Day 3, Rapid City, South Dakota (Written by David Takeuchi): Where am I? For a few seconds, I lost my sense of time and place. I sit at a bar with 30 some odd seats and no one is around me. Loud chatter comes from the main dining room, but I am alone at the bar. When I walked in the waitress and the bartender kept looking at me – actually looking at my shirt. Could it be they have not seen someone who looks like me? Is it the reason why no one is sitting near me at the bar? Before I can get indignant, I recall what Amy told me a few minutes before I ventured to get dinner. Just remember, she said, you are wearing a t-shirt with the saying, “No Worry Beef Curry.” What does no worries mean outside of Hawaii? My indignation calms. I am sipping a beer, waiting for my food order. I looked at my phone for email messages and I looked up and see my reflection in the bar mirror. Where am I? I am in Sanfords Pub and Grill in Rapid City, South Dakota. I am here not because Sanfords has any Michelin ratings but it is a very quick drive from HoJos where we are staying for the night. Rapid City has statues of all the US presidents on different street corners in the city. Amy and I went to a park close to the hotel and the park had a Berlin Wall Memorial. Out of nowhere come these fascinating insights about a different geographic space. It’s another reminder about how preconceived ideas about places sometimes prevent us from seeing the underlying nature of places. On our ride into Rapid City, we saw Crazy Mountain, a roughly 30 miles stretch of the Rocky Mountains in Montana. It’s also called the Crazies and there is some disagreement over the origins of the names. It is probably more likely that the name came about due to a translation error where the Crow saw the mountains as a source of spirituality describing it as a source of vision. The settlers are likely to have interpreted the description of visions as “crazy.” Once you see the stretch and beauty of the mountains, you absorb their spiritual nature even if the car is racing at 75 miles an hour. We also drove past Little Big Horn, and through Custer National Park, the Crow Nation, and the Cheyenne Nation. This is our fifth extended drive across the US geography. Our first trip was with our niece, Cheryl, going from Los Angeles to New Haven. Cheryl was sixteen at the time and it was a wonderful learning experience for us on how not to do a road trip. I remember letting Cheryl take a swim in the swimming pool in the middle of a thunderstorm. We were fortunate the lightning stayed away from the pool. Otherwise, we would have one less niece. The second trip was back to from Connecticut to Los Angeles where we rented a large Ryder van and towed our car. It was our most stressful cross country trip to date. The third and fourth trips involved moving from Los Angeles to Bloomington Indiana driving with our first dog, Bizzy, and our two cats, Madison and Maya. The fourth trip was a move from Bloomington to Seattle. Tomorrow is one of our longest drives – 7 hours to Albert Lea, MN.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 10:31:46 +0000
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