We arrived in Mitchell, SD (home of Dakota Wesleyan University) in time to go to the grocery store and make dinner in our hotel room. The plan for dinner was originally to have a rotisserie chicken with spaghetti and broccoli on the side, however they were out of rotisserie chickens. So, I decided that I'd buy some ground turkey to make some protein heavy pasta sauce...only then to find that the family-owned grocery store in Mitchell, South Dakota does not sell ground turkey (I'm not sure why I was surprised by this in the moment). That is when I realized that dinner was going to be even better than I thought...they had fresh ground beef from a local farm! So, beef it was...2 pounds for the hungry boys.
Hotel room cooking...
While wandering around the grocery store, I was excited to see they sold Aseltine's Apple Cider...which is made down the street from where my parents live in Comstock Park, MI!
We didn't have to drive anywhere on Monday, so we decided to make a picnic and find a park to eat at...and play Rummikub (it's starting to be ranked up there with Scrabble...but don't worry, Scrabble still wins). I went to the grocery store (again), only this time to find a whole rotisserie oven lined with chickens. I bought one and brought it back to the hotel room to make an Asian Chicken Salad for lunch. The only problem, is that I (like most people) can't cut onions without crying...that is when Ryan dug into my bag and found the solution...
You may (or may not) have just noticed that I am wearing the same shirt in both pictures taken two days in a row...it is true, I pretty much wear the same thing everyday...I love having a simple wardrobe of two pairs of pants and 4 shirts. And, the great thing is that no one ever even notices that I'm wearing the same thing because we are surrounded by new people everyday. And, Ryan is too oblivious to even know what he is wearing right now to care what I am wearing (a quality I love about him!), and Cameron...well he's too busy still checking himself out in the mirror to bother notice what anyone else is wearing. :)
After our picnic and game of Rummikub, we headed for the infamous "Corn Palace" that everyone had been telling us about, and that Mitchell is supposedly "famous" for. We were pretty intrigued by the idea of a corn palace and had high expectations of the tourist attraction. Yet upon seeing it we just looked at each other and asked, "Why on earth did they make this thing?" It's basically a building decorated with murals made out of ears of corn that they change every year. The inside of the building...is a gymnasium used for DWU's basketball games and graduation. Luckily there was a sweet old woman inside who was able to answer our question of why the corn palace came into existence: They built it 3 years after SD became a state simply to attract tourism. The palace takes 100 acres of farming and $130,000 to decorate every year! That's a whole lot of mouths that could be fed! But, it is doing just what it intended...as we entered in as tourists along with about 20 others that day.
1 comment:
I'm still completely amazed by the way you guys cook in the hotel rooms. I can imagine how nice it is to do that though, so I'm sure it is well worth it.
As for the corn palace, I went with my family on a cross- country drive in 1991....and I wish we'd spoken before you went. It is a MAJOR tourist trap! I didn't remember that they put up new corn murals each year so I'm guessing you partook a little more than my family did. I think we drove up to it, had a similar reaction as yours, and then kept on going.
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