“Now that we’re in South Dakota we ought to stop in Mitchell and see the Corn Palace,” I said as we drove along in our Volkswagen minibus en route home from a month’s tour of the western parks of the USA. The minibus was loaded with camp gear that left just enough room for four children big enough to do most of the camp work, and their mother.

“Sounds good to me,” said Mary, the mother, “I’ve heard of it.”

The Corn Palace is a building big enough to be a theater. Each year a crew constructs a mural on the side of the building made entirely of corn ears. Corn comes in such a wide variety of colors that the artist has little restriction in his palate. We parked nearby to gaze at the picture on the wall. It depicted a farmer at work harvesting grain in a vast field with hills in the background. We were amazed at the detail included in the picture. We looked at it for a long time, it seemed.

Right behind us, while viewing the scene, I noticed a Volkswagen dealership. I was glad to go in and buy a key for my gas tank door. I frequently lost one to a service station attendant who forgot to return it after putting in gas. 

We found a grocery store, replenished our larder and moved on. About ten miles down the road the engine began to labor so that our top speed was about forty miles per hour. There was nothing to do but to turn around and head back to town. Luckily, I knew where the Volkswagen dealer hung out.

“We’ll have to put in new valves and valve seats,” said the garage man (where had I heard that before?), “We can have it ready for you at about eleven o’clock tomorrow.” 

“Great,” I said, “But where do we stay in the meantime?”

“There’s a nice little park where you can camp just out of town. We’ll take out the engine and tow you out there,” the man said.   “We can have it ready by eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.” 

Without our engine we were towed to a very nice campsite. There we were. We were not going anywhere. So the thing to do was to take advantage of the park’s amenities and relax.

We had visited the Rocky Mountain National Park, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the Grand Canyon, and points in between. We had seen the giant monolithic rocks of Zion National Park, the army of red statues silently standing in Brice Canyon National Park and the Alpine-like Grand Tetons. In Yellowstone National Park we had seen geysers, mud pots, hot springs and my all time favorite waterfall, the lower falls of the Yellowstone, where the river drops as a clean white ribbon into the golden gorge it has cut for itself. It was once the poster boy for the Union Pacific Railroad.

Despite a leisurely pace, visiting these places and a few others had generated some amount of fatigue in all of us. I had arranged our travel so that we arrived at a campground early on each Friday to get a good site ahead of the weekend crowd. On Saturday we did not travel, but instead found the local laundry and a grocery store and just relaxed and cleaned up. We usually traveled again on Sunday.

We prepared our camp for the night. We explored the park’s amenities and played around. We had a leisurely supper and played around some more. When the tow truck arrived a bit before eleven we were packed and ready to go. A half hour’s work at the garage was all it took before we were ready to resume our journey. As we left Mitchell we all agreed that the folks there had made our stay the most memorable and the most pleasant of our campouts. Our stay turned out to be a welcome respite from our travels.