Another view, but it's tough to show the scale of the thing.


And, finally, the last photo taken during the trip.

Those driving I-95 south into the Carolinas know about "South of the Border", a road-site stop where every trinket ever made in the Far East is available. "Wall Drug" in South Dakota is its western-themed counterpart, though it defies me how a 15 ft tall growling animatronic T-Rex dinosaur from the movie "Jurassic Park" fits in. It's a huge place that extends for a city-block of connecting store-fronts hiding a warren of shops selling T-shirts to tomahawks to taffy. If it's cheap, cheaply-made, tacky, and could be a souvenier, they have it by the dozen, in all sizes, and in both your least (and most) favorite colors.

The strangest thing I encountered there was actually in a Mexican-food restaurant. I make a distinction from "Mexican" restaurant because ALL of the wait-staff, with the exception of one stereotypical hard-boiled waitress, was Eastern European girls in their late teens or early twenties whose English was, surprisingly, poor. The hard-boiled waitress informed me that the girls were from Moldavia (!), Germany, and Rumania. (I had to ask her to take my order after I had trouble being understood by both the hostess and a waitress she called over to help. They had trouble with "Taco salad to go".) I left there wondering how a half-dozen young women from those countries ended up in the middle of South Dakota. Are wait-staff jobs so undesirable to locals? Did the young people from the area get out as soon as they turned eighteen and could buy a bus ticket to the Big Apple? I'll never know because one stop at Wall Drug is enough for this lifetime.