Woke up fresh and raring to go after a great nights sleep - one thing about the USA, their beds are top class and when a double room means two queen sized beds, it's glorious to stretch out and enjoy the comfort and space!!!
We hit the Interstate lacking coffee because Kodaka is a bit too small for a coffee shop, and they're a little short on restaurants too - last nights dinner was in a very scratchy diner inside a Subway outlet! Nevertheless my steak sanger was pretty good and yep, I did have fries with it!!!!
And they sold beer and wine too!
Along the way we allowed Greg to take an exit to a car and tractor museum which turned out to be quite a gem, with over 250 cars and dozens of cars, tractors, motorbikes, outboards and any other old stuff you could imagine! Needless to say we had to drag him out some time later, but it was typical of the museums we have seen everywhere we have been and I spent some time chatting to one of the caretakers who told me a great deal about the area in general!
Corn and sunflowers are the main crops, with 425mm of rainfall and pretty cold winters - apparently the Interstate get closed off for days at a time because of the snow!
While on the Interstate, yesterday we had come across roadworks that went on for 15kms with the 2 eastbound lanes being completely rebuilt! They remove all the old concrete and then lay road base, moisture wicking cloth and iron re-enforcing bars and then lay concrete 30cm thick with a huge machine, the full 2 lanes wide! They then come back and pack the verges! All this over the whole 15km at once! What a task! Apparently this part of the Interstate has been down since the 1970's and this is the first rebuild!
This morning we came across similar work on the westbound lanes that stretched nearly 20kms! Everything in the US is done on a big scale!
That applies equally to crop growing with both sides of the Interstate for the entire 500 kms we drove today. Millions of acres of corn are grown on the plains with no irrigation at all - an amazing sight and one that I have been wanting to see all my life!
We had a stop at Sioux Falls for a look at the falls but they were only trickling after a long summer - but the park facilities along the river were superb and were being well used by the locals!
We arrived here in Worthington, a small town of about 12,000 people, which is an agricultural hub and has a large lake on the south side of town! The area is very windy in summer and many windsurfing competitions are held here at that time, along with famous turkey races, with some people bringing their turkeys from as far away as Texas?????????
In winter it is very cold and the lake freezes to well over a metre of ice, and so the skating season begins!!!
We found a motel (turned out to be the best yet) and then had a birthday dinner for Jasmin at a nearby bar and grill, which was extremely nice!