills so far. It's so restful to look out over that view. I took the following at Sunset just as we were getting to the Badlands. It got down to about 45 degrees this evening, but we're still expecting excellent weather during the day.
The first hotel we saw when we got into town was the Welsh Motel, which is just about the cutest thing we've seen. It's scrupulously clean, if a bit Momo-ish in terms of decor. I particularly like that there's a thermometer tacked to the wall above the thermostat. The owner was super nice, and gave us a restaurant recommendation (Red Rock Cafe - more on that in a minute). They have free WiFi, the place is practically empty, super quiet, and cost us a whopping $43. If we decide to stick around here instead of going to Hot Springs tomorrow, we'll definitely stay another night.
The restaurant turned out to be The Red Rock Cafe and Napa Auto Parts store. Literally the same building, just no connecting door. Matt had the buffalo NY strip, which was excellent. I ordered broasted chicken, thinking it would be some kind of baking / roasting combo. Broasting turns out to be a patented cooking process that originated in Wisconsin -- it's a method of deep fat frying the chicken in a pressure cooker. I was disappointed at first because I really wanted something lighter, and disappointed again when it showed up at the table blood raw in the middle.
They took it back though and recooked it, and it really was delicious after all. It was super juicy and it really is lighter than regular fried chicken, presumably because it's not battered. The skin gets super dark and crisp. Everything else was fine - we may go back tomorrow to try their buffalo burgers.
So now we're tucked into our little room with a beer from the cooler. I'm catching up on the pictures and trying to fend off the urge to knit some more, and Matt says he's watching the ALCS (I was just going to call it baseball).
Tomorrow we're hoping to see the Badlands, the Wounded Knee monument, and maybe some of the grasslands. We want to hike a bit and get our butts plumped back up! They're flat from sitting in the car for two days. :)
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