In Mitchell SD there is an oddity known as the “Corn Palace.” Since we were traveling almost right by it, I wanted to make the small detour to see it. On the Great Plains, cities built grain palaces in the olden days to promote themselves and their products. The original Mitchell palace was a wooden castle structure, but it was rebuilt several times. It has Russian onion domes and Moorish minarets.

It is a somewhat grotesque structure standing in all of its garish ugliness, impossible to ignore. This time the murals made of corn cobs featured pictures of Willie Nelson and Elvis Presley. If that was not bad enough, there was also a street fair going on in front of it. The food items were all related to corn; such as, corn dogs, corn curls, corn tacos, etc.

Now my favorite thing in the entire junk food world is kettle corn. I could not pass by the booth selling it. I bought two medium bags, one for me and one for Mo, while he figured out how to get his oversized camera to work. When I looked around trying to find him, he was buying a large bag of kettle corn and engaging the farmer in a conversation about breeding dogs, which the old man apparently did when not selling popcorn or farming.

We couldn’t find anything else we liked, so we ended up having kettle corn for lunch. And we will probably have it for several days to come since we bought so much.