Our South Dakota Neighbor

After months of neglect, I thought I would share more of our adventurous trip to and from Omaha, NE. Let me say one thing, when you're driving on I-90 and pass Wall Drug and the hundred plus miles of unique signs posted every other mile in South Dakota, there isn't anything else to see. Period! South Dakota was one of the long parts of our trip, so we decided to make the most of the monotony by meeting new people. Ok, so it wasn't planned at all, but it's something that we will never forget.

When you drive through South Dakota and see a place to stop to pee, you jump on it (ok, not literally). Gas stations happen about every hundred miles or so and bathrooms less often, so we were approaching a rest stop and going to take advantage of indoor and heated bathrooms. When we parked, it was my job to open the back of our wagon and get everybody's coat and put them on as people exited the vehicle and then close the back and run to the bathroom. When we were all done, I took the coats as people peeled them off and jumped back into the wagon, and then I opened the back of the wagon and put the coats in and jumped back into the car. I then backed the wagon out of our spot and started driving away. Did I forget something? Yep!

About 200 yards from our spot, a man started jumping up and down trying to get our attention, so we stopped. "Um, hello," I said, and he replied, "Hey partner, I think you forgot something back there." So I looked back to where we were parked and said, "Hey! The back's open." "There you go partner," he replied. I thanked him for getting our attention and picked up some stuffed that had fallen out when we stopped and closed the back. I looked back to our spot and found a cowboy waving something of ours and trying to get our attention.

I climbed backed in the wagon, put my head down, took a deep breath, and looked in the rearview mirror and started backing up. Allison didn't see the cowboy, so I had to explain why we were backing up more than 200 yards, and then we all started giggling. When we reached the cowboy, Allison rolled down her window, and this is what happened:

"Howdy! You know, I've had bad days before, just like my Washington neighbors have." At this point, Allison and I both thought the cowboy was going to tell us a story about his neighbors that used to live in or now live in or part of the year live in Washington, but no, the cowboy was talking about us. Allison and I just looked at him, waiting for the rest of the story, but there was no story coming. So, we just stared at each other, waiting for the other to start talking. Then he tried to make us feel better by saying, "Hope this will make you laugh later on, my Washington neighbors." Then he lifted the lost item - a flattening iron.

We thanked our South Dakota neighbor for returning our flattening iron, bid him a good day, and drove away. Then we all started laughing! Really, really hard! We were laughing so hard that I had to pull the car over to the side of the road. When our laughing subsided enough to drive again, we realized we were still at the rest stop, only about another 50 yards past where we first stopped to close the back of the wagon. So we started laughing again, but I drove through tear blurred eyes this time just so we could leave the rest stop. The rest of the day, we made jokes about what the heck that cowboy thought the flattening iron must have been from a portable iron for jeans to a travel grilled cheese sandwich maker. It was one of the best days of travel we had, and we still laugh and joke about it.