Tag: South Dakota

tierneytravels

Wall Drug

tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

While on our ambitious Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska road trip in July 2025, we stopped at the iconic Wall Drug.

From Tripadvisor.com:

Once a humble small-town drugstore that offered free iced water to weary travelers, Wall Drug is now a buzzing 76,000-square-foot roadside attraction that draws travelers to this small city in South Dakota. Here, you can shop for Western-themed apparel at the shopping mall, snap a photo with an 80-foot brontosaurus in the kids’ area, and grab a 5-cent coffee and one of the best donuts in the U.S. at the restaurant. And don’t leave without getting the iconic Wall Drug bumper sticker—it’s free! Wall Drug is a great stop along a tour of the Badlands National Park. – Tripadvisor Some of our stores and the café may close earlier than our main store.

We ended up spending a couple hours wandering around and eating at one of their restaurants (and we did get a Wall Drug free bumper sticker for John’s toolbox).

John loves to sit for photos on benches with characters and here is John posing on a couple of their benches with their Western themed characters:

I first heard about Wall Drug in 2020 when I saw the movie Nomadland and the main character Fern (played brilliantly by Frances McDormand) stops along her travels to work at Wall Drug.

This movie is really tender to my heart and deeply touched me when I saw it in 2020. The main character Fern is a recent widow who has also lost her job when the town’s factory closes. She deals with her tremendous loss by putting everything in storage and embarking on an epic roadtrip across the US in an old van and exploring nomadic life.

There was a moment before deciding to move from Oregon to Colorado after my husband died in 2018 that I had considered such a journey. I watched a lot of “living in a van/RV” and “nomadic life” videos as I contemplated this option. It would have been Mike the Miniature Schnauzer and I on the road.

I am nearly done with my stories from our ambitious roadtrip in July, one more to go – Frontier Days in Cheyenne Wyoming. Here are the other posts to date related to our trip:

Carhenge 

A Wander About Downtown Rapid City, SD 

Badlands and Wind Cave National Parks 

Mt. Rushmore National Park, Believe the Hype 

Crazy Horse Memorial 

Deadwood, South Dakota 

tierneytravels

Deadwood, South Dakota

tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

During our ambitious Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska road trip in July we stopped for an overnight in Deadwood, South Dakota, a historic Wild West town which attracted legendary figures like Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane.

A lot of the town is preserved as a Wild West style town and you get the feel of stepping back in the American West history when you visit.

John loves Bourbon/Whisky Tasting and we stopped at one of the many Whiskey establishments in Deadwood for a tasting.

I had to include some of the signs that made us laugh related to whiskey drinking!

Several times a day on the main street they have a recreation of the Wild West shootout with a couple of gunslingers!

If you don’t appreciate Wild West culture this would not be the place to visit, because it is over the top at Deadwood!

John and I had fun wandering around the endless gift shops/”tourist traps” and just had to take photos with a huge Sasquatch/Yeti/Bigfoot (where you are in the U.S. determines what you call this legendary creature):

John likes to play poker so he did spend the later part of the evening playing poker at one of the Wild West saloons (nope he didn’t win enough money to pay for our trip, ha!) while I relaxed in our hotel room working on my sunflower granny squares.

Here is a listing of the other posts to date about our ambitious trip and I think I have another post or so to come about it:

Carhenge 

A Wander About Downtown Rapid City, SD 

Badlands and Wind Cave National Parks 

Mt. Rushmore National Park, Believe the Hype 

Crazy Horse Memorial 

tierneytravels, U.S. National Parks

Mt. Rushmore National Park, Believe the Hype

tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

As part of our ambitious and kind of epic roadtrip to Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska, we stopped at Mount Rushmore National Monument in Keystone, South Dakota.

John had been there before I said it was a “must see”, I trusted him but I wondered if it was worth the hype.

It is worth the hype.

Carved from a section of the granite face of 5,725 feet (1745 meters) above sea level Mount Rushmore are the 60 foot tall figures of four former U.S. Presidents: George Washington (1789-1797), Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865). These four U.S. Presidents are very significant in U.S. History. (A full listing of U.S. Presidents by year if you are curious is at The Presidents Timeline website).

According to the U.S. National Park website: “…surrounded by the beauty of the Black Hills of South Dakota, tell the story of the birth, growth, development and preservation of this country…”

Here was our view of the national monument when you first enter the park:

Actually when we first arrived it was very cloudy and misty and we couldn’t see anything on Mount Rushmore, and then it suddenly cleared to reveal an amazing view.

We walked through the State Flags of U.S. States and it was fun to try and locate the State Flags for states I lived in my lifetime: Pennsylvania (only briefly), New York, Washington, Oregon and Colorado.

After walking through the State Flags we walked down into the amphitheater area where very few visitors were (it felt like we had Mount Rushmore to ourselves compared to the busy upper areas) to spend time just looking at the Mount Rushmore National Monument.

It made us very reflective. After a while of sitting before these mammoth carvings it made us feel as if these four historical U.S. Presidents, each with major contributions, are looking over the U.S. today, watching.

I keep away from political discussions on my blog because I want to respect the different political opinions of others which stem from their life experiences and values, but I do want to share that we just started to wonder: “What would George Washington , Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln this of the U.S. today?. Would they be proud? Did the U.S. become what they hoped it would become?”

Not try to spur any political discussion, I just wanted to share some of our musings as we sat reverently and studied the monument.

After sitting with the monument we went back upstairs and visited the amazing museum exhbit that shared images, history and equipment from the carving/creation of Mount Rushmore October 4, 1927 – October 31, 1941. The exhibit shared photos of the workers who translated the vision of the the Chief Carver. (If you’d like to read the carving history of Mount Rushmore, which involved lots of dynamite see this link Carving History)

This placard in the exhibit particularly moved me:

To close out this post I just want to say that I like to imagine that the “Mount Rushmore Crew”: George Washington , Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln are looking over the U.S. and are hopeful that it will transcend the current political situations and the “principles of liberty and freedom on which (the U.S.) was founded” will prevail.

tierneytravels, U.S. National Parks

Badlands and Wind Cave National Parks

tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

As I mentioned in the posts A Wander About Downtown Rapid City, SD and Carhenge, in July we ventured on an ambitious and kind of epic roadtrip to Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska, some of our neighboring (and sort of neighboring) states to Colorado.

Since John retired, we are trying to see as many of the U.S. National Parks as possible over the next couple of years (and who knows what kind of funding they will have in the future to host visitors, their have already been serious cuts to National Park staff); as we feel they are some of the best parts of the U.S.

So during our roadtrip while in South Dakota traveling from Rapid City, South Dakota we stopped briefly at Wind Caves National Park; and then spent a large part of the day at Badlands National Park.

Badlands National Park

Whatever images I share they will not do justice to the magnificence of this National Park.

As the park’s website states: “The rugged beauty of the Badlands draws visitors from around the world. These striking geologic deposits contain one of the world’s richest fossil beds. Ancient horses and rhinos once roamed here. The park’s 244,000 acres protect an expanse of mixed-grass prairie where bison, bighorn sheep, prairie dogs, and black-footed ferrets live today.”

First we stopped at the Visitor Center so we could get our National Park Passport stamped for Badlands National Park and pick up some souveniers.

Here are some of the amazing rock formations outside the Visitor Center and a section that John was brave enough to climb up:

After this initial stop we got on the Badlands Loops Road (Highway 240) and drove through the park. Here are some of the zillion photos as we made our way along the road.

As I mentioned whatever images I share they will not do justice to the magnificence of this National Park. Checking my photos after I took them and already anticipating the disappointment (ha!) I decided to take a video at one of the many glorious viewpoints on our drive through the park.

As I was about to take my video I cleverly (not so cleverly perhaps) decided to narrate the video using the placards (? not sure if that is the right term) at the viewpoint describing the view. Here is an example of a “placard”:

They were rather weather worn and difficult to read but once I started my narration I was kind of committed to complete it.

So here is the video, which I uploaded to YouTube in order to post, with my very monotone voice as I attempted to take the video and read the whole line of different “placards” before other people showed up at the viewpoint and blocked my view or wondered what the heck the crazy lady speed reading the “placards” was doing!

By the way it is VERY WINDY in the Badlands and the wind provides a soundtrack to my monotone awkward narration – ha!

Perhaps my lame videography provided you with a tiny bit better sense of the awesomeness of the Badlands.

Wind Cave National Park

Not much to report on this National Park. Unless you take one of the Park Ranger guided tours of a section of the Wind Caves there isn’t much to see. The wait for the guided tours was a couple hours. So we just looked around the Visitor Center, got some souveniers and got our National Park Passport stamped. We were wondering why it was free to get into the park and that is because you pay when you sign up for one of the tours.

In the Visitor Center they did have a cool diagram of the cave system.

So that’s our South Dakota National Park adventure!

We were tempted to pop over the Theodore Roosevelt National Park but it was quite a bit away and we’d already been to Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorial on the trip so far (next post).

Postscript

After I posted this post I discovered that John had taken a video on his phone also at Badlands National Park at the same viewpoint but without the narration. His video shows more of the 180+ view so I uploaded it to YouTube if you’d like to see it also. (Sorry it only has the wind as soundtrack no monotonous voice!)