Indians, Badlands and Sunflowers... Oh my!

It's the first full day of our vacation. We awoke bright and early in Mitchell, South Dakota. What does one do in Mitchell? We had a few stops on our planned agenda: kids fishing day @ Cabela's...but it was raining, so we skipped it, and headed straight to the World's Only Corn Palace! We happened to be in town during the Corn Palace festival too, so lots of additional stuff was around. The kids were not very impressed with the corn/natural material murals, but the wide open areas of the auditorium sure were fun! Ben was hilarious in the gift area: he found the toy tractor display and had to make a massive line of tractors along the table. It was quite cute.

After the Corn Palace we headed over to the Prehistoric Indian Village and Archeodome. The kids were super excited to dig in the 'sandbox' to look for arrowheads. They had a small dig site set up for kids with plastic arrow heads. After fining the pretend arrowheads the kids could trade for real arrowheads. After their dig, we all explored the archeodome. Abby sorted fossil bones from pottery shards and even tried to reassemble a dog skeleton in the hands on learning area. After the dome, Nathan learned how to throw a spear with an atlatl. His first throw at the fake deer targets actually hit the deer! Sideways, but still, he hit the deer!

We had lunch at the corn palace festival and then hit the road for Rapid City. The drive started rather boring. After we crossed the Missouri river the scenery changed a bit and the landscape got more bubbly hills. We also saw fields and fields of sunflowers. They were just gorgeous!

One of the items on our to do list was a night ranger talk at Badlands National Park. The skies were clear and the timing was right, so we ended up in the park. We enjoyed some exploring before the talk. The star talk was great. The ranger pointed out many constellations, the Milky Way, the International Space Station and several satellites. The kids sort of crashed, so they missed the porcupine in the road on the way out of the park.

Whatever will tomorrow bring?