South Dakota Pt. I

After the wedding and a nice Sunday visit with some of Ken's family in from out of state, we packed up the car and got out of town! It's been an unbelievably long semester so far with the wedding planning and students from the underworld for me (Note here that I'm trying to put that nicely -- I have some real doozies this semester). We slowly made our way toward South Dakota and the Black Hills/Mt. Rushmore, but as usual found a couple of good stopping points along the way.

Stop 1: The Beanpod Candle Outlet Store -- Marcy's favorite place to buy her now-favorite soy candles at an exceptionally low price. After stocking up on some good deals, we were back on the road which took us to ....

Stop 2: Clear Lake, IA home of the Surf Ballroom, the last place Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and JP "the Big Bopper" Richardson played in Feb. 1959 before their plane went down a few miles outside of town.

I've been to the Surf Ballroom before, but had always wanted to go to the spot in the corn field where the plane went down. I'd heard there was a memorial there, so off we went to find it. We trudged our way through an extremely muddy March corn field (Hey , where was the frozen ground?). After we were almost there, the ground just became too saturated and I could not go on. By this point my sneakers were coated in mud, but being the neat freak I am, I decided that I just could not walk through the standing water/mud to the memorial. Being the trooper he is, Ken did it for me and got some nice pictures of the memorial. It was strange to think that it was almost exactly 50 years that the plan had crashed in that field killing the three rock legends.

After mudding our way back to the car and trying desperately to clean our shoes off in the lone patch of snow we could find, we got back on the road and headed to....

Stop 3: Sioux Falls, SD. There we decided to go hang at the hotel (Country Inns and and Suites) early, relaxing to a lovely room, comfy bed, and free cookies in the lobby. My idea of a real vacation!

More on the Douth Dakota trip in the next blog. There are too many pictures to post and stories to tell to do it now. It's getting late and I have to start another week tomorrow. More to come soon!