Summer Trip 2023 Day 18

3 July 2023

At 551 miles, this was the longest driving day of the trip. Except for the first 62 miles, this was all on secondary roads and there was a time change where I lost an hour, so yes, it was a long day!

An hour and a half into the trip, I stopped at a rest area to return borrowed coffee. Even though I was still at 5,100’ elevation, I could no longer see mountain peaks to the west. Over the course of the day’s drive, I lost a total of almost 3,800’ of elevation.

There was still interesting scenery in spots for the first part of the drive, as you can see in the above photo. Formations like this just popped up out of nowhere and definitely provided interest to the drive.

At some point in South Dakota, I dropped down to the Missouri River and was surprised at how wide it still was this far north – I grew up in Kansas City MO so knew the river there, where the common joke was that you could run Missouri River water through a pipe and cut it into chunks with a knife! It looks much cleaner these days.

Once I was past the river valley, the scenery changed back to mostly flat and lots of farms.

My hotel room tonight has a “river view” which surprised me because of the lack of “river” to view. This is the second time I’ve stayed in Sioux Falls SD; I didn’t like it the first time and am not any more impressed this time. Sioux Falls – Sioux City – Omaha … I’ve stayed in them all and am not enamored of any of them. Next time, I guess I’ll have to be in the KCMO area again as I was last year!

And here’s that “river view” for you to decide whether it’s worth visiting.