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:
A Wander About Downtown Rapid City, SD
Badlands and Wind Cave National Parks
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