Special Treasures...

I, for one, am glad that there are people in this world that care enough to preserve “special treasures”.  Maybe it’s just “nostalgia”, or maybe it’s “history”, or I guess you could put any number of different tags on it, but the bottom line is that there are just some things worth saving, I think (and obviously, so do others).

We were fortunate to spend some time with a couple of them...

Just outside of Rapid City is a wonderful historical church called Chapel in the Hills.  It is an exact replica of a stave church in Norway called the Borgund Stavkirke built about 1150.  It was originally built as the home for the “Lutheran Vespers” radio program and completed in 1969.  The radio program moved to their national offices in Minneapolis in 1975 and ultimately became a non-profit corporation using monies from donations, wedding fees and sales from the gift shop.

The chapel is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and probably you too!  The early church builders in Norway were the same ones who built the Viking ships, so many of the details were the same.  For instance, carvings around the door frames are of snakes and dragons representing the battle between good and evil.  The Vikings being pagans, considered dragons to be good luck which is why dragons adorned the prow of their ships.  You will also see dragon heads adorn the Chapel.  (The fact that crosses outnumber the dragon heads demonstrated their confidence in their new conversion to Christianity.)

The timber for their staves went through a special hardening process of two years where they were left standing, but had all their bark and branches removed.  The Chapel has 16,000 hand-cut (with a saw!) shingles on it.  Standing inside the church, the ceiling is constructed like a Viking ship turned upside down.  Pretty cool looking.

The side door is known as the women’s door (front door being the men’s door, of course!).  The door portal around this door is also a pagan sculpture.  The top of it has carved lions and the bottom has heads of bear or wolves.  The door locks on the doors are also interesting (and cool iron work).  The large ring on the front door served a dual purpose.  First it was a door knocker, but it was also known as a Sanctuary Ring.  At the time the Borgund church was built, outlaws could be killed by anyone but if the outlaws could get to the church and grip the ring, no one could touch them.  Folklore says many outlaws starved to death holding onto the ring!

In addition to this beautiful little Chapel they had a small gift shop that has a sod rooftop, Norwegian museum and short prayer walk along a hillside with a few statues.  It was a lovely place to visit and quite enlightening as well.  I’m glad we found it.

The other special treasure is a vintage steam engine train.  Now if you know Jack and I at all, you know we love trains, so whenever we get the chance to ride an “old one”, we take it!  This scenic one is called the 1880 Train and it runs from Hill City to Keystone.  It’s about a 2 hour, 20 mile round trip that winds through the Black Hills National Forest. 

We rode the #110 which is a 2-6-6-2T (low speed locomotives commonly used on logging railroads)  which is an articulated Mallet that was built by The Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1928 for the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company of Vail, WA and was retired in 1968.  It is the only 2-6-6-2T Mallet in service in the world. During the late 1940s, diesel engines became more common than steam.  After years of declining use a public relations man with railroad experience, William Heckman, decided to start a railroad where steam was actually operated, and was not just relegated to static display. 

The first official train began operation in August, 1957.  The route had been nicknamed "the 1880 TRAIN," as it was likened by Heckman to riding a train in the 1880s. While not quite historically accurate (Heckman was never a rigorous advocate of historic accuracy), the dating of the operation stuck, and if nothing else, captured an illusion of the railroad history.

As for us, our train traversed around one bend then another and we saw such sights as the Good Luck Tungsten Mine, Harney Peak (elev 7242) with it’s rock fire lookout tower outline on the very top, Indian Cliffs, old abandoned houses and pretty new houses, even a deer dashing through the tall grass. The ride was smooth and the  whistle blew often.  Big puffs of steam shown in the blue sky and I could see the beauty of that big engine ‘round each bend from my seat way back in one of the beautifully restored cars. 

What a lovely trip it was...scenic, relaxing and yes, reminiscent of another time.

...kicking back in Rapid City South Dakota,  Marie

If you wish to view the rest of the photos from this trip, you can at my Flickr account at:http://www.flickr.com/photos/74905158@N04/

To think it all started with a free glass of water...

One thing great about the RV community is that it is one.  No one is a stranger and everyone is friendly.  At the very least you always get a friendly greeting on the road, at gas stations and while at camp.  Often you get into conversations of where you’ve been and where your headed.  This always leads to ‘favorites’ and “have you been to...?” with wonderful suggestions and good for-warnings. 

When you hear from many campers to “be sure and see...” I put it on our ‘must do’ list!  One such place was Wall Drug, in Wall South Dakota.  Anytime we mentioned that we were going to be anywhere even near South Dakota, the response was always “oh, you’ve got to go see Wall Drug Store then!”  Well, ok then.  So, we did.

After the visit to Devils Tower, I booked us into the Hart Ranch in Rapid City (because it is part of our RPI membership) which is about an hour away.  We didn’t really know what to expect and even tried to guess on the drive out to it.  To add to the anticipation, Wall Drug has fun signs posted about every half mile all along the way!  They began to prepare us for the fun that is Wall Drug. 

I’m almost tempted to just tell you that you have to experience it for yourself and leave it at that...but I won’t be that cruel.  It is going to be hard to describe tho, but I’ll try.

First, let’s start with a little history:  “Wall” is the name of the town, not the owners...and it’s a really small town, out in the middle of nowhere, even now, so try to imagine it back in 1931(326 ppl)...in December...on the edge of the Badlands in South Dakota.  Brrr  This crazy couple, Dorothy and Ted Hustead (and small son) decided that they wanted to open up a small drug store.  Mount Rushmore was being built and tourists would soon be driving by to see it...and stop, or so they thought.  No one stopped.  They decided to give it five years.  In the summer of 1936 their five-year trial was closing in.  One hot Sunday in July, in the deadening heat Dorothy had an idea.  As she watched all the cars driving by, she thought after driving across that hot prairie, they're thirsty, “what they really want right now is ice cold water!”  Now, they had plenty of ice and water, so she told her husband that they needed to put up signs all along the highway telling people to come there for free ice water!  They modeled them after the old Burma Shave signs, and the tourists showed up, by the hundreds!  At first, just for the free ice water, but soon, they asked to buy ice cream too.  The rest, as they say, is history.  The Hustead’s turned free ice water into a family billion dollar business.  He has a statement in his brochure that I really like - “ Free Ice Water.  It brought us Husteads a long way and it taught me my greatest lesson, and that’s that there’s absolutely no place on God’s earth that’s Godforsaken.  No matter where you live, you can succeed, because wherever you are, you can reach out to other people with something that they need!”

Ok, so that’s how it started, today, it’s a multi-complex of buildings a block long and wide with shops and activities for all ages! So big that they give you a map to help you figure out where everything is.  Of course there is a place to eat, the Western Art Gallery Cafe, and a gas station, along with every kind of gift shop imaginable - those are to be expected.  But, the unexpected is the fun stuff, like the Travelers Chapel in case you need to pray, different statues for 'photo ops' or the various activities for the kids, like panning for gold, or playing in the water at the train station, or how about some of the mechanical entertainments like T-Rex that goes off about every 12 minutes, or the cowboy campers singing around the campfire?  I could go on and on, but I think you can get at least some of the picture, and oh yes, there is still the original drug store tucked in among all this, and yes...a free ice water station!

...kicking back in Rapid City South Dakota,  Marie

Rapid City surprises...

A lot of the time we choose our campground locations by how many miles we want to travel in a day.  Our "rule of thumb" is four hours on the road.  This doesn't tax Jack to much and gives both of us time to settle in, relax and still enjoy part of the day.  Because of this, we don't always know a lot about the towns we end up staying in, or near, so once we get there, or near there, we try and find out about it as much as possible.  We will stop at Visitor Centers (our favorite) or ask locals (restaurants staff, campground staff, etc) for suggestions.  I'm always on the lookout for brochures and nab ones that look interesting, even if it's not where we are at, just in case it's someplace within driving distance.  Of course we always have our books - AAA Guide Book, 1000 Places to Visit Before You Die, and Off The Beaten Path and Watch It Made in the USA.  We also found a fun app we added to Jack's I Pad, called Roadside.  It lists all the roadside oddities and attractions, everything from the littlest museum to quirky graves, to Muffler men statues.

So, while I'm sitting in my 'co-pilot' seat, I'm perusing through all these various forms of information, figuring out what, if anything, this city/town/area we are staying at for the next day or two or three, has to offer.  It's often that during this research session, we find out that this place that we thought was just going to be an over-night stop, is worth spending several days there because it has lots to see!  Such a place was Rapid City SD.  We knew it was within driving distance to Wall Drug, and that was the reason for the visit...and that was going to be it, and go.  Until we got there...

A day filled with Wall Drug Store (it's own blog), a day filled with the 1880 Train and the Chapel in the Hill (another separate blog) and a day filled with what I call it's oddities...

Now, for the one or two people that may be reading this, that doesn't know, I worked for the World Famous San Diego Zoo & Safari Park for 20 years, so I've been around animals.  All kinds of animals.  I've been privileged to be up close and personal with some pretty exotic ones (no, I didn't work with animals, only people) too, so I usually don't get overly excited about seeing most animals in captivity, however...THIS place was a hoot!

Bear Country U.S.A. is a drive-through animal park.  Now, many, many years ago, California used to have something like this called Lion Country Safari where you could drive through while lions walked about, but it closed down (They say for dwindling tourists, but I would bet a lot had to do with high insurance costs, among other things!).  It's a three-mile drive through several enclosures and encounter black bear, elk, reindeer, deer, cougars, bobcats, rocky mountain goats, bighorn sheep, dall sheep and buffalo.  Even though you see all the other animals, the black bears are the attraction.  There are dozens of them wandering about!  We had one come right up along side my window and walk along with it for a minute, that's how close...and that's the closest I've ever been to one, I can tell you!  They're big!  It's kind of fun to see all the various shades of "black" they are too - from gold all the way to darkest brown.  Afterward, they have an area where you park and walk around to see the young bear cubs,  fox and other small animals.  A unique experience, I will say, even for a zoo person like me!

After all that "animal watching" we were ready to face the city, have some lunch and see what it had to offer!   One fun thing was their "City of Presidents series", life-size bronze statues of our nation’s past presidents along the city’s streets and sidewalks.   I picked out a few of our favorite and hunted them down and took our picture with them.  The other really cool thing was what they call “Art Alley”.  They let the local “artists” paint whatever they want - graffiti, art, writings, anything.  Some of it was pretty cool stuff too!  It seemed to keep “tagging” in one area of town too, as we didn’t see any outside this alley, so pretty smart of the people who came up with the idea, I’d say!

Just goes to show you...one never knows what hidden gems lies in wait for us...guess we will just have to keep searching them out!

...kicking back in Rapid City South Dakota,  Marie

If you wish to view the rest of the photos from this trip, you can at my Flickr account at:http://www.flickr.com/photos/74905158@N04/