The Corn Palace and Wall Drug

Grandma was the most excited about these two Americana tourist traps, so I'll let her tell you about it...

"This place was in the middle of the cutest town. Every place we've been in South Dakota is so tidy -- you can tell it was settled by Scandinavians.

Anyway, The Corn Palace is actually the town's civic center where they hold proms and graduations. But it's redecorated every year and they've been making the murals since the late 1800s, back when they still had board sidewalks. As incredible as it was on the outside, I just couldn't believe it when I went on the inside. (Never mind the cheesy gift store set up in the auditorium!). The murals made from the corn husks are so impressive. They use 600,000 pieces of corn, 3,000 bushels of grain and grass and over a ton of nails, staples and wires for fastening it all to the walls.

Everyone in town was friendly and nice and would you believe it was free?

Across the state in a perfectly straight line, nothing could have prepared me for Wall Drug. I expected an oversized drug store and it was the WHOLE town! They had every tourist item available, but also things I hadn't seen in a hundred years. This place went from room to room to room. It was actually multiple stores where the walls had been cut out -- now they call it all Wall Drug, but merchandise had to be paid within each room. It was nuts! They had everything Midwest: homemade ice-cream (and real chocolate malts!), home-made pies, buffalo burgers, fudge, crazy stuff for the kids like a mammoth sized Jackalope to climb on and a mock mine and fossil dig. They thought they'd died and gone to heaven with their found treasures.

We planned to spend an hour there an ended up killing half the day!