We decided to push on to Kansas. My wife has three sisters in Kansas, and it’s tough to turn around and head home when you’re that close. So we headed south. On our way we stopped to see one of my wife’s nieces who lives near Ord, Nebraska. We had a nice lunch with her and her family, and since it was fairly late, we decided that instead of trying to make it all the way to the Newton area, we would stay overnight in Hays, Kansas home of Fort Hays State University, which both my wife and I attended. Below is one of my favorite buildings on the FHSU campus: Albertson Hall. I love the observatory. It really gives the building some class.

We wandered through the newly remodeled McCartney Hall, which houses the business school. It looks much better than it did when I was there. The photo below is of our old apartment, F1 Wooster Place. We lived here while I was working on my MBA. These are tiny little cockroach infested apartments (My guess is they’re still infested, but maybe that isn’t so. I’ll give FHSU the benefit of the doubt.), but they sufficed. One weekend, we had about 10 family members sleep over in this tiny little crack box.

There aren’t too many Universities that have a herd of bison right next to the campus. You can see the observatory of Albertson Hall in the background to the right in the picture below, and that building with all the windows is a dormitory.

Hays has grown a great deal since our last visit. In fact, the hotel we stayed in was north of Interstate 70. When we lived in Hays, the town pretty much ended at the Interstate.

We enjoyed living in Hays during our first years of marriage. The town and the university were very good to us. It was a lot of fun showing our children around.

Our first order of business upon arriving in Nebraska was dinner with my wife’s sister and her husband in Ainsworth, Nebraska. Then we headed south to her oldest sister’s place where we spent the night. It seemed as though we were in the middle of nowhere, and it was wonderful. The next morning, we went to my mother-in-law’s. Below is a picture of the sandhills on the place where my wife grew up. It’s a great place, and even though we don’t get back there very often, it holds some great memories for us.

Windmills are ubiquitous in this part of the country. The one pictured below is just across the road from the Duff cemetery were my father-in-law is buried.

We had reached our original destination. Now we had to make a decision: Should we push on to Kansas and perhaps the Dust Bowl region or head back home?

We made it to Nebraska! The Good Life! This picture was taken on the Nebraska-South Dakota border just north of Ainsworth. The sign has sure taken a beating over the years.

It’s almost obligatory to stop at Wall Drug when you’re headed through South Dakota on Interstate 90. This Badlands community is in the middle of nowhere (see map), and there really was no reason to stop there until the local drug store started advertising free ice water during the Great Depression.

Wall, South Dakota

They eventually put up “Wall Drug” billboards all over the country, and people began to stop. As you can see from the photo above, the parking lot is full even on a rainy August day. You can still get a free drink of water from the original well (It doesn’t taste that great.), and there are all kinds of touristy things to do.

In the candy store, I found Spokcandy candy, which was a pleasant surprise. I didn’t buy any Spokandy products. I promised my daughter that if she would sit on the jackalope in the rain so I could take her picture, I would let her buy some candy at the store. She did it (without getting wet) so she got to choose whatever she wanted.

Wall Drug is a great place to take a break. It’s also a great entrepreneurial story where someone took advantage of a fairly simple idea and turned an out-of-the-way drug store into something big. (I wonder if they graduated from EWU.)

Some day, I’d like to take some time and explore the Badlands National Park to the south of Wall, but we needed to get to Nebraska.

We saw this sign coming back to Rapid City from the Crazy Horse Monument. We didn’t see any turtles but thought the sign was pretty cool. In an area known for buffalo, or more properly, bison, it’s nice to know that they’re looking out for the little guy!

Below is a picture of the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park. I always like to stop here because it’s a very nice lodge, but mostly because Calvin Coolidge used it for his Summer White House in 1927.  Coolidge had a rather interesting personality, and I wonder how he liked staying here. Dwight Eisenhower also visited here while he was President.

If you head south from the lodge, you will get to see a huge herd of bison. It was getting dark by the time we got to the lodge so we headed for Rapid City instead of the bison herd; although we did get to see a couple of buffalo, some mountain sheep, deer, and antelope. We also missed out on the Needles but had a great time in the Black Hills. Some day we’ll spend a little more time here, but on this trip, we really needed to get to Nebraska and maybe to the Dust Bowl.