Day 65: World’s Only Corn Palace

Today’s drive was a little under three hours, taking us from Minnesota to South Dakota. Our view out the window was corn, soy beans and lots of windmills.

On our 2020 trip, we considered visiting the World’s Only Corn Palace, but instead chose the Golden Spike Tower and world’s largest train yard in North Platte, Nebraska. As luck would have it, this route gave us a second crack at the Corn Palace. Our visit happened to fall during the annual Corn Palace Festival weekend, adding carnival games to the surrounding streets.

None of us knew what a “corn palace” was. Basically, it’s a big building decorated with corn, redone every September with 160k ears of corn (cut in half and nailed on). It was fun to see it, but I think we were all pretty underwhelmed. The surrounding carnival made it fun for Nicholas; he got to ride the Zipper again and get an ICEE. Cooper got three scoops of caramel Rolo ice cream, and Kelly got a caramel apple.

We then headed back to the somewhat sketchy RV park (which shares a parking lot with a Motel 8ish so we can use their pool if we choose) for the evening. The boys were super helpers with laundry using the campground bike and our wagon. Kelly won’t miss the random washer and dryer experiences, especially when 3 of the 4 don’t work like tonight, but it has helped make many memories.

We had breakfast for dinner, taking advantage of full hookups to help us clean all the pans required for that meal.