Here we are in Mitchell at the Corn Palace-- THE ONLY CORN PALACE IN THE WORLD.  The top photo shows some workers nailing some corn onto the building, and down below Jean and Saara are holding a bundle of dried grass ready to be stapled to the wall.  If you like corn it's a hell of an attraction.  After Mitchell, on to Yankton.  We drove through beautiful countryside, flat and filled with crops.  Nana said, "I love all the nothingness!"

OK, now the rest of this day is about Chris and his younger years in Yankton.  Nana and he cooked up this trip because they were both from South Dakota.  So now we are going around looking at things and places that are important to Chris.  I thought Nana would want to rest, but she said, "No he had to take me around to all my cities and houses, now I want to see where he came from."  Here he is in Yankton next to his great grandfather's gravestone: Joseph Ward is one of the founders of the state of South Dakota.  Nearby are the graves of Chris' father and grandfather.

The boys: Guy, Bob and Chris.  They went to grade school, middle school and a bit of high school until Chris moved away.  They're his oldest friends.  Guy and Chris are in full geezer attire; Bob's in work clothes-- he's a stockbroker.  He's also a long-term survivor of pancreatic cancer-- his case is so rare that he's literally one in a million.  Living in Yankton all their lives, Guy and Bob know everything that's happened in this small town for the last 50 years.  It's fun to hear their stories and giggle about the old days.  After visiting with Bob, Chris and Guy went to the Ice House, America's only drive-in bar.  They pulled up and rolled down their windows and ordered some beers from the waitress, drank them in their car and drove away.  All perfectly legal, by ordinance-- as long as the bar is owned by the Einar Anderson family, it's legal.  Don't you wish every community had a drive-in bar?

Couldn't resist this one.  Guy made this happen, he wanted to humiliate his friend, and he did.  Wednesday is Chris' birthday, so we have started to celebrate early.  (Note from Chris: that hat was really heavy.)