Summer Vacation: Coming home from Kansas - 693.39 miles

So Aaron was still in Texas when we finished our Kansas vacation so I decided to see some of the sights on our way home.  Two places I particularly wanted to go were to Winter Quarters in Nebraska and The Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD.

I've noticed that sometimes when you go to a Visitor's Center the people there have their "schpiel"  that they usually say.  I've also noticed that no matter how often you tell them you don't have a ton of time and still have about 8 hours left in your drive, you are going to get the entire "schpiel".  Thus our visit to Winter Quarters went from a quick 30 minutes to 2 hours.  The kids only complained as I went through the cemetery but did stand long enough for a picture or two.

By the way, for those of you who don't know Winter Quarters is the place where the pioneers stayed over the winter in really terrible conditions before their trek west to Salt Lake City.  Most there had been forced out of their homes previously so food and supplies were scarce and there was a lot of sickness so many, especially kids, died there.

Kids pulling a handcart.  Alex mentioned that this was so easy that pulling it to Utah would've been no problem.

Kids loading their wagons.

Memorial to children who died at Winter Quarters.  You can almost feel the enthusiasm.

Although long, it was a great experience and the kids actually learned something so we have that going for us...which is nice.

So back in the car and 5 hours later we pull up to The World's ONLY Corn Palace.  That's right, there's only one and lucky us it's in South Dakota.

Since none of you know, The Corn Palace was built to advertise that corn grows in South Dakota and to entice farmers to either move here or stay here instead of relocating to Iowa or Nebraska because hey...we have so much corn we're building palaces out of the stuff.

Apparently it didn't take because to this day South Dakota still does not have 1 million people in her borders.

They start decorating for the next year in July so it's not as corny as it could be.

World's Only...too bad I didn't get in there myself.

Rushmore made of corn.