June 27-28 Sioux Falls, S.D. area

    Driving 130 or so miles today.  I read that S.D. has 31,300 small farms averaging 1400 acres.  Again, being from the Midwest ( a city girl, though), I am glad to see these small farms making it.  We see mainly corn, soybeans and cattle.  In Marshall, Mn. we saw a huge corn processing plant and a Schwan's food plant.  Also passed two Old Home Bakery outlet stores this morning in towns.  That brought bake memories of their large bakery on the edge of our Iowa town and the wonderful aroma of the bread as you drove past it on the highway.  Outside of Jasper, Mn. a farm had a big display of all kinds of windmills, including a Dutch one.  Later, driving through a small town, a yard had 7 or 8 windmills.
    Although S.F. is only about 80 miles from my hometown in Iowa, I don't remember ever being in the town, only driving by on the Interstate.  I read that its pop. is 160,000, making it the largest town in S.D., with Rapid City being second.  We made reservations at Palisades State Park, a few miles out of town.  So we drove through Brandon that had a large residential area under construction and a nice golf course.  We've seen many nice ones, spread all over in the small towns, too.  Jim will be happy, Linda!
     The park has some cute log cabins that can be rented.  The KOA campgrounds all have those, too, so if you don't have an RV or tent, you can still camp out.  Our spot had a babbling brook behind some trees and the lady next to us said the little gorge would be infested with mosquitoes.  I never walked down into there.   It was a very quiet park.
     We drove around the park, seeing large, pink quartzite rock formations.  We were walking on the bridge above the Split Rock Creek and were going to go down by where people were swimming and picnicing, saw a Sheriff get out of his car with something in his hand and realized they were all watching something in the creek.  Two men had decided to let the current take them downstream, but one got deeper and further than he wanted.  The Sheriff kept throwing this thing that looked like a frisbee on a long string, but it would float away from the man.  Just as the fire dept showed up, the man latched onto it and the Sheriff walked out on rocks to get close to him.  They were having him checked out by the EMS when we left.  Tom got a couple of good pics of the rescue and the man walking onto shore.  He asked the other sheriffs who showed up if they thought the dept. would like them.  They said that'd be neat.  We went to their office downtown S.F. twice and no one there could make a decision about copying them off his disc since the Watch Commander was out of the office both times.
    One afternoon we drove 6 miles from camp to Garretson.  It is very small and its claim to fame is being near Devil's Gulch.   Jesse James and his gang robbed a bank in Northfield, MN., not far away.  Two of his men were killed in the bank and he escaped by jumping his horse across the gulch.  We then drove to Split Rock Park, where the "Norwegian cruise line", the Jesse James pontoon boat, was tying up for the day.  He gives tours to the Jesse James cave.  We never saw anything about it and figured it was a tourist gimmick.

Palisades State Park with quartzite rock formations-very pink