How Far Is It?

When you follow one road for 75 miles and it’s dead straight the whole way, your mind has a tendency to wander a bit. I have taken to playing a game that I made up called “How far is it?” The game is quite simple. You pick something off in the distance and you guess how far away it is. You start at a mile marker for easy reference. Once I figured out the trick, the game is quite easy. The trick is simply to take your initial thought and add 3 miles. Some guy told me the tired old joke the other day about the guy in North Dakota whose dog ran away. He watched it go for 3 days. Not a huge stretch. After I got too good at that game, I started having some random thoughts.

1) Being a highway engineer in South Dakota might be the easiest professional job in the world. Take a ruler and line it up due north to south. Draw a line that spans the state. Repeat that exactly every mile. Repeat the same process due east/west. Repeat that exactly every mile. Number the lines sequentially, starting from the west and the north. North-south roads are avenues. East-west roads are streets. Do not bother paving them. I expect that profession in North Dakota, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska is about as difficult.

2) Who numbers the state highways? Today I passed SD Hwy 253. I’m pretty sure if you removed the interstates (just 2 of them) and the US Highways, there aren’t 253 paved roads in all of South Dakota. A little quick research shows that they actually have SD Hwy 1806. Now that’s just stupid. They’ve skipped bunches of numbers? Why? Who’s in charge of this and how do they decide?

3) The number one roadkill in South Dakota, by a huge margin, is birds. All kinds of them. Big ones and small ones. Near water. Near nothing. Doesn’t matter. They were everywhere. I’d guess they outnumbered all other species combined 10-1. Sorry Woody.

3.1) South Dakota has very little garbage along the road. They do have a variety of much more interesting items on the shoulder, including a golf ball, a plastic hangar, and one high-top sneaker.

4) The National Geographic definition of a hill is “a piece of land that rises above everything else around it. It looks like a little bump in the Earth”. With proper acknowledgement of the Black Hills, which are much farther south and west than where I’ve been, this is a geologic feature that gets little use in South Dakota. I hear North Dakota is worse. I’ll see starting tomorrow.

5) While it is generally accepted that the prevailing wind in South Dakota comes out of the NW, I will have spent parts of 4 days in this state before I leave tomorrow morning and in Day 1 it was from the SW, Day 2 was from the NE, today was from the N and tomorrow is supposed to be from the SE. It appears I’ll get out of this state with truly experiencing a full frontal like I did in Minnesota. North Dakota awaits, however.

6) The 3rd biggest city in South Dakota - Aberdeen - has 26,000 people. I believe this is more than all the other towns I’ve been in, combined, in South Dakota. That includes Watertown, which has 22,000. Kranzburg, Webster, Groton, Mina, Ipswich, Roscoe, Bowdle, and Selby. Raise your hand if you’ve heard of any of them. That’s what I thought.

7) I wish I had my playlist.

8) As diners go, Ricky’s Restaurant and Lounge in Roscoe is a huge step up from the Time Out in Selby. If given the choice to stop at the Time Out, or gnaw off your arm, I think the arm is a good choice. I was the only person in the restaurant. Newsmax was on the big TV, but fortunately, Jack Hanna’s Into the Wild was on the other TV with the volume up higher. The big sea turtle struggled across the beach into the ocean. I was relieved.

9) The Great Plains are great only in the sense of vast size. They are very plain. South Dakota is not ugly. It’s just boring. Nevada is ugly.

Nothing to add here

Just so you don’t think I’m just high-grading the pictures. This was the view to the side.

Oncoming traffic

This was quite a hook considering the wind was blowing the opposite way

This biker’s favorite sight on the prairie - a water tower. Signs of life and maybe a diner or convenience store

The Fried Steak Stacker at Ricky’s in Roscoe, SD. Before you say anything, the mashed potatoes buried under there were the closest thing to a vegetable on the menu.

A hill !!!!!