My gosh, we’re in OshKosh

Today started out a little earlier than normal (1:00 A.M.) with a knock on our door. Groggy and still half asleep I looked out our bedroom window to see the flashing lights on a mall security car. We had stopped in Rapid City, SD for the night and pulled to the backside of a mall parking lot. I went to the door and the security guard politely told me that they didn’t allow overnight parking in the mall parking lot but told me that if I moved to a vacant lot over there (just a few thousand feet down the road), that we’d be fine. So pack up the dogs, pull in the one slide (we’ve found that putting out the kitchen slide makes for more room for the dogs to stretch out each night) and down the road we went to set up again. Back to bed to resume sleep..
We had been pondering the cost of land, per acre, out here and I think that we just got our answer. We just drove through a small town on 26 south in the southern part of Nebraska and there was a sign in the front yard of a house…For Sale..Must Sell $14,000…Wow !
This afternoon we went to Hot Springs, SD to see the Mammoth site. In 1974, while a contractor was using earth moving equipment, he unearthed a mammoth tusk. As it turned out this archeological site has the largest number of Columbian mammoths in North America. Columbian mammoths are much larger than wooly mammoths and so far they have unearthed 55 Columbian mammoths and 3 wooly mammoths in the site. They figured that the sinkhole that had swallowed up the mammoths 26,000 years ago was 65 feet deep so they built a building around the excavation site and you are able to walk amongst the active dig site. They even have a program for youth and senior citizens (elder hostel) where you can come in for 6 weeks and after proper training, you would be part of the dig team. How neat would that be ! Overall is was a fascinating thing to see. This is not part of a state or federal program but is a non-profit organization. The gentle man who owned the land, originally intended to be a housing development, understood the value of such a unique find and sold the land for what he paid for it to the local community. If you ever get to the southern part of South Dakota, be sure to stop and see the mammoths.
We left South Dakota and began the long journey across the plains to Nebraska. We will stop for the night in Ogallala, NE.