A Pleasant Time in Sioux Falls

We have spent a whole week seeing the sights of Sioux Falls, beginning with the river and waterfalls that give the town its name.

           

We have also wandered around downtown and tried a couple of local restaurants, including Bob’s BBQ which was a really good little hole in the wall.

 

Normally, our mail is collected here and forwarded to us twice per month, but this week we picked it up in person at Dakota Post’s new offices.

We have also seen a number of current movies, one in a sit-down theater (Beauty and the Beast) and two others on our home theater (Sully and La La Land).

It was a relaxing week there and now the relaxation continues as we move east.  We have plenty of time to take state highways slow and easy.  We are now in Iowa’s “Great Lakes” area, a major tourist area in the summer near Spirit Lake and Lake Okoboji.  It is not crowded at this time of year, but we can see how it will be busy later.  We took a ride around the lake and saw some huge, beautiful homes.  It was a real surprise to see how popular this area is.

We are heading slowly toward the Winnebago plant in Forest City IA for a quick fix or two next week.  When done there, we will continue north to see the kids and grandkids in the Minneapolis area for a few days, and try to get to Joyce’s place in Duluth before the opening of fishing season on May 13.

The local weather forecasts are now including some frost warnings.  Are we coming north too soon?

In Sioux Falls for Awhile

After a week volunteering at Oak Park Retreat Center we continued our trip north, following the pollen and dandelions as spring led the way.  From Perkins, Oklahoma to Bob’s sister’s farm in southern Nebraska, it is an easy 2-day drive.  Friday, the 14^th, we had a very strong tailwind that blew us north into Kansas.  We stopped for the night at a Corps of Engineers park on the Marion Reservoir near Marion, Kansas.  The only problem is that the wind didn’t stop, but kept on blowing at 30 to 40 mph all night long; so intense that we kept our living room slides in all night.

Saturday the wind was not as strong, but continued from the south and helped us roll into Nebraska.  When we stopped here last year the weather was very stormy, but this year was quite nice.  We attended Easter services with Bill and Mary and had Sunday dinner with them as well. 

After a pleasant Monday of laundry and shopping with Mary, we hit the road again, this time to Sioux Falls.  This city is officially our legal home, so we plan to spend some time here and get to know it better.

Art Deco

Our wandering around northern Oklahoma brought us to Tulsa where the tourism brochure suggested seeing a church on South Boston Avenue near downtown.  The Methodist church here was built in 1929 in the Art Deco style and is quite unique.  So much so that has also been designated to be a National Historic Landmark.

Some details can be found at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Avenue_Methodist_Church

We found it on Saturday and chose to attend services there on Sunday.  It is quite a building, but a choir of about 50 youth was even more impressive.

          

Now, after a whole week off, we found the possibility of boredom setting in, so we have gone back to work.  The Oak Park Retreat center in Perkins Oklahoma had been slowly going to pieces for many years, until a new owner (a local Methodist Church) bought it about this time last year.  They had a group of Nomads work here last fall, and some of them told us that Oak Park will have lots of work available for quite some time.  We contacted the minister and asked if they could use some help for 4 days this week.  He was very excited to have the offer of help.  We are doing our first “Drop In” project here this week. 

We met with Larry, who is our contact at the retreat center, on Sunday.  He asked us to unpack 250 new folding chairs and paint some of the rooms at the center during our 4 days here.  Their rooms look a lot like hotel rooms with a bedroom and bathroom/shower.  We’ve been able to do one room & bath per day with a goal of getting 4 rooms done. 

They are very grateful and we’re so grateful we can help out.  Pastor Max had us over for dinner on Monday night and then took us out for lunch on Wednesday.  We’ll be able to attend his church for Maunday Thursday services which we’re looking forward to.

Getting our Kicks on Route 66

We are taking that time off mentioned a couple of days ago, just not where we had in mind.  The first Corps of Engineers campground that we had planned didn’t work out.  It was too remote and provided neither TV nor cell phone/internet service so we didn’t check in.  Instead we took a round-about route to stop for 3 nights in Eufaula.  Tuesday we moved again, a little farther north, to Big Cabin which is a small town near what was Route 66.

Although old US Route 66 went from Chicago to Los Angeles, it seems that Arizona and Oklahoma do the most for tourists to help remember it.  We have toured parts of it in California, Arizona and New Mexico in the past.  Today we went to Miami Oklahoma, in the very corner of the state, to see Waylan’s Ku-Ku Burger shop.

This was part of a fast-food chain in the 1960’s and is still operating today.  While in town we also spent some time at a couple of other tourist places: the Coleman Theater and the Vintage Iron Motorcycle Museum.

On our way back to Big Cabin we also saw the restored 1930’s vintage DX service station in Afton.

Later this week we will see a few other tourist attractions near here before doing some shopping in Tulsa. 

In the meantime we are now watching CBS for the FIRST time all year!  We have been in a number of small towns in both Texas and Oklahoma where there were either NO or very limited TV signals.