I have driven through much of the state of South Dakota over the decades going both east-west and north-south. This trip had only one goal -- wrap up a loose end by visiting the Minute Man Missle National Park site east of Wall SD.

In 2017 I changed my travel plans a bit to hustle to the MMM visitor center. It is barely in the mountain time zone and I (incorrectly) assumed that it would be open until 5:00 pm, like most national park visitor centers are. However, this place always closes one hour earlier than whatever other national park visitor centers close at (as I learned on this trip). So this time I made sure I was there in plenty of time.

When I got up that morning, knowing I had already taken care of visiting both the Scotts Bluff and Fort Laramie national park sites, I had only Agate Fossil Bed and the MMM national parks for the day. Then I realized that, although the visitor center at Agate opened at 9:00 pm, there really was little to see in the park -- a bunch of small mountains where someone long ago found some dinosaur fossils. So I arrived at the park around 7:30 am after a wonderful drive along the highway that I had all to myself -- only two vehicles seen, and they both were headed the other way. In fact, I had to drive for over three hours before I ever encountered another vehicle going my way. I did note along the route how poor looking the farms seemed -- barely kept up. And grazing cows were everywhere!

Once I got to Agate, I had the park all to myself too. Looked around the park, took some photos, then headed to South Dakota and the MMM -- I was NOT going to be late there this time.

While I unexpectedly found that South Dakota's highway 79 leading from northwestern Nebrasksa was a very nice four-lane highway, it had construction that narrowed it down to two lanes -- for seven miles. And this was the shortest one for the day as I would later find out. I did get to the Minute Man Missle national park visitor center in plenty of time.

Since it was about 12:30 pm mountain time (1:30 pm central time) when I left MMM, I decided that instead of spending the night in South Dalota that I would take a page from the "travel book" of a friend and drive into the night all the way home which was 650 miles away. And, along the way, while in Iowa (along I-29) I saw yet another rainbow -- my third one in two days! However, I also encountered two more construction zones in South Dakota where the interstate was down to one lane each way. The two places totalled an additional 32 miles of one-lane driving. After enjoying 80 MPH speed limits for hours, it is tough to be in these time-killer situations. I calculated I lose about 15 seconds of driving time for each mile of one-lane driving.

On my way home in early September I purposely drove the northeastern quardrant of the state because I had never been through it before. Just north of Gettysburg SD the terrain is mostly farmland with some rolling grass-covered large hills. Along the route I was surprised to note that so many little towns have an airport.