Pull over? Hail, yes!

We drove from Grand Island, Nebraska, to Kadoka, South Dakota, today, touring a factory, an auto museum, and a petrified wood display; seeing the beautiful Sandhills area of Nebraska; and having a bit of excitement on the road. The factory we visited (for free!) was the Hornaday Ammunition plant in Grand Island. I couldn’t take pictures in the manufacturing area, so the best I can do is to show one of the well-done mounts that have in the lobby and office areas. The plant tour was great – an employee named Michelle took Phillip and me thru the entire process, except for putting the powder in the casings (safety issue, no visitors there). We were amazed at the level of quality control and all the dies and presses used. We saw the lead being melted, then cooled into 165 pound solid tubes of lead called billets. These billets are then pressed into reels of lead wire, which is then cut for each bullet. More machinery cuts the copper jacketing and yet another presses the jacketing and the lead together. There’s a whole lot more to the process, as we saw, and it was an education. Sorry, no free samples of ammunition at the conclusion of the tour.

After the tour, we headed northeast toward the Sandhills area. Our road paralleled a set of tracks and we noticed train after train, over a mile long each, moving or parked on the tracks. All were filled with coal. At first I thought they were delivering coal from Kentucky or West Virginia, until I realized that they were heading southeast as we headed northwest. Fortunately, we were in a location with cell service, so it was time to search for that useless information on the internet. Did you know that the largest coal-producing state is Wyoming? West Virginia and Kentucky are second and third in coal production. I’m not exaggerating when I say we saw 20 miles of coal-containing boxcars heading from Wyoming.

As we proceeded farther into Nebraska, we noticed a very significant cloud bank ahead of us, far in the distance. We hoped our route would take us to the west of what we figured was a significant storm.

Meanwhile, we saw the land change from flat plains full of corn and alfalfa fields into the Sandhills. This area of the Sandhills is basically sand dunes covered with native grass. In the picture, you can see the sand on the side of the hill where the dune and grass dropped away. No corn or alfalfa here, just thousands of acres of these grass-covered hills.

 

I haven’t put a food picture in the blog yet or raved about some special dish we ate. We’ve been eating breakfast at the hotels (nothing special there) and usually Subway for lunch. Today, at lunch, we were not near a Subway, but the gas station in Thedford had a sandwich shop, so we ate there. We buy and eat something there that we had never had before: Larry the Cable Guy’s “Tater Chips.” This is as exotic as it gets in Nebraska!

Now, about those clouds and the title of today’s post. About twenty minutes after lunch, we actually made it to that cloud bank. The rain started, then all the sudden the hail started, hail the size of ping-pong balls pounding the SUV. Fortunately, we were about 200 feet from a field driveway, so Phillip pulled off the road and turned the SUV so the hail was hitting the back window more directly than the front window. After about two or three minutes, the hail changed to pea-sized, then it stopped and we just got rain. No windows were broken but it was a scary few minutes. We do have multiple dents in the SUV now on the hood and roof. Our baby has even more character than before and now has its own war story.

We stopped at a small casino just over the South Dakota state line, but didn’t stay long.

Combined, this stop cost us less than $2 in gambling losses. Our next stop was at the Pioneer Auto Show, actually forty building full of old cars, some in prime condition, others not so polished. An original Dukes of Hazard car and Elvis Presley’s motorcycle were the headline attractions. We spent a few hours here, as we walked thru every building (all forty of them!) and display area. Not every building or exhibit was car-related.

Some of the forty buildings were just sheds and others were metal buildings like our workshop. Probably half the buildings contained the car collection, the remaining buildings held all manner of stuff. Eclectic describes the entire collection of the Pioneer Auto Show.  They had an exhibit of metal lunch boxes. I liked the Mork and Mindy one. I say “exhibit” and “display,” but this was much more casual than the museum in Hastings where we saw the Koolaid exhibit.

After the Pioneer Auto Show, we got onto I-90 and had more

traffic and road construction in the next 40 miles than we has had in the previous 900 miles on state highways. We stopped here in Kadoka for the Badlands Petrified Wood Gardens, a fairly small outdoor and indoor display, but with great explanations of the petrified wood found in the nearby Badlands area. Petrified wood is created when wood becomes waterlogged and is covered with layers of sand and silt. As the molecules of wood decayed, they were replaced with molecules of silica and other substances. The trees basically became rocks.

 

The Petrified Garden also had  local dinosaur fossils and an inexpensive gift shop. After the Petrified stop, we found a hotel in Kadoka. Actually, it is the hotel in Kadoka. All the other lodging options are motels, so we’re glad to get our room here. Tomorrow: the Badlands