This morning, things were not looking so good:  pouring rain.  Which was kind of good since, for the second night in a row, I had to finish the blog in the morning because I couldn’t keep my eyes open the night before.  And I couldn’t find the energy last night to get the Flickr photos up.  I was absolutely dead tired.  So, after doing all that, it was 10 am and the rain was still coming down.  I considered giving up and going back to bed around.  I checked ol’ reliable (not) weather.com for the forecast.  And the forecast for Sisseton — 2 1/2 hours to the north where I was heading today.  While weather.com is pretty inaccurate with forecasting, at least they’re better with announcing the present conditions (though even that they screw up sometimes).  I’ve tried other weather websites and they’re no better.  When I saw all sun up in Sisseton, I fired up Sparkle and off we went.  Sure enough — loads of sun.  And by the time we got back to Sioux Falls, it was sunny there, too.  Well done!  So, a travel tip for when you encounter crappy weather:  find out where the sun is and skedaddle to there.

Hello, Sisseton!

 

 

This will be a shorter than usual post since I spent about half the day on the interstate or nothing-to-look-at highways.  But actually, the clouds were stupendous all day.  Just amazing.  But I won’t bore you with photos of those.

Back in Sioux Falls:

 

 

I’m guessing that the El Riad Shrine (Shriners Temple) in Sioux Falls was built in the 1930s or so.  Really hard to tell and I’m finding nothing about the building’s history on-line.  Probably a lot of remodeling.  The neon signs are probably modern but still great.  I hated the modern carnival-esque entrance marquee at first.  But now it’s beginning to grow on me:

 

 

From Brandon.  Trees in the way forced this angle — but maybe better than straight on anyway:

 

Moving on to Iowa for a little bit.  This Rexall drug store in Rock Rapids appears to still be in business.  I couldn’t tell if there was a lunch counter — the place was closed when I arrived.  This store probably also had a hanging neon Rexall sign originally.  If you’re into Rexall signs, I’ve got a mini section over at my website:
http://www.agilitynut.com/signs/rex.html

 

 

Last one for the night — ran out of daylight here.  I’ll be reshooting this one in the morning for the website.  But you don’t mind a bit of washed out color, right?  From Spirit Lake, IA.   A nice bit of historical info about the place here:
http://www.vickscorner.com/history.htm

 

 

Tomorrow, I’ll finish up a very short Iowa list and then be on to Minnesota.  Most of it small towns on the southern edge of the state.  A few Minneapolis/St. Paul stops — but not many.   I did a fairly thorough job of all that last year.  In bed at midnight for the first time in weeks!

Since this is a shortie post tonight, it’s a good time to mention to late-arrivers that there’s a whole ‘nother parallel universe taking place over at Flickr.  Yep, I post different photos here and there every night on these trips.  Here’s what you might be missing:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/agilitynut/