Miles and miles before getting to Wall, South Dakota, there are billboards talking about Wall Drugs. This drug store has been in existence since 1931. Thousands of tourists stop in this little town to see this drug store. It has everything that a drug store should have and then some.....Lots and lots of "then somes". Plenty of tourist souvenir items, of course, as well as some of the best donuts any of us have ever eaten and....5 cent coffee. That's right, a 5 cent cup of coffee. Mom and I were wandering through the drug store, going from room to room, just browsing and realized that Dad was missing. We retraced our steps and found him, coffee cup in hand. (Dad said he had one dime and 3 pennies in his pocket.....so he placed 3 pennies in the slot and enjoyed a 3 cent cup of coffee). Don't worry, we placed an extra nickel in the slot later when we refilled our cups. From the 1st picture of Dad with coffee cup in hand, it looks like he really, really needed that coffee!
And, then there were the prarie dogs....we saw a convenience store that featured "prarie dog food", which just happens to be the same thing as "squirrel food" at our house.....unsalted peanuts in the shell. Our neighborhood squirrels love unsalted peanuts and so do their furry cousins, the prarie dogs. When we pulled up, a family was leaving to continue on their journey and gave us the rest of their peanuts so that we could feed the cute little critters. We had to keep an eye on Mom since we didn't want any twisted ankles due to falling in a prarie dog burrow, but all turned out OK. It turns out that the prarie dogs near that store were very well-fed little fellows. They probably were more interested in tourist peanuts in the early morning, but in the mid-to-late afternoon (when we were there) they were pretty full (no wonder those tourists had leftover peanuts to share with us.) But, we certainly did enjoy seeing the little guys up close and personal. Mr. Cubby, of course, only got to see them from a distance since he would have been unable to keep himself from running after them if he got too close.
When we were in the Mt Rushmore/Badlands area, we went to the Old West town of Deadwood. Wild Bill Hickock was shot to death during a card game in the town and is buried at the local cemetery. They do a daily re-enactment of a shootout in the middle of the street (stopping traffic in Deadwood for the event). The town has lots of places to eat and drink and many of the little places have small casinos in them....some with maybe 20 or so machines. We played for awhile in a few of the "gaming establishments", and it was fun to feed tokens into the machines and bring a cupful of tokens to the old-fashioned teller cages to exchange the tokens of that establishment for US dollars and cents before moseying down the street to try our luck elsewhere. Let's just say that we had worse luck than some, but better luck than Wild Bill had in Deadwood.
