South Dakota Retains Unique Vintage Charm
Many roadside oddities have survived several decades
January 13, 2012
The decorations at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, are fashioned from ears of corn.
If you’re into time travel, time warps, time capsules, that sort of thing, you should take a trip to the high-plains state of South Dakota. You’ll feel like you’re back in the 1940s.
That was long before high-speed Interstate highways, and there was no easy way to bypass the little towns that dot the 600 kilometers from the Minnesota border on the east to the Wyoming line out west.
The brontosaurus at Rapid City’s Dinosaur Park looks fierce, but this species was timid as dinosaurs went. They were vegans.
Humble motor-court motels and snake farms, family zoos, gemstone and dinosaur-bone collections broke the tedium for families heading to Yellowstone National Park.
And many roadside oddities have survived to this day. In Mitchell, South Dakota, there’s the Corn Palace - a building covered in 275,000 ears of corn. No, we’re not kidding.
In the town of Lemmon, you’ll encounter a petrified-wood park, which someone described as a “forest of frozen fossils.” In Rapid City, a park filled with concrete dinosaurs. No admission fee for that.
Elsewhere across the desolate prairie, you’ll find the skull and bones of a circus elephant; a house in the shape of a shoe; and museums devoted to vinegar, the walleye fish, and those relics of the days before indoor toilets: outhouses.
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25