Wow, 2 months without a blog! Can you believe it! As I said before ...time flies when you're having fun!
Where to begin? Mmm ... well, I guess way back when, on the 18th of October, when our stay in the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota finally had to come to an end.
Not that we really wanted to, but the weather was about to turn on us soon, and we definitely had to leave before the first snow was going to fly!

So we packed up once again, said our goodbyes to Stephanie, Brett and Grant and beautiful Recreational Springs, and left Lead and on a beautiful fall day.
We made it down the steep hills in one piece (phew) and started to follow the I-90 East. Not much to see along the way, just endless (dormant) prairie ....

And a guy walking a dinosaur ... wait a minute ... a dinosaur?!
What the heck??

Fun art!

Although we'd planned to stay in Kadoka that night, and golf at the local golf course, we had to change plans right away, since the golf course was closed!
We decided to drive a little farther and ended up in Murdo, where we made it just in time for a round of golf at the Rolling Prairie municipal course, just a couple of miles out of town.

It was a fun course, and very aptly named, since it sat in the middle of the prairie!
Not much of a tree in sight, but nicely rolling fairways and beautiful, wide open, views!

After the round we were going to find a campground or Walmart around town to spend the night. 
But by the time we were done, the office had already locked up, everybody had left and we were basically in the middle of nowhere, so we figured that probably nobody would have a problem with us spending the night in their large gravel parking lot!

Which is what we did, and we spent a beautiful sunset and very quiet night on the prairie!

We left early the next morning an continued our drive through the south of South Dakota. 

Now I have to explain, that this time around, we'd decided to not so much stop for any touristy stuff along the way, but that every day we were going to find us another small town municipal golf course, and play golf!
So our first stop today, was at the Fish Lake Country Club in Plankinton.

See the RV there in the back?

A pretty little 9 hole course with quite some water (and I was in it too much ...).

  

 

We really liked the way that playing golf broke up our otherwise long drives, we could stretch our legs, get some fresh air and have some  fun exercise as well!

After lunch we continued our drive east.
This part of the state is part of the agricultural 'paradise' that is the Mid-West. Corn is king here, and there is no greater place to see that than the town of Mitchell, South Dakota, our next destination.
We were going to overnight at Cabelas, but since we would not be able to disconnect there, we first payed a visit to the place that makes this town a must-see tourist destination for many, the one and only ... Corn Palace!




The original Corn Palace was built in 1892 as part of an effort to showcase the agricultural bounty of the area and lure settlers to homestead here. Several versions were constructed over the years with the current building, including the Moorish towers and onion domes, completed in 1937.
The stylish new metal onion domes are designed to be more effective in minimizing the impact of the strong winds which regularly blow across the prairie.



The Palace is actually a function events center for the area, featuring a combined sports court/auditorium. The interior walls of the arena are entirely covered with more of the corn design.

 

The lobby area is festooned with pillars designed as ceramic ears of corn.

The exterior is covered with corn and other grain products and a new design is created every year (costing about $130,000 per year). The 2015 version (featuring a tribute to Willie Nelson and Michael Jackson) was close to completion.

If you look closely at the outside, you can see the various uses of real corn and grains. It really is quite a feat of construction.

As I mentioned, we overnight-ed in the parking lot of Cabelas. A first for us, but definitely not our last!

Known of course as a specialty retailer of hunting, fishing, camping, shooting, and other related outdoor recreation stuff, we actually never set foot in one before. Boy, did we miss out on something!

           

Cabela's has a distinctive look to its retail operations, a look which turns its retail stores into very interesting tourist attractions. 
The stores are more like cavernous showrooms, bringing the outdoors inside.

They feature museum-quality displays of taxidermied wildlife, large aquariums, indoor mountains, and archery ranges.
Just stunning!
One more feat that especially caught our interest, is that they allow free overnight camping in their parking lots. 



And they are set up for it! Besides the nice, wide and long spaces in a special area, there's a dump station and a dog walking area and even temporary kennels for when you go into the store and don't want to leave your dog in the (hot) car!

Much better, and quieter, than Walmart, but unfortunately, there are much less of them around, so you have to be lucky to find one on your specific route.
Almost worth detouring for though...

After a good night's sleep, our first order of the day was to find a golf course for our daily 'fix'! 



Just a couple of miles down the highway we'd found (on the web) Lakeview municipal Golf course. It turned out to be a beautiful course with big mature trees that were still showing some nice fall colors.

(One disadvantage of playing in the fall at a golf course with lots of deciduous trees: you'll have a hard time finding your ball among the leaves!)



After a nice round we had a cup of coffee in front of the pro-shop before we 'hit the road' again ....

....soon to arrive in Iowa! 

In this region, sometimes called the "American Heartland", Iowa is bordered by the Mississippi River on the east and the Missouri River and the Big Sioux River on the west; it is the only U.S. state whose eastern and western borders are formed entirely by rivers.

Iowa derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many Native American tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. It is the only state that has a state abbreviation that consists of two vowels (IA).
Iowa is generally not flat; most of the state consists of rolling hills.

For our next destination we'd picked Orange City! It was sort of on our way and it's always fun for me to find something of my own heritage!

We stayed at the Veterans Memorial Park Campground, a small city park that also houses softball fields, basketball courts and a playing ground. 

The weather was beautiful, warm enough to set up the BBQ to grill some steaks and eat outside!

Merl' likes his steak medium rare and on his own dish and place-mat, if you please ... thank you very much ...

Another beautiful end of the day!

The next morning we set out to explore the 'city' of orange.

First called Holland, it was later renamed in honor of Dutch royalty,

William of Orange, it is best known for its Dutch background, which it celebrates with an annual Tulip Festival for 3 days every May.

The chamber is (of course) housed in a windmill ..

Many signs are in dutch ....

                 

... and many of the city's buildings are faced with Dutch architectural fronts as this dutch grocery store:

 

 

No tulips this time of the year, but this beautiful mural made up for it:

How about this phone boot?

Off course we put some golf on the program and since the golf course in Orange City is quite pricey, we opted for the municipal in Alton, which turned out to be a gorgeous little  course!

                  

That evening we ate at the 'Nederlander' Grill but other than pea-soup they didn't have anything 'dutch' on the menu, which was rather disappointing ... oh well ..

Next day, we continued our way south on the I-75.

Lots and lots of corn fields ...

         

  

Most of the farms we came across had a few huge old barns next to their homesteads and a lot of them showed these beautiful quilts on their fronts:

Turns out, it's quite a 'thing'. 
Barn quilts, as they are called, are quilt blocks painted on barns (duhh) and outbuildings, usually about 8 feet high by 8 feet wide.  

The tradition of painting quilt blocks on barns seems to have been started in Ohio, but has spread in the last few years to other rural areas throughout the country.   
Washington County, Iowa has pushed to have the largest number of barn quilts in Iowa.

One of the reasons we chose to take this most western route south was to drive through the Loess Hills :

These Hills are a formation of wind-deposited loess soil in the westernmost part of Iowa and Missouri along the Missouri River.
As the last ice age was ending, the winds blew finely ground soil into dunes along what is now the Missouri River. Dunes made of this "loess" soil (from the German for "loose") piled up over 200 feet in some parts of Iowa over thousands of years.

Loess hills can be found elsewhere in the world but Iowa's are special: They're second only to China's in height.

We were not that impressed by the views but that might be because we really cannot deviate very far from the main road, or stopping wherever we want, when we're towing the rig. 

I bet some of the smaller roads will be more interesting.

This road was about as windy and hilly as I'd like to see when we're having the rig behind us ...

From the Loess scenic Byway we went onto the Western Skies scenic Byway ... same landscape ... more cornfields ..

Our next destination was Elkhorn, one of two small towns next to each other in the Iowa countryside, that has Danish heritage.

I know, we were covering the whole Mayflower!

When we arrived in town we had a nice lunch at the village cafe, goulash with red cabbage (yum), and drove a few miles out of town to the Prairie Rose State Park, where we picked a beautiful site with a lake-view:

Since the weather was going to change and rain was in the forecast for the next day, we decided to golf that afternoon. 

Shelby County golf Course in nearby Harlan lays a midst the cornfields ...

By the end of the round, the wind started to blow and it started to turn dark early ... time to go home and hunker down before the storm would hit ...

Storm approaching ...

Fortunately, the weather didn't get too severe and the next day we were able to visit both towns in between some light showers. 

Elk Horn and Kimballton are the two largest rural Danish settlements in the United States, and known as a center of Danish ethnicity, Elkhorn is also home to the Museum of Danish America.

Elk Horn is the host to the only authentic, operating Danish windmill in the United States. The mill was purchased from Norre Snede, Denmark, shipped and reconstructed in 1976 with the help of over 300 volunteers.

Restaurants and shops sell the danish Kringle, a sort of danish doughnut. Unfortunately we didn't get to try them since most of the stores and shops were closed.
We noticed this often throughout our trip. The Midwest has been hit hard in the latest recession, many businesses are closed and boarded up, and lots of rural little towns look nothing but abandoned.

After hooking up he next morning we drove about 5 miles to the little town of Avoca, and golfed at the Country View Golf and Grill Golf Course:    

It so happened that he golf course hosted the yearly Firefighter Pancake Breakfast fundraiser and was officially closed for the day, but since we were going to walk and nobody else would be on it, they allowed us to play for next to nothing.
Works for us!

After lunch we decided to get on Highway I-29 south for a while to make some extra miles today and overnight at a Walmart along the way.
(We were sort of living by a 'rule' we'd made up for this trip, that what we saved on camping fees, we could use to golf!)

'Only 'Highlight' of the day, we entered Missouri ....

Guess what .... more corn!

No wait, that must have been a wheat field?

And the next morning , we drove into Kansas!

A rather unusual move, I admit, but we wanted to visit the NuWa plant in Chanute, where our RV was made.
And while it was right on the way, I liked to go to the 'Yarn Barn' in Lawrence!

I have a catalog from this store and had wanted to order some of their roving, but never did. This was my change to actually see and touch their stuff and avoid the shipping cost, just in case I wanted to get something.

I'd expected their store, being called a barn, to be outside of town and preferably with a large parking lot, but it turned out to be smack in the middle of this fairly busy university town, and right on main street!

Fortunately, James is (almost) never daunted by such things, so he dropped me off in front of the store and went and parked in one of the small side streets. He's such a trooper!

Unfortunately, the store was rather disappointing. Granted, they had spinning wheels, which is more than most, but no cotton wheel (Charka) which I was looking for, their rovings were pricey and no interesting sales! Oh well ... worth a try ...

Onwards! To Chanute!
We'd googled the town, of course, and had found out that the city campground let's you stay 48 for free, so that's where we headed.
Hey, free means ... more golf ... you got it! 



Look at that! We've never seen so many Hitchhikers in one place before!
Reason being: the small town of Chanute is largely supported by what was previously the NuWa manufacturing plant and its companion plants, Young's Manufacturing (which makes trailer frames,including some for NuWa), and HiLo Manufacturing (which makes trailer furniture and cabinets, including some for NuWa). 

Old archive picture

But with the US economy slowing and gas prices skyrocketing, the RV industry was not happy and many high-end RV manufacturers, among which also NuWa, had to close their doors.

The buildings were bought by the Kansas RV Center who is now selling various brands of RV's, but still has the largest inventory of used Hitchhikers in the country.

Which is largely due to the fact that they continue to provide warranty and parts for Hitchhikers and expanded the service department, which is known for quality and value. Refurbishment of used HitchHikers is still done on a daily base.

Most of the units in the campground have appointments for repair or maintenance and stay at this campground for a couple of days while being worked on.



We toured the warehouse, stepped in a few of the beautiful 5th-wheelers on display and went into the little appliance store where we got a few replacement bits and pieces.

Time for some fresh air! We golfed at the local municipal 'Stone Creek Golf Course'. 

I couldn't hit a ball if my life depended on it, so while James went around for another nine, I sat in the clubhouse and read. 
Works for us!

                        


OK, I think this post is about long enough (really, you think so?), so I'm going to kill it and start a fresh one for the rest of the story. 
WiFi is maddeningly slow here at our current RV Park but I'm going to try to upload this whole thing. Keep your fingers crossed!