Sunday 3 August
Breakfast was our last meal with the Edwards and Carr families. Mr Jackson had 'biscuits and gravy' (scones and carbonara sauce with bits of sausage in it instead of bacon), a traditional southern breakfast food. Every time we've had the option of cooked breakfast, some sort of potatoes has been offered. We don't think of potatoes as a breakfast food in Australia but here they definitely do.
After waving a sad goodbye, thankful we had had so much time together with the Edwards, we packed the last of our gear and set off on the I-35 south out of Minneapolis. Soon we were driving on the wide open spaces of Minnesota state highway 169, which follows the course of the Minnesota River. We are starting to see road kill of a very American variety. So far we've seen lots of dead racoons, squirrels, at least one skunk, a goose, and a fox (thought of Graham Lawrence with the last) and perhaps a gopher. Mr Jackson saw a dead deer yesterday, but we mostly saw live ones in Iowa, thankfully.
The countryside west of Chicago has been mainly farmland, with horizon to horizon being filled with corn fields and soyabeans, but now we are into South Dakota (as I type this), we are starting to see the occasional hay field dotted with hay bale rolls, and cattle paddocks as well. The cattle here seem to have a mighty fine life, I must say. The land is littered with creeks and rivers, ponds and lakes; their water a deep lush green that reflects the deep green of the cornfields.
Earlier this morning on the MN-169 we drove past the "World's Biggest Candy and Pop Store" and of course had to make a quick addition to our planned stops for our day. 'Candy' is the American word for lollies, and 'pop', also known as 'soda', is soft drink. This store was amazing! They had a huge variety of every sugary confection known to man. Most of the soft drink was boutique brands such as the Zombie Brain Juice that Sam and Joshua chose, and the Fudge Cookie Dough flavour I picked. Jeff bought bacon flavour! But we did see one familiar drink: Bundaberg Ginger Beer. There were about ten different colours of pop corn, with the kernels naturally coloured red, blue, black and even purple. The flavours of liquorice provided more astounding variety, including root beer, watermelon and huckleberry flavours.
It might surprise some, but we didn't buy too much candy from the store. We did decide to buy one packet of "Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans" (licensed to Jelly Belly Beans from WB Harry Potter). They included such flavours as earthworm, dirt, grass, black pepper, sausage, booger, vomit, earwax and soap, as well as the more traditional blueberry, cinnamon, candyfloss (fairy floss), banana and lemon. We tried the less traditional flavours first, but even Joshua couldn't stomach the vomit flavour bean he gamely tried and had to spit it out the window. I found soap surprisingly pleasant. Mr Jackson described the sausage flavoured bean as, "not particularly nice", but dirt was "palatable". We cleansed our palates with the fruity flavours.
On the road again we left the state highway for some back roads as we made our way to the McCone Sod House, north of Jackson County near the Cottonwood River. This part of the USA, known as the Great Plains, is fairly flat land, which was mostly Prairie Tallgrass Plains when the first white settlers arrived. When they did, they found that there were no rocks to provide stone for bricks, nor trees to provide lumber for planks. The only trees we are seeing as we drive - and they are few and far between - have been planted since the settlers arrived in the Great Plains. So they were faced with a difficulty: what would they build their homes with? They answered the question by cutting 2ft x 1ft (60cm x 30cm) slices of sodden earth from the prairie, which they laid two deep to form very thick earthen walls. Thus the 'soddy', or 'sod house' was born.
This style of house was made famous in the semi-autobiographical book 'Little House on the Prairie' by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who also wrote 'Little House in the Big Woods' about her family's time in Wisconsin. Apparently, at one time there were as many as a million sod houses across the Great Plains, as homesteaders sought to provide shelter for their families for the five years required to claim the surrounding land as their own.
The McCone Sod House is a reproduction, built in the 1980s, but it is authentic in construction, having been built with sod cut using a traditional sod cutter. This is a type of sled, that was towed by horses using the weight of the farmer to push its blades 10cm into the ground, before the cross cuts were made with sod cutting knives to release a rectangular prism of sod from the ground. The prairie soil was so wet that the walls would lose 18in (45cm) from their height as the walls dried out. Inside, the one-room house would typically have space for the husband and wife's bed on the floor and a loft bedroom accessed by a ladder for any children. There would also be an enclosed fire stove, but it would have to burn twists of dry grass or 'cow wood' (aka 'cow chips', ie dried cow dung) in the absence of wood.
Abi and Anna both enjoyed dressing up in prairie dresses and bonnets, and having a go at writing on a slate board, as children of Ingalls Wilder's generation must have done. Sam was delighted to hide in the long green grass of a paddock while the rest of the family watched a History Channel report about the McCone Sod House, and then to frighten us out of our wits by popping up from the grass when we left the TV room. Josh ran around the prairie walk through the restored tallgrass, which was filled with wildflowers. Last time we came to America my attempt to visit a tallgrass prairie area was foiled by the spring burn off that had just happened, so I was very appreciative of this opportunity to see such a classic American landscape, since little of it remains today, being mostly replaced by the pervasive cornfields.
Samuel discovered what he described as "the most delicious water in America" at the McCone Sod House, from a pump near the McCone family's shed. It was 'well water', cool and fresh, and we were generously allowed to refill all our water bottles and quench our thirst before heading back to the car and onto the I-90.
We've crossed into South Dakota now, and are seeing more and more motorbikes, as people drive to the annual Black Hills Sturgis Motorbike Rally, which starts in a few days and goes for a week. Many of the bikes have tiny trailers on the back or are lumbered with huge piles of camping gear. At a rest stop, I chatted to a rider who had driven from Georgia, on the eastern coast of the USA, since this morning, an amazing distance of 1100 miles (almost 1800km). We were just overtaken by a couple on a giant hog bike, the lady passenger busy texting as her bloke focussed his attention on the road ahead. Not the first, and won't be the last, Mr Jackson reckons.
It is now 7:30pm, but the sun is well up in the sky as we travel west, set to cross into the Mountain Time Zone and go back an hour just before we stop for the night. There is still another two or three hours of sunlight to go, this far north. We are about to have Dairy Queen for dinner on the banks of the Missouri River, one of the greatest of the Mississippi's tributaries. Then we have several hours more driving to Kadoka for the night. Tomorrow, we visit the first of our long list of National Parks, Badlands National Park.
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