The Missouri has a lot of dams on it

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Sunday (Sep 16)

It’s very windy this morning. Glad I didn’t leave stuff outside. Last night I had to cross Lake Oahe yet again to get to the campground. Around here, crossing the Missouri even when it’s a lake means changing time zones, so … back to the Central Time Zone! This morning I retrace my route back across the bridge to the Eastern Time and the quiet town of Mobridge, SD. The only places open on Sunday are the Burger King, the Dairy Queen and the grocery store. I went to two out of three! At the grocery the wine and liquor shelves were cordoned off – no sales on Sunday … but they were happy to sell beer(?!). I started a little debate with the cashier and the lady behind me as to whether this is a state law or local ordinance. We didn’t decide, but in any event no wine for me in Mobridge today. It was a great stop anyway, because their deli was a real upgrade over the chain store delis I’ve been to out here in the sticks. I loaded up on chicken, chicken salad and caesar salad which all served me well over the next few days.

The DQ was a trip. It was THE place to be on a Sunday in Mobridge, I guess because it is the ONLY place to be!  It was busy enough when I got there, but some church must’ve let out because when I left every booth was full and most had 3-4 people in them. Everybody was chatting across the dividers about harvest and the usual life in the country stuff. I wouldn’t have experienced this at the DQ in the middle of a random Tuesday, so I guess I am thankful for this little slice of communal life in rural South Dakota.

US 12 east from Mobridge is an arrow-straight shot to US 83 South to US 14 west to Pierre, but that’s what this trip is about. Instead I mosey along on Route 1804 hugging the contours of the river/lake as best I can. It takes quite a bit longer, but that’s the point!

Sunday is football day, and it’s early enough in the NFL season that the Niners suckage hasn’t yet killed all my enthusiasm for pro football for this year, so I head for what Yelp says is Pierre‘s best and only sports bar – the one and only Jake’s Good Times Place.

I drink beer and watch the Niners barely win. There are campgrounds about an hour down the road, and there are campgrounds here. The game wore on, and I’m still here sitting and drinking. Driving another hour is starting to seem like a bad idea. Just two beers total, in case you’re wondering. Allstays show a couple of cheap municipal camping places, but the cuties at the bar knew those places and thought they were kinda shabby for a distinguished fellow like me. They were no doubt wrong about that, but I followed their recommendation and (carefully) drove the short four miles to Farm Island, which was as nice as they said it was, but expensive.

The ranger at the check-in kiosk lets me pick a site off the map in the office instead of driving out and driving back. That was nice of her, but I didn’t pick a great site. My site looked nice and private in the map, at the far end of the farthest loop, but it’s a huge campground and everything interesting or useful is very far away, even the basics like flush toilets. I decided to think of this as a bike riding opportunity rather than a pain in the ass. In fact it was both!

So I park, plug into the expensive electricity and assemble my bike. I had noticed a sign to a “swimming beach” on the way in, so I put on my trunks, packed my swimming gear – a towel, and headed out. Yesterday was hot, today is even hotter (90°s). However, the forecast tomorrow is for a cold snap – 60°s tonight and a high in the 60°s tomorrow. So tonight is the night for some Dakota dippin’ if there is going to be any. The water was a little stinky and slimy near the edge, but 30 feet out, it was chest deep and very, very pleasant. The stinky water I had to wade through to get out made me glad this place has showers.

Then I pedaled around the other loops and the showers, which are far, far away from my loop. There is a basketball court! I am such a ball of energy tonight that I rode back to the site, got my ball, returned and shot hoops for a while. It was a pretty sad basketball court – just a square of asphalt in a field of hacked-back scrub land. Nowadays I mostly shoot close-in shots anyway because I’m not very strong. Tonight that was a feature because long shots bounce farther, and chasing the ball into that stumpy scrub was VERY nasty in flip flops. Briars and thorns stuck to the ball. Not awesome, but it felt great be hoopin’ again for a few minutes.

Monday

Get myself going mid-morning and pedal the 3/4 mile to the showers and back. Continue filling my batteries with quality South Dakota electricity until the very last moment, then uncouple my extension cord, loop it and stow it and head off back to Pierre to get the day going.

The only coffee + wifi in the area is the Coffee Exchange downtown. The breakfasts looked very tasty, but I was too late for them (aarrgh!), so I just had coffee and four cinnamon-sugared bagel holes! Never even gave a thought to the existence of bagel holes before this. They were very … chewy and definitely not something I would order again. The Coffee Exchange was not a winner for me.

There are no restaurants for an hour in the direction I am going, so I decide get lunch here at some place that is not the Coffee Exchange. The Branding Iron Bistro was pretty nice, brighter and cheerier than the other. I woulda come here first if I had known. Even better, they had a South Dakota official state map under glass at my table! It’s a much bigger scale than my AAA map which has both Dakotas on the same side. I was better able to scope out the many turns I will have to take on third-tier state roads to follow the Lewis and Clark Trail today. Yesterday it was route 1804 but it looks like route 1806 is the way to go heading south.

I backtrack to the north end of town and cross the river back to the west side of the Missouri, where I re-enter the Mountain Time Zone for a while. I always get a geeky little thrill when my phone says “1:17” one time I look, then it says “12:17” the next time. Cheap thrills. SR 1806 follows the L&C Trail south along the river edge of a huge federal grassland, then into a reservation for the next 50 miles. It is a pretty bad road. Not so much bumpy as wavy. I don’t know the geology around here, but the top layer seems to be prone to slipping and slumping. You come on a nice straightaway and you bump it up to 70, because there is no one in sight and the speed limit is 65. That straightaway turns out to have a series of dips and bumps you couldn’t see that bounce you between the bottom of your seat and the roof, and you think maybe I’d better just stick to old, boring 50-ish mph.

After an hour or so of this I get on I-90 for a minute to cross back to the east side of the river to take Route 50 south for the rest of the day.

Today’s drive was pretty, but quite long. It was already long when I got to my destination – Pease Island, and it got even longer when it turned out that Pease Island was a FAIL. I am not a fan of the South Dakota State Park system. Pease Island was a modest little campground 12 miles off the highway, not a single living human anywhere around it. It was going to cost even more than amenity-rich Farm Island – $22 for a site, $6 for the entry fee, AND a $2 reservation fee for a grand total of $30 for a parking spot next to an inexplicable giant RV campground, where oh by the way, the nice bathroom with showers and sinks and flush toilets is closed for upgrades. There is no phone reception out here, so they thoughtfully provided one of those roadside emergency-type phones make a reservation. Sure enough, a nice lady actually answered at 6 pm on Monday, confirming that my experience here would coast $30. I politely declined.  To sum up, eff South Dakota State Parks, I’m outta here.

Twelve miles back to the highway, where I got good enough phone reception to find that there is a casino with camping about 30 miles away on this side of the river, and a some kind of municipal campground a little farther along on the Nebraska side of the river. I chose the latter.

Got here around 7:20, so I have less than an hour of daylight. If I had come straight here instead goofing around at stupid Pease Island  I would’ve been here an hour ago. But it’s all good. In it’s modest way this place is spectacularly user-friendly and I am really happy to be here.

Tuesday

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I had a nice brunch at the only restaurant in town. This one was as pure rural as you’re gonna get. Just farm folks going about their business. The waitress was very nice but harried by the lunch crowd. Also she was completely inefficient about accomplishing multiple things with each trip to the kitchen. I sat down, she came out and welcomed me, but without a menu. So when I said I wanted lunch that was another trip back to get a menu … that sort of thing. But anyway she was real nice. She made a fresh pot of coffee just for me (heart emoji). I wish I could remember what I ordered. I’m pretty sure I was too late for breakfast … I’ll bet I had a mushroom swiss burger, that’s my go to non-breakfast breakfast right now.

Today’s drive is nothing much, a lot of corn fields. I stopped at a nice river overlook. I guess the news here that for the first time in two hundred miles there is a hill high enough to have an overlook! When I got out of the van here, the air was noticeably humid than it was back in Spencer. This depressed me: the realization that humidity will be my life for the next month or so. I’m not really into it, but I’m heading to the south, so that’s how it’s gonna be.

The not particularly lovely town of Elk Point has a city park between the town and the interstate, next to the high school and football stadium. It’s bigger and on paper fancier than last night’s city park campground but it is much less appealing and user-friendly to me. The grass here is thicker and wetter. It looks nice, but it needs mowing, and it’s very damp from last night’s rain so it’s not that comfortable to hang out in … also, many, many insects. My ankles are constantly being attacked. The bathroom is far away. I’ve had worse, but I am not a fan of tonight’s situation.

I took an evening walk and ended up on Main Street, where I dropped into a bar because a couple of happy people were walking out. I’ve decided bars in Trump-land are safe for me in the afternoon. I hung out for a very entertaining couple of beers. The fellow next to me is in the seed corn business. I found this out because he was going on at length about a disagreement with the owner of a field about how many loads of corn the field would generate. I entertained him and the rest by being so dumb. He was talking about “six rows of females, then two rows of males”, and issues with drying the corn and I was mystified until I finally got it that this is not regular corn. Nobody cares about boys and girls with regular corn, you just harvest it and feed it to the cows. It’s only when you plan to use the corn to grow more corn that you care about fertility. Sounds pretty obvious when I write it out, but it took me a while that night.

A pretty intense thunderstorm blew through about 4 am, woke me up. The only things I’d left outside were my mat and flip flops, but I brought ’em in.  I followed its progress on my weather app. It was a pretty strong wind for a few minutes, but it passed quickly. With Hurricane Florence in the news, the power of it was just a little frightening. Weather has undoubtedly gotten more intense last few years. I stayed up for a while and watched the traffic on I-29 through the front window. Ain’t no thunderstorm gonna slow up those three-trailer big rigs.

Wednesday

My next door neighbors are gone without a trace by the time I got up. It seemed some kind of family affair, with the parents in a mid-sized trailer and the kids in a tent. It was kind of odd yesterday when I pulled up, the trailer inhabitant was playing with a drone in the expanse of grass that was previously deserted until I (apparently) ruined the party. No judgement from me. I do the same with my Tai Chi practice, if a car or person invades my space it totally ruins the mood. My guess is that their tent did not fare well in that vicious wind. Anyway, there are large swampy areas that weren’t there yesterday, and the ground is very soft, but with a little planning I was able to get to the gravel without getting stuck or without churning up the sod.

There is no hope of coffee until Sioux City. The best bet there appears to be Pierce Street Coffee Works, so that’s where I went. Sioux City has a grimy old industrial feel to it. There was this odd little parkway with narrow lanes and concrete curbs that felt like it was out of the 30’s. The Coffee Works is evidently THE place for lunch in that part of SC, because it was very crowded with a long line to order when I arrived at 12:15. I waited and ordered coffee and a sandwich to go and a muffin. then I ate my muffin and drank my coffee, but when I asked the bus person how to get a refill she told me to stand in line and pay another dollar. I didn’t like any of that, but the notion that you had to stand with your cup in your hand while five people order lunch to get your second cup enraged me to a dangerous degree! I went up and asked the nice fellow taking orders about it, and he said “gimme your cup” and gave me refill.  Disaster and a scorching Yelp review averted! :))

As I’m looking at my map now, I see that Sioux City has a Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center that looks pretty cool. Wish I had known that then. Poor research on my part.