On August of 2012, David and I flew to Minneapolis, met my mom, sister, and nephew, climbed into a minivan and drove to Mount Rushmore. It was the Great American Summer Car Trip!
To properly document the trip, David and I bought a small Nikon Coolpix for Lorenz and told him that he was the documentarian. So if you see particularly artsy photos of inexplicably mundane objects, you can probably assume that it was the work of Lorenz. He was very excited to be the documentarian at first, but it turns out he was kind of bad about catching important things. He didn't care if we were approaching the border to South Dakota if the rear windshield looked particularly interesting at that moment. And usually he had his face in Grandma's iPad. So as the trip went on, the documentarian duties usually fell to David because he could scramble for the camera.
The drive to Mount Rushmore from Minneapolis is roughly 10 hours. We decided to break the trip up on the way out there for two days of roughly 5 hours each. This ended up being a very smart decision because there were some fun stops on the way out there and if we had tried to do it all in one day, we would have been beyond exhausted by the time we arrived. So our mid-point stop was Sioux Falls in South Dakota. Part of our logic was that the largest water park in all of South Dakota is in Sioux Falls. Whenever Lorenz got bored of sitting in the car (which was pretty rare), we held the water park excursion over his head for good behavior.
The first day was mostly spent in Minnesota. We drove through lightly rolling green fields. The flatness of the Midwest had not sunk in. We only made it about an hour into the trip before we had to stop at McDonald's for a bathroom break. I had a moment of "if we can't go an hour without stopping, we will never make it." But we soon got our "car legs" and could go for a few hours without stopping. Our lunch stop was a tiny town called St. James in Minnesota. There was a restaurant called "Hickory Inn" that was supposed to have views of the lake. In reality, it had a view of mobile homes parked next to the lake. Still, it was the kind of small diner your imagined you'd stumble across on a road trip across the U.S. And the food matched that image. It sticks to your ribs!
Sioux Falls was nice enough. The hotel was clean and convenient. There was a Best Buy where we could get an iPad Camera Connection kit so that I could copy the photos off the camera and onto my iPad at night. The threat of Lorenz deleting all the photos from the camera was constant. Despite several lectures of "DON'T EVER DELETE ANY PHOTOS FROM THE CAMERA," he still deleted photos that he didn't like.
The water park, Wild Water West, was a lot of fun. After salivating all day about the water park, Lorenz decided he didn't want to go on the water slides. Sis, David and I all pasted smiles on our face and acted like a bunch of water park Labradors jumping down the water slides to show Lorenz how fun it was. David's inner tube flipped at the bottom of the water slide and I think that confirmed that Lorenz was going to stick to the pools.
We had a nice dinner outside where the hundreds of flies of South Dakota could enjoy us and our food. And we followed that with a trip to Dairy Queen.
This was a real road trip.
