July 13th, Rapid City, SD

We took a road trip and visited the fascinating wonders of Wall, SD. and Wall Drug. In Dec, 1931 Ted and Dorothy Hustead bought the only drugstore in town called Wall on the edge of the South Dakotas Badlands. After a few days business was just bad and Ted and Dorothy realized that maybe their family was right, that only 326 people lived in Wall and they were only 326 of the poorest people. Most were farmers who'd been wiped out by either drought or the depression.

Ted had graduated from pharmacy school in 1929 and two years working for other druggists knew he wanted his own drugstore. Ted's father had died and left him $3000 legacy which he was willing to invest into his dreams of having his own store. Needless to say after a few months business had not improved, but Dorothy encouraged Ted that they could make it work. So Ted said " Five years Dorothy, that's what I think we should give this store. Five good years, and if it doesn't work by then, well, then we'll...". Ted spent many hours a day standing in the store window looking for customers but they never came. Summer of 1936 had come around and their business hadn't grown much at all. Their five year plan would soon be up, but on a hot summer July Dorothy had went home to put Billy and the baby down for a nap but couldn't sleep because of the cars passing their house on Hwy 16a was rattling their house. Dorothy told Ted that she finally seen how they could get the cars to stop, they would make signs offering travelers "ice cold water". They made several signs, "get soda... get root beer... turn next corner.. Just as near .. to Highway 16 & 14... Free Ice Water... Wall Drug." Before the signs were completely up people had begun pulling over to have their "free Ice Water". The signs worked and Ted and Dorothy were never lonely for customers again.

Today Wall Drug is a couple blocks long and bring people from far and wide to see Wall Drug. 

We managed to have breakfast,  nothing to out of the ordinary, eggs, bacon and toast, however we had a cinnamon roll and they were awesome. They bake pies, donuts and such all day long making the streets smell of fresh baked goods pretty awesome.

Ok after our stop at Wall we continued to head east to enter the Badlands National Park at exit 131 off I90.

For over millions of years layers of mud, sands and gravels were laid down. In those layers are fossils of many different prehistoric animals preserved for modern study.

The area of the Badlands were once portions of a giant salt water sea. Upheaval and volcanic activity pushed the sea floor up. As the water drained away, it left behind broad, marshy plains. Three toed horses, sabre-toothed cats and other pre-historic animals roamed the area. When they died, many were buried by river sediments or just sank into the marshlands. Periodically white volcanic ash covered the soil, hot winds blew across the plateaus and the terrain continued evolving. Erosion continues today each season with wind, rain and snow and thousands of tons of sedimentary deposits are carried away.

The Badlands were proclaimed a national monument in 1939 by Presidential proclamation, then a national park in 1978. The park covers 244,300 acres of the White River Badlands.

The landscape takes on the appearance of great castles, a great wall and you can imagine many other things too as you look at this amazing area.