There it is.Wall Drug is difficult to describe. Signs appear for fifty miles beforehand—and a few scattered ones in the empty parts of Wyoming and Montana—advertising free ice water! Fudge! Five cent coffee! Tyrannosaurus Rex! Free coffee for Vietnam vets! Homemade pie! Yes, Wall Drug has every good thing in the entire world.
When you get there, Wall Drug turns out to be a kind of weird tourist trap. But not just any tourist trap! It's a tourist trap so large, so weird and entertaining, that an entire town of other, smaller tourist traps has sprung up around it. It's like a drug store, a museum, a gift shop and a playground all rolled into one place. Ashley and I wandered its halls, sampling the five cent coffee (surprisingly drinkable), eating the fresh-baked doughnuts (delicious), looking at the hundreds of 19th century photographs of South Dakota and the American West, examining the huge concrete jackalope and the stuffed buffalo, and feeding money into the mechanical band (those robots do a mean version of “Bad Moon Rising”).
It's one of the few roadside attractions I don't feel gypped spending time at, because there's so much, and it's all interesting. There's even an entire room dedicated to photographs and newspaper clippings of Ted Hustead and his family, who have run Wall Drug since the early 1930s, and are basically the reason anybody stops in the tiny town of Wall, SD.
It's way too much to take in, and we would have loved to spend another few hours there, but we had a cat overheating in the car, so we had to leave. On the way out, however, we stopped at a gas station— overrun with bikers, just like everything else—and purchased a Sturgis 2009 Rally souvenir beer, which I plan to try out in a live video on this blog. Technology allows us to do such useful things, doesn't it? I could go on for so much longer about how amazing Wall Drug is, but instead I'll shut up and leave you with some pictures.
Harleys everywhere
Jackalopes
More Jackalope.
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