Welcome to our trip report from our 2018 South Dakota trip!
We started out leaving Friday after my grad class and driving to Moville to spend the night with my parents. It was a great stopping point and although we got in late and left mid-morning the next day, we still had a nice visit. My parents are getting ready to move so it was nice to visit the house one more time (not like it is going away anytime soon- just my brother and his wife are moving in!).
No toy tops the ultimate entertainer on the farm...baby kitties! These little guys were really tame and put up with the girls' handling pretty well. Anna & Brynn loved them.
Aunt Nikki had two fun toys to share with us- the first being a vintage PINK kitchen she had in the garage. Wow, it was adorable. The girls really wanted to stay and play for a while but I'm sure it will be there for next time.
The second fun thing of Aunt Nikki's was her two baby miniature horses. They were both born this spring and she thinks the lighter colored one is a dwarf. They are adorable.
After all that fun on the farm, the girls were worn out and fell right asleep on the way to Sioux Falls. We stopped for lunch at Qdoba and had a good stop. Then it was straight on towards Mitchell!
Our first stop was, of course, the Corn Palace. We enjoyed looking around inside at the huge gift shop and the murals and artwork from palaces past. My favorite was the large photo inside of when John Philip Sousa's band came to visit to play at the corn palace. The story said that the road hadn't been paved and was all muddy. Sousa refused to let his band off the train until they were paid up front. They got paid and then played extra gigs the time they were in town to make up for it. They did several concerts each day in front of the corn palace. I thought it was really neat- back in the day getting Sousa's band to your town would be like having Coldplay or some other huge band come to town. There was also a gallery of the artwork of past murals upstairs that was neat to look at.
As you can see in the above photo, this is when we started to have our first photo meltdowns. The sun is on our eyes, we don't want to hold hands, crying, whining, etc, etc. This theme will reappear throughout the trip until we greatly lowered our expectation of what constituted a "good" "family" "photo". :)
At any rate, I thought the Palace looked awesome and I loved the new onion tops. It is a neat stop and you can't visit Mitchell without going there.
We had a bit of time to kill before getting ready for Scott's class reunion (the real reason/excuse for visiting Mitchell and SD) so we decided to take a quick Scott Kundel reality tour of the town. We visited the old home of the Kernels, Mitchell High as well as the newly expanded to two sheets ice arena. We also checked out the newest builds by Puetz construction with the schools' fine arts center and buildings on Dakota Wesleyan campus.
Scott also got a wild hair to look up his friend Tom, who is notorious for avoiding contact. We drove out to his property (which Scott scouted out using the assessor page) and when no one was there, we stopped by his friend's dad's place. Scott had his dad call Tom and hand off the phone to him and lo and behold, they were reunited. It was awesome seeing Tom and it had been years. Kudos to Scott for not giving up!
We finally headed over to Puetz's house to change for the reunion and hang out for a bit before the sitter arrived. We all headed over to the reunion together and had a really nice night. It was fun seeing Scott reconnect with so many friends and share their stories. Most of the night's photos are on Scott's phone so you'll have to check out his facebook to see them.
Class on 98! I think he looks a little like our nephew here. Or maybe a future Michael?
We shut the reunion down, staying until midnight (what!?!?) and then grabbed pizzas on the way home to eat out on Mark and Katie's beach. It was a really fun day in Mitchell! Stay tuned for our trek out to the Black Hills!
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