Last night we had a storm move through, quite a bit of rain, but that’s always nice to hear when you are sleeping in a camper. When we headed out this morning it was still misty and looked like more rain coming.

Before we left Minnesota, we made a quick stop in the town of Blue Earth to visit the 55 foot tall statue of the Jolly Green Giant! 

From there it was on to Sioux Falls to visit Falls Park. Unfortunately we had more mist and some pretty strong wind gusts. It was a white-knuckle drive for the entire 2 hours, the gusts were coming from the side and pushing everyone around the road.

Once we got to Sioux Falls the wind started to die down and the sun came out! There is an amazing city park surrounding the falls, it was a nice place to have lunch and take a break from driving.

When we left the weather had turned completly around, sunshine and light winds.Then it was on to our stop for the night east of Mitchell,  We’ve been to Mitchell numerous times, and always visit the Corn Palace, but Brian had a new place to visit this trip, the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village. There was a village of between 200-300 people who lived there around the year 1000. They had numerous timber framed, mud-covered lodges, a surrounding fence to keep animals out and large gardens along the river. It was a thriving community for around 100-150 years then they moved on to a new location leaving behind an amazing archeology site! The University built a large buiding over part of the old village so they can excavate and dig year round. The amount of artifacts, food remnants and animal bones is astounding. They collected over a million pieces just getting the holes dug for the foundation of the building.

We then headed over to the Corn Palace (because you can’t visit Mitchell without seeing it). They’ve made some renovations to the towers on the top of the bulding, replacing them with some cool metal sculptures that are very similar to the old towers.

We returned to the campground for a game of mini-golf (Brian won!). We had noticed some concrete bunker like buildings around the outside edge of the campground before we left. Turns out they are tornado shelters for the campers. We’ve never seen them before, but it seems like a really great idea. They’ve only had to use them once last summer and hopefully they won’t be used tonight. 😃