Sculpture Walk and Disc Golf?

Sunday morning we went downtown to check out some artwork similar to the Art Prize in Grand Rapids but on a smaller scale. It was interesting. Downtown Sioux Falls has a LOT of cool boutiques and neat restaurants, but we mainly checked out the artwork (see slideshow), then headed to a major grocery store called Hy-Vee. Wow! Several restaurants inside, an amazing wine store inside the store as well, huge selection of items and just amazing selections of foods. Quite impressive and we highly recommend a trip to check it out, but it was pricier than other grocery chains. The best part was all the samples being demonstrated, we could have had a complete lunch there had we wanted to!

your target

Later this afternoon, I dragged Eldy to a disc golf course. Some people call it frisbee golf. The object is to throw the frisbee disc at a chain link basket X number of feet away from you in a certain amount of throws. Disc golf is played with frisbee type discs but they are made especially for throwing long distances. There are many different kinds of driver discs, putting discs and discs for throwing left hooks or right slices. Putter discs are heavier so they drop to the ground sooner. Being the trooper that he is, Eldy is willing to try something more than once. The last time we played disc golf, it was on the side on a mountain, major downhill descent all the way, and that was not all that fun! This 18 hole disc golf course was at beautiful Tuthill Park in Sioux Falls. There were some hills, not too many trees to shoot your disc through, and it was great walking exercise. Some people carry 6 or 7 discs in a bag, but we each had just two--a driver disc and a putter disc. You play the game similarly like golf--par is a certain number of shots to throw the disc into a chain basket which traps the disc. The most difficult hole on this course was the 18th hole. From the 17th to the 18th you had to walk through a narrow trail in the woods to get to it, and the 18th was the most difficult one of all. A great way to finish the course!

the 18th hole--see the basket?

Eldy would much rather play 18 holes of regular golf, but I've been playing disc golf for several years, and he knows how much I enjoy it. It's not every day you find a disc golf course in the town you are visiting, so I just HAD to try it out! I really REALLY enjoy it...Eldy, well, let's just say he does it because I enjoy it. (He did look like he was enjoying himself, though!) Great exercise--walking up and down hills and throwing the discs! Love it!

Water Falls in South Dakota

Sioux Falls

Oh, yeah! These beautiful falls are in downtown Sioux Falls. You can see its beauty at Falls Park, right in the center of downtown. There is a wonderful cafe, Falls Overlook Cafe, that serves great food, and you can sit outside and eat and enjoy the falls. The stone walled cafe is a former hydroelectric plant, and I think it's made of pink granite or jasper. (The state stone is jasper, so I bet that's what it is!) Whatever it is, it's beautifully colored pink blocks of stone. The waterfalls are a 100 foot drop, and the surrounding rock piles look like a gigantic bulldozer came through the plains and unearthed all these beautiful granite rock piles and then just left them behind. You can clamber all around the rocks and get extremely close to the falls. There are no railings to hold you back, which makes for some great camera  shots. The entire park is very pretty. After we checked out the falls, I went to a local Farmer's Market at the bottom of the hill and saw these really cool pumpkins. At first I thought they had a fungus or something, and that's why all the growths on them, but no, these are called "knucklehead" pumpkins, that's a particular kind of pumpkin grown from seed. Interesting!

Later in the day, I went for a bike ride on the bike trail around town. It's about a 20+ mile ride if you do the whole loop. It's a totally open paved bike path that follows the river as far as I can tell. It's just wide open spaces all the way with an urban landscape to view and a few parks sprinkled along the way. You see very little nature on this trail and it's completely out in the open, at least the ten miles that I did were. The trail was blocked off in several locations for bridge work, but that didn't stop hardcore bike enthusiasts from going on through anyway. Something very cool that I saw while out biking was a rock wall sculpture at Sherman Park. This was part of Sioux Falls' Sculpture Walk a few years back and it remains for people to enjoy. An Indian is hunting buffalo.  The buffalo's body is a large craggy boulder to simulate his hide. The artwork is entitled "Sacred Buffalo". Very cool! Today we finished out our sightseeing with the Sculpture Walk downtown, and a round of disc golf--We did 18 holes at beautiful Tuthill Park. If you are not familiar with disc golf, I'll tell you all about it tomorrow while Eldy is driving to first Mitchell, S.D., home of the Corn Palace, and then on to the Badlands!

Sertoma Butterfly House in Sioux Falls

It's Saturday...time to kick back and relax a little and see the sights. We've been busy the last two days, collecting paperwork and documents, getting plates for the RV,  trying to get a S. Dakota driver's license for Eldy, trying to get passports renewed JUST IN CASE we want to go to Canada sometime in the near future--(Vancouver, anyone?) but we've run into road blocks on just how specific the US government wants your paperwork to be. Birth certificates can't be copies, they have to be certified, and so we put that on the back burner for now. We'll have to order those from the county seat and wait for delivery.

It was another beautiful Saturday in Sioux Falls, low 60's, no rain in sight for the next few days. We went to the Sertoma Butterfly House at Sertoma Park in Sioux Falls. Admission price was around $11.00 for two seniors (60 and over) with a coupon from a tourist's brochure. Normal admission is 8.00 a person. The building is being remodeled and they are adding an aquarium. When you see the beautiful, colorful remodeling and construction they are doing, it's going to be an awesome asset to the city when they are done. There were over 350 different species of butterflies flying around today, the brochure says there can be up to 800 species sometimes!....they were gorgeous! If you've never been in a butterfly "house", you need to see one. It's very warm and humid in there, with lots of butterfly friendly plants, flowers and little waterfalls...it's very peaceful and soothing. Now if they only had New Age music playing, that would be the perfect touch. You can sit on park benches in the butterfly room and watch them fly around everywhere, they land at your feet (you have to watch where you are stepping) or they land on you sometimes. They have feeding stations for the butterflies as well. There are so many beautiful ones flying, landing, and eating, you will just constantly click your camera to try and get the perfect butterfly shot!  I used a little Canon Powershot A1100 camera to take these photos today. Imagine what you could do with a better digital camera! We also visited the Sioux Falls today at Falls Park. We'll tell you about that tomorrow. Hope you enjoy the show!

Establishing Residency in S.Dakota

Eldy has researched this topic for several years. Once you are full timing, you have to have an address for your mail, and for tax purposes. You could use a family member, but it gets very tedious for the family member to keep track of, forward on, and make trips to the post office--- a hassle for them and sometimes it's just not feasible to have a family member to do it. There are several states that are very favorable to RVers for tax purposes---Texas, Florida, Nevada, and South Dakota are the most well known and used. These do not  have any state income tax. There are more advantages to S. Dakota in  particular for full timers.  South Dakota has lower insurance rates, both health and auto, among some other advantages to being a South Dakota resident. Besides no state tax, there is no inheritance tax, no personal property taxes, low vehicle licensing fees (tada! that's why we are here), and the 47th lowest state in private car insurance rates. The difference in license plate cost alone is $1500.00 between our home state of Indiana and S. Dakota rates! As far as mail services, the state has several all over but one of the better known services is Alternative Resources. This mail forwarding service currently serves 3500+ clients and is located in Sioux Falls.

Today we established the mail service and a post office address thru Sioux Falls. You can have your mail forwarded to you once a month, twice a month, weekly, or on demand. We chose monthly, and that cost is $168.00 a year. In addition to that fee, you pay a starter amount for postage for them to ship it out to you. Depending on how much you move around, you might pick a different schedule. You get a default mail date which the mail will be sent every month. If you need it sooner, you can call and make arrangements, you are not "stuck" with this time period. When you've gotten within 10.00 of using up your postage, they charge you another set amount of postage. You decide how much and what kind of mail you want to have forwarded on to you. The staff at Alternative Resources is a HUGE help either on the phone or in person in helping you set up residency and answering questions.  It's a very organized, well run business. When we met them for the first time today, a sign in the lobby says, "Welcome home!" and they were so warm and friendly, it was a pleasure dealing with them.

Biking in Sioux Falls 

Then we went to the county treasurer to get plates for the RV. It was about 1500.00 cheaper in South Dakota than Indiana for license plates. WOW! Worth the drive here!  Next, to the license branch for Eldy's driver's license. You have to have a CERTIFIED copy of your birth certificate and your social security card to get a S.D. driver's license. Eldy had a birth certificate from the hospital, the ORIGINAL 62 year old piece of paper and they wouldn't take it! It has to be certified from the county seat government, I guess. He'll have to order that from his place of birth and try again later. At the end of the day, after all that, we hopped on a local bike trail that runs along the Little Sioux River...very open paved trail, but no trees on the trail and nothing really pretty to see except industry along the river along the three miles we covered today. We are going to explore the trail some more tomorrow in a different direction and see if the scenery is different. They say you can kayak this river, too. Sioux Falls has some beautiful 100 ft. falls to see, a butterfly house, a battleship memorial, and a sculpture walk. We'll check it out and let you know more about it tomorrow....

"OOPS! I'M SO SORRY!"

What else can you say when open the door to somebody's else's coach and not your own at night? How in the heck did that happen, you ask? When you can't find your way out of a mall with multiple exits, going out the same way you came in in broad daylight, it's possible. One time I walked out of a department store in downtown Chicago and walked 10 city blocks the wrong way from the train station into a scary, seedy slummy area before realizing I was lost. You need to understand that I have some type of learning difficulty when it comes to spatial orientation. I used to have to turn maps upside down if I was going south when I drove. I'm getting better but not much, apparently. It was pitch black out, no lighting in the park to speak of. We were located right across from the bathhouse. I was on my way out of the bath house, having gone to check the conditions of the showers and toilets. Problem was, I got turned around in my orientation (as always) when I came out, and I headed straight for the RV coach on the OTHER side of the showerhouse doorway. I opened the door, stepped up two steps and heard, "WHOA! WHAT THE HELL!!?-----" and I said, "OOPS! I'm so sorry! Wrong coach!" and skedaddled out of there as fast as I could. I heard the door lock immediately after as I hurriedly went down the lane looking for our coach. I was so rattled I didn't see ours right away, but I finally found it. I used to think Eldy was being a little paranoid in locking the doors early in the evening, but I certainly can see why that's a good idea now! You never know when some strange lady is going to come barging in through your front door, acting like she lives there!

We are more than halfway to S. Dakota. We had a relatively quiet night after my little "oops!" at the Kellogg RV park in Kellogg, IA. It's situated right next to I-80 West. Lots of highway traffic but NOTHING as loud as freight trains blowing their horns all night long, as they did back at the Elkhart Fairgrounds.

wind turbines along I-80 

Passing through Iowa today surprised us in a couple of different ways...first, Iowa is NOT as flat as you think it might be, at least not in the central portion..it's actually filled with gently rolling plains along I-80. Where our old Damon Challenger's engine would have been loudly complaining about the slightest changes in elevation, the diesel is so quiet and effortless with the changes, it's much more of a pleasure to drive. We're looking forward to driving it in the mountains! Uh, ELDY is looking forward to driving it in the mountains. The other thing that surprised us was the number of wind turbines along a stretch of I-80, it seemed as if there were over 100 of them in the fields and along the highway...and wouldn't you know, it was a very windy stretch of the interstate west of Des Moines. We are staying at Tower Campground in Sioux Falls. Nice sites, great price (25.00 a night) and the owners are working hard to upgrade the facilities. BUT, wouldn't you know, we are in the direct path of jets landing and taking off from the Sioux Falls Regional Airport, there's a train track nearby, and cars are rushing along I-29.  Here we go again, planes, trains, and automobiles, we've got all three!

The World's Largest Truckstop

Where is it? On the way to South Dakota from Indiana, on interstate 80 West. Yesterday, we went to the license branch to get Indiana plates for the motorhome. We were expecting a sizeable increase from last year, because Indiana now collects excise tax on RV's through license plates. If it wasn't too bad, we were going to go ahead and pay it so we could go south for awhile, we were thinking North Carolina, maybe South Carolina. But we weren't expecting a triple digit license plate fee! Not only that, but if you buy a vehicle in another state other than Indiana, it has to be visually inspected for the VIN number, you have to physically bring the vehicle to the license branch. O-o-o-o-k-a-a-a-y...you want us to bring the motor home to the license branch? But we're sitting on a site all hooked up, that would be a bit of a hassle... OK, the representative says...I understand that, then you'll need to get the police to come out to your campsite to visually inspect the number, I'll give you a paper for him to sign verifying the VIN number. At that point, Eldy says, I think we'll go to South Dakota. We understand the reasoning behind the inspection, but we had lots of paperwork to prove who we were, and where the vehicle came from.  I know, I know, we should have bought the RV in Indiana, but that was not where the best deal came from for the Tiffin, nor is anybody selling Tiffins locally. So, we are on the interstate 80-90 toll road today, traveling to Iowa for our first stop on the way to South Dakota.

This afternoon we stopped at the WORLD'S LARGEST TRUCKSTOP,  Iowa 80, in Walcott, Iowa and it lived up to its reputation! A full semi trailer truck inside the building and a couple of cabs. Old vintage cars and farm trucks inside as well, with every available piece of merchandise you could think of that a traveler or a trucker could want. There is 100,000 sq. feet in the main building, and 30,000 sq. feet in the truck showroom. There are 50,000 items in the store with more CHROME than you can imagine and lots of Toby Keith playing in the background...They even had a 60 seat Dolby surround sound movie theater in there! A trucker haven for sure! I wouldn't want to leave  and get back on the road if I was drivin' truck. We ate in the main restaurant, and it was ok. Instant mashed potatoes are just not my favorite. There was a Gramma's Kitchen across the street, I think we'll try that the next time we are in the area.

full length semi inside the store

After covering about 405 miles today, we stopped this evening in Kellogg, Iowa. The campground is called Kellogg RV Park, right off interstate 80, exit 173. Price is right, $19.00 for water and electric, no sewer. Good deal! Tomorrow, we continue on to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Eldy will establish residency, get a new driver's license, and plate the motor home. South Dakota is so RV friendly that all you need to do is spend one night in the state, and you are officially a resident. No state income tax, low insurance rates, so many RVers claim S. Dakota as their state of residency even though they don't live there. We're looking forward to seeing the state after we get all the licensing taken care of...

Sharing life and sharing the road

city streets of Fremont, IN

Today was a wonderful day...I went to Fremont, my former hometown and home of my great post office lady who is holding my mail for me, and Angola, IN to visit school friends. I went around the school's lunch time which ended up being one of the most positive experiences of my life and a very meaningful one for me. You see, when you are a special ed. teacher, especially an old school one like myself, (when separation from the regular kids was the norm and the special ed. teacher was separate from the staff as well-- that was the case for many years,) you are used to the kids looking the other way when you walk down the hall and say hi because they don't want to be associated with the "sped" teacher. For many years it was like that. With inclusion, with most special ed kids now being mainstreamed in general ed. classes, the blending of special ed. and "normal" is a much blurrier line. It's one of the great things about inclusion---kids have learned to be more accepting of each other's differences. Today I walked into my old school, Angola Middle School, and I saw two boys I worked with last year...one of my special ed boys, and one boy (not special ed.) I tutored after school on a regular basis. They broke into a big mutual grin...The first thing out of their mouths was, "MRS. SPARKS! Are you coming to lunch? Come and sit at our table. We'll save you a place!" I said, "You bet!" I about fell over. For special ed. kids to invite me to come sit at their table for lunch, in front of their regular ed. peers, about made me tear up.

Ropchan Nature Trail

It was really great! The table was a mixed bunch of kids, some of my special ed. boys who could alternately make you pull your hair out one day, and  make you want to take them home with you the next, and regular ed. kids. There were a couple of girls there that I didn't work with who gave me just as warm a welcome as my former students. The boys were eager to tell me who of my former students was in trouble this year as 8th graders, and who was getting  the good grades. A couple of students wanted my Facebook information and my email so they could write. It was just a wonderful, wonderful feeling to know that they weren't ashamed to be seen with me, and we just had a great lunch together. I will hold that wonderful memory inside me for a very long time.....After lunch I visited my favorite hiking trail, the Ropchan Nature Preserve in Fremont. I went for a two mile hike and saw a really big doe while hiking the beautiful trails thru meadows, forest, and prairie grass habitat. I always see deer when I hike there. Then I headed back home to where Eldy was "holding down the fort" till I got back. Here's why I titled the blog what it is today....

The reason I mention sharing the road is because today I saw something very upsetting on the way back to Goshen...when you think of sharing the road, you think of watching out for motorcycles, and bicycle riders. But in Amish country, you have to think about the Amish riding bikes along the side of the road, and the many open wagons and traditional black closed in buggies that are pulled by horses. On the way home from school today, passing through Shipshewanna, I stopped for my favorite pretzels at JoJo's. Just as I got back on my way and close to the intersection to turn onto US 20, I just missed witnessing a car hit a horse drawn buggy. From what I could tell, the car hit the horse, the horse was down writhing on the ground, the Amish women in the buggy were consoling the horse, and the man who had hit the horse was coming towards the buggy to talk to them. The people in the buggy appeared to be ok. The horse appeared to be badly hurt. Had I not stopped for pretzels, I probably would have been a witness to the sad accident. The buggies have orange triangles on the back, and blinking lights, but the horses can be skittish around traffic, and so there is always the possibility that the unexpected might happen. It was an upsetting reminder today to be extra vigilant when driving around in Amish country......