Road Trip, Part I (South Dakota)

OK, some pithy thoughts on the start our road trip across America:

• On the morning of June 19, the start of our road trip, it was pouring rain.  I mean buckets, I mean biblical rain.  Thank Buddha Enterprise picks us up; even if their branch was within walking distance, I would have been soaking wet if I tried doing that.
• My Fucking Father kind of made a fool of himself when he tried haggling over the price, specifically getting insurance to cover our huge one-way ride.  I don't know if he believed if the amount he tossed out was one they accepted, but basically the guy who was helping us offered us a third tier of coverage, the addition of which was still acceptable to My Father to use his card.  You know, maybe Father really is just hard of hearing.
• These rains that hit in the morning really affected southern Minnesota -- to the point where parts of 169 in Mankato were closed down due to standing water.  That really fucked up our plans; all of the directions I printed out and AAA gave to us had us going through here.  And since I've never driven through (or even been in) this part of the state, I didn't know where else I could turn.  The saving grace, I guess, was the GPS, which, along with generally knowing where west and south were, allowed us to take side streets down beautiful Minnesota farmland and finally connect to a part of 169 that was still open.  Probably set us back a couple hours, though.
• After escaping Mankato, and with the exception of one brief shower, the rain stopped and at some point during our drive out of Minnesota the sun came out.
• I heard people say that Big Sky country/the Great Plains/the part of America that's least populated is flat, and I can tell you that South Dakota certainly is.  We were flying through the land, which basically is a lot of short, light green grass, at lightning speed without worry about either hills or curves.
• Not to say that South Dakota is ugly.  I'll just tip you guys off that the next part of our trip, the states surrounding Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, were much more bucolic.  But I found the flat land of S.D. to have its own desolate beauty.  You could see this overlooked piece of country for miles on some parts of the drive on 90 West.  Maybe to some it's miles of nuthin'.  But not to me.  When I was a passenger I took several pictures, and I didn't mind the scenery at all.
• Expounding on the fact that we arrived at our Rapid City, S.D. hotel, the Howard Johnson (and it's technically not Howard Johnson's -- no possessive apostrophe "s") just as their Happy Hour was wrapping up, I kind of looked around and there are a few franchises that have something similar, and not in any adjoining restaurant but their own breakfast room (Portland, a couple places in Florida).  If HoJo is the only hotel chain that does this, I might frequent them a little more.
• I may have heard it from people who've seen it before we did, but if I did hear this before, they are right: Mt. Rushmore is a lot smaller than I thought.  There is an overlook, but from there you'll have to crane your head up to see the monument fairly off in the distance.  There is a trail that takes you to what I think is the base of it, but if that's the case, you'd have to look straight up then.  We didn't take the trail; in fact I don't think we spent more than half an hour there.  It's like the time me and my cousins went to the Grand Canyon back in 1994; I doubt we spent more than 20 minutes looking over the gigantic gorge.  I mean, it's not like we could just dive in there and look around.  We took our pics then took off for, uh, Lake Powell, I think.  I think I remember Matt Lauer telling Jay Leno on The Tonight Show a long time ago that a survey showed that a tourist spends an average of only that much at the Grand Canyon.  So maybe I got that 20 minutes from that, and we spent a lot more time there.  In fact I remember that I bought a shirt there.  OK, maybe we stopped by the souvenir shop.  Anyway, the point is we didn't stay there long because even though it's one of the most well-known landmarks of America, there isn't a whole lot you can do besides stare at it.
• After leaving Mt. Rushmore it got be really important to me to make sure I was behind the wheel driving the minivan full of my parents' stuff through at least a portion of every single state we were going to drive through.  And not to sound like a dick, I also wanted Mother and my sister to do the same, to a lesser extent.  To a lesser extent because I know this is one of those weird OCD things only I really cared about.  But I can say with some authority that not only is this family not going to do this particular road trip again, there are parts of this country we went through almost a month ago that we never will set foot on again.