American Gam

“Go as far as you can see; when you get there you’ll be able to see farther.” ~ Thomas Carlyle

Interstate 90 runs three thousand miles from Seattle to Boston. Two weeks ago we picked up I-90 East in Rapid City, South Dakota, which is roughly a thousand miles from Seattle to the west and two thousand miles from Boston to the east. The Boston area was our target and we were eager to get back there so we settled on the straight and narrow highway instead of meandering the backroads and byways. I-90 was our chosen path. The seemingly endless miles of highway and the seemingly endless signs promoting Wall Drugs were on the horizon.

The first night we boondocked on the Wall just outside of the entrance to the Badlands. You’ll remember we stayed there right after Kodi died and right before our KOA adventure began. It’s where I found that legacy stone down in the canyon.

We thought Kodi would have loved to run wild in this wide open grassland so we left a little piece of him here on the wind. Run Kodi, run!

Once you pull out of the Badlands of South Dakota and head east on I-90 the first thing of interest to see is the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, which you saw in a recent post.

From there, a thousand interesting things were waiting to be seen like…

…1880’s Town, in East Jackson, South Dakota, where you can see a town built from a collection of relocated buildings from the late 1800’s. Along with shops, antiques, carriage rides, high-noon shootouts, live music in the saloon, the town jail, the old schoolhouse, a train car where you can have lunch, windmills, museums, and other unique artifacts from the late 1880’s, they also have a large collection of props from the movie, Dances with Wolves, including the taxidermied remains of Two Socks and Cisco. You can see more photos from my previous solo visit here on American Gam.

Along the highway in Kadoka, South Dakota we saw Firehenge…

There was that amazing statue in Chamberlain, South Dakota called Dignity of Earth and Sky…

And the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota …

And the Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, Minnesota…

I found another legacy stone at the size 78 foot of the Jolly Green Giant. You can find the story of this legacy stone at: ABL88rocks (on Facebook.)

And, of course, we went to the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota that was deliciously fun…

As you travel along Interstate 90 it slices, dices, and traverses its way through the sprawling metropolises of Sioux City, South Dakota, Austin, Minnesota, Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, South Bend, Indiana, Cleveland, Ohio, Erie, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, New York, all of which we cruised through without incident. We stopped to visit family in Albany, New York before reaching our destination of Worcester, Massachusetts.

Along with all of those stark, gray, crowded, manic, metropolitan areas were the miles and miles of wide open prairies, the rolling green hills, the countless farms, the cows and horses of every color, the rolled bales of hay sitting like sentinels across recently scoured fields, the cornfields thirsty for more water in this high-drought season, and the acres of sunflowers straining their long necks ever closer to the nurishing sun.

…and then there was this astonishing sunrise over Lake Erie…

Two thousand miles later we landed, like the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, at the family home in Massachusetts, ready for some rest and relaxation, visits with family and friends, seeing the ocean for the first time in eight months, lots of lobster, and just some mental and physical winding down from a summer spent working in the Black Hills and a week of traversing Interstate 90.

I hope you enjoyed this transnavigation of America across I-90.

The gam continues…