Corn Palace!

We've spent most of yesterday and part of today driving through South Dakota and Minnesota. It's very green and flat, with lots of lakes. It features corn fields interspersed with what I suspect is potatoes since the leaves are so dark; windmills (it produces 60% of the country's wind power, I think); rustic farm buildings and cottages; and little small towns with a few hundred people. The main streets have hundred year-old buildings. It's really cute.

Minnesota is one of the main producers of ethanol, probably since the corn is all right there.

The humidity has also shot up to almost 100%, according to the guy outside the Walmart oil-changing area yesterday. (We've already hit 4,000 miles, so we wanted to change the oil.) We felt disgusting and sticky, and made sure we found a campground with showers. It was probably only 32 degrees C, but it was unbearable heat. Today is luckily overcast and much cooler, but still slightly sticky if you trail your hand outside the car window.

South Dakota has a Corn Palace, in a town called Mitchell. The outside of Corn Palace is covered in murals made from twelve different colours of corn.

The inside of Corn Palace functions variously as a basketball court, auditorium, marketplace and gift shop for the town. It has the cheapest concession food either of us have ever seen. We bought some corn on the cob to eat at Corn Palace, and some "cookie dough" candy. It was yummy. It also features the only "one-way traffic" toilets I've seen.

Various corn-related paraphernalia and associated festivals lined the walls inside.



In South Dakota, babies come from corn fields.

Somewhere last night we also crossed the time zone barrier, because when we woke up late and thought it was 9am, it was actually 10am. Oops. The Fat Kiwi is going back into the mechanics again, while we go to the Mall of America.