Corner To Corner - Chapter - 8, Somewhere Out On the Prairie

It was good to rest for a day in Minneapolis and not ride a few hundred miles. After six straight days of hard riding, we needed it. We left Minneapolis late as well to avoid the commuter traffic. There is nothing worse than being on a motorcycle, in a strange big city, trying to read confusing freeway ramp signs, getting lost in a tangle of ramps that looks like a can full of worms, and dodging rushing commuters who are on auto pilot. As it was the short trips around Minneapolis on Sunday meeting up with friends were trying – and we missed ramps twice and ended up going all over town. It was a very pleasant morning once again, and we left Minneapolis in t-shirts. Riding along in the warm sun – bare arms out, fists in the wind – there is nothing to compare to the feeling, and I could ride for hours like that. We’ve really lucked out with weather on this trip – other than the two rain squalls, we’ve had sun. However, earlier in the day as I was noting out the route west and seeing how damn far we still had to go, I actually found myself thinking “maybe we could ship them home and just fly…” I know, a crazy thought eh? But truth be told, another day’s rest would have felt nice.

We headed southwest on a tangle of freeways out of Minneapolis, aiming for US-212 West, and out onto the Minnesota Prairie. Riding along this nice two-lane out on the prairie is great. It’s not so flat and boring, (like Florida), and the towns are about 15 miles apart. You can see them start to rise before you – grain elevators and silos – then you ride through a nice small town main street with two story brick buildings, and past the grain elevator and the farm implement dealer and out onto the prairie again – watching the town disappear in your rear view mirror. You ride through a few miles of corn or soy beans, and the next town starts to rise up before you – towns like Hector, Bird Island, Oliva, and Danube. Out here they still have 4-H and FFA clubs and town parks sponsored by the Rotary Club. If it’s a county seat, there’s usually a fancy courthouse built at the turn of the century. It’s really what middle America is all about.

Out here on the prairie we’ve lost the Baptists and their reader boards demanding that I ACCEPT HIM!!! And we’ve landed, as Garrison Keilor says, out amongst the Lutherans. Lutherans are not nearly as preachy as Baptists apparently and all the towns have a nice large Lutheran Church and the reader board only lists the Sunday service hours and when the next Church Supper is. Every town also has an implement dealer. I like the John Deere ones – with their green painted tractors. These beasts are huge! Especially the combines and corn harvesters. They dwarf most houses and no doubt cost as much.

We turned south on MN-23 and found ourselves motoring through the small town of Hanley Falls. Just outside of town we passed an antique tractor with a sign saying “Farm Implement Museum” with an arrow pointing to the town, and since we needed a break, we pulled in. The museum is housed in the town’s old school building – a two story building put up by the WPA in the 1920s. This is a classic old school, where Ruth the caretaker told us the town had all 12 grades up until 1965. On the hall walls were the class pictures over the years – in 1960 the high school class had 7 graduates. In 1964 they had 14. Evidence of the baby-boom in action. The ceilings were 20 feet high, and the doors all oak. All the rooms were filled with old farm implements and equipment, antique cooking stuff, cool “feed” signs, and the like. They must have cleaned out every barn in the County for this collection, including a bunch of old tractors in a garage out back! And inside, on a shelf, was a small bottle labeled “Mt. St. Helens Ash”. Hey, something from back home, all the way out in a museum in Hanley Falls, MN. Ruth had us fill out and sign the guest book and we put a pin on the map in Seattle – the only one from Washington. I guess the Farm Implement museum doesn’t get a lot of traffic. We gave them $20 in their donation bin and headed back out on MN-23, looking for a place for lunch.

The next town up was Marshall, and according to Ruth at the museum we’d be able to find something there. I told her we didn’t want to do “chain” places, we wanted real food, and I wanted some place with a swrily vannila ice cream cone on top and she assured us we would find it In Marshall. I had grave reservations however as we rolled south as the sign for the “Adopt a Highway” litter pick up was for the Marshall Starbucks. Now as an investor in Starbucks, I appreciate that – as a connoisseur of road food, any town with a Starbucks means the hunt for real food will be hard. It was. We cruised down the main drag – finding nothing but Mc Donalds, Carls Jr., Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Applebees, and then hidden off in the corner of a motel was “Mike’s Café”. It wasn’t a chain. So we did a U-turn and headed in. It was the best decision of the day.

Our waitress brought us menus and water and asked where we were from and going to – the typical question everyone asks traveling road bikers. We told her we were riding from Key West back home to Seattle, and said “ you are crazy!”, paused for a minute and said “Seattle” her eyes lighting up. Yep, we replied, she asked “what part”? We told her West Seattle and she said she lived in Puyallup for two years. Her name is Karen, and her husband took a job out there so they packed up and moved out for a couple of years despite being born and raised on the Minnesota prairie. She didn’t look it but she said she had a 20 year old son and a 16 year old daughter, and, she’d move back in a second. She said her son was in a class of 70 in Marshall, but graduated from a class of 900 in Puyallup, and she was grateful for the diversity and culture of Washington. She said she could talk with us all afternoon about Seattle, and how nice it was there, and how pretty and green, and the water, and the mountains. She just gushed – and we had to agree since neither of us can imagine living anywhere else. They were sad to have her husband’s job transfer him back to Minnesota.

About that time a table full of characters right out of the Andy Griffith show wandered into the café, including a deputy sheriff. I overhead someone say “tornado warning” and indeed the sky was getting dark. I decided to wander over and ask about it, and was invited to sit down for a moment. There was a mention on the weather about the conditions being ripe for a tornado, although there was no watch or warning. One of the farmers said he’d had one cross right in front of him last week and it took off the roof of a barn. I asked them “what should I do if we spot one”, and was advised to get in the ditch as quick as I could, and if possible crawl into a culvert. At my size, I don’t think there are many culverts that I could crawl into. They told me what to watch for, and said to listen to the radio. I’ve been teasing Tony about his “Geezer Glide” with all its gadgets, but right now I was very glad to know he had a radio. Then one of the guys said, “say hello to my sister in Enumclaw for me”. Small world indeed – at a café in Marshall, MN, we run into two connections to home – a waitress who would love to go back to Puyallup, and a farmer with a sister in Enumclaw.

For dessert I had peach pie and Tony had some sort of pudding concoction that was out of this world. Karen talked about how she missed the flowers from Pikes Place Market, and that it’s a big conspiracy to tell people that it rains a lot in Seattle. We settled up, and the farmers all wished us a safe ride, one of them even coming out to show us what to watch for in the sky. However, as an omen of things to come I noticed across the street from Mike’s Café a new Arby’s under construction – with the sign saying “Coming soon – the Excitement is building”. I think not. Lets hope that Mikes’ Café stays in business a long time.
We headed out, underneath a dark sky, keeping a watch out for swirling clouds, and flying cows, and passed the local BNSF Freight train. I was very nervous looking for any sign of a twister, but Tony kept an ear on the radio and said nothing was being reported. We passed a huge windmill farm with hundreds of giant windmills out in the corn. These things were gigantic and really fascinating to watch. A bit further down the road we turned West on US-14 towards the South Dakota state line. We also passed our first “Wall Drug” sign of the trip. This famous South Dakota tourist mecca in Wall, SD is famous for having signs all over the world pointing you to this kitchy little place. You know you are getting into the West when you run into Wall Drug signs on the highway. Us-14 is also signed as the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway”, as it apparently connects several of the settings from her “Little House” series of children’s books.

We crossed into South Dakota and up the highway we came into DeSmet, SD, which has a warring faction of Laura Ingalls Wilder booster clubs – one with the actual house they claim, and one with the “homestead”. The homestead is about a mile off US-14 and on a dirt road. I turned down it. Tony’s big geezer glide doesn’t handle all that well on dirt roads, so by the time he rolled up five minutes after I got there I got a look that said we should keep going. So we kept rolling west towards our destination – Huron SD, not wanting to contribute to the 21st Century’s South Dakota equivalent of the Hatfields and McCoys or having to endure Tony’s look.
We settled in for the night in Huron, SD after riding 297 miles today, and had dinner at a local dive that deep fried everything. Now we have a spectacular lightning storm to watch, along with listening for a tornado warning siren. Huron is the home of the "World's Largest Pheasant". My bike is acting up with some sort of electrical malfunction, but I was able to get it started after dinner and am hoping we can nurse it to an HD Dealer down the road. Tomorrow, we’ll take a short ride into Sturgis, SD. Now the famous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally doesn’t officially start until next week, which is why we could get a hotel room! We plan on spending the day exploring – there should be a number of early arrivals and folks setting up, plus riding to see Mt. Rushmore and Devils Tower. Then on Wednesday, we’ll keep heading West towards home.