Out West 2014: Wall Drug

Obviously, you've got to stop at Wall Drug.

Well, perhaps if your parents never took YOU out west when you were a kid, you can squeak by with not stopping at Wall Drug, but if your parents took you out west, they obviously took you to Wall Drug and snapped a photo of you on the jackalope, so you've got to stop at Wall Drug with your own kids.

And snap photos of them on the jackalope:

Even the bathroom graffiti is jackalope-themed!

And yourselves, too, of course!

I solicited a kind stranger to take this photo of us. I had to remind her what an eyepiece and lens are after she held my camera out in front of her, then frowned at it and hollered over to me, "It's not showing the picture! Is it on?"

Wall Drug is technically the kind of giant, indoor shopping mall that I abhor (Go ahead, ask me how many souvenirs I bought on this trip!), but fortunately... okay, here's another story--

I sort of remember the layout of the Wall Drug Backyard, where all the cool stuff is, from my childhood (it's one of those random, nearly useless pieces of information that combine with every theme song that I've ever heard to bully out all the important knowledge in my brain), so I direct Matt to park in a nearly vacant parking lot just across the street from the entrance to the backyard, and then I start walking us back there.

But Matt doesn't want to go this way, because he says that the front door is in the other direction and there's no way to get right to the backyard, because they want you to weave your way through all the stuff to buy first, and he doesn't want to have to walk all the way around the building just to have to go in the front door because we're all tired--we've just come from the Badlands, you know.

Now, here's my secret that Matt has never figured out, but I'm telling YOU, because I like you: If you and I are ever on the verge of a disagreement, and then I all of a sudden just cave without a fight and agree to do it your way, you'd better change your tune immediately and do it my way after all, because the only, only time that I will not fight you to the death when I think that I'm right (it's my most adorable personality trait) is when I know for a fact that I won't have to, because I am about to be proven right, and it's even more fun to be proven right when I have not just been spending the past twenty minutes going on like a douchebag about how I'm right. 

So Matt starts to argue that I'm wrong and the door's the other way, and I mildly say, "Okay, we can go your way," and follow him, and like a lamb to the slaughter he leads the way, naively pleased that he's finally won an argument with me this year. In we go through the front door, weave through all the stuff to buy first, and find our way out to the backyard, just to see that at the entrance to the backyard there's an alley, and that alley leads out to the street. You can basically see our car from there. 

Therefore, AS I WAS SAYING, there's fortunately a way to go straight to the backyard so that you don't have to walk through a bunch of stuff for sale.

There are photos to take of the kids with the same stuff that someone took photos of you with when you were a kid:

--and, of course, you've got to have your free ice water--

--but this addition is new to me:

And thank goodness for it! After a long, hot day hiking in the Badlands, and another couple of hours in the car before we reach the touristy hellhole that is Keystone, South Dakota, a refreshing romp in the water is just what we all needed. 

Ooh, and the kids going on and on and on about how much shorter the walk back to the car was than the walk into the Wall Drug Backyard didn't hurt, either (at least to me!).