Day 9

This lovely Sunday morning, we woke up amidst painted palm trees and orange wallpaper. The motel's wireless network was nowhere to be found, though, so we took off in search of it. We landed in a log cabin-style local coffee shop about an hour west and spent a good part of our morning there before turning to the local Walmart to purchase a tent that 1) definitely had all of its pieces, and 2) would come with instructions for how to set it up.

Once in Walmart, I could see that this was not a force with which Andrew often reckoned. Before crossing through the sliding doors, he said:

"10 minutes, tops. 5 to find the tent, 5 to pay and get out, ok?"

But faced with aisles of seemingly useful and cheap items, the story changed a little. Still, we reemerged about 25 minutes later with nothing more that a glorious $30 tent and 2 bags of croutons.

We polished off an entire bag of these organic croutons on our way to our major destination for the day: the actual crash site of the plane that shortly transported The Big Bopper, Richie Vallens, and Buddy Holly. The plane went down in the middle of an Iowa corn field, and a fan erected a small memorial a half mile from the road.

The walk in was hot and crowded with insects, but when we made it to the memorial, we were speechless. Part of our morning consisted of reading articles about their deaths, and even Buddy Holly's coroner report. It was a gruesome death. Although we were alone at the memorial, we could see that it had been visited by many people - what began as a couple of platinum records and a sign had become a shrine complete with guitar picks, jewelry, Polaroid pictures, and even a small guitar. Andrew pulled his favorite picks out of his wallet and we placed them in the soil before turning back to the car. Along the way, we encountered nearly 10 visitors hiking through the field towards the memorial, and commented on how happy we were that our journey had been private.

We got back into Goldie and made it into Sioux Falls, South Dakota before dark. We were shocked to see interesting architecture, big parks, an outdoor, free viewing of "How to Eat Fried Worms," and clubs with open doors and lrock music pouring out. "What a great place!" we said to ourselves.

Then we learned we happened to show up the same weekend as over 5000 missionary women from all over the world, and the only hotel room available in this bustling city was a $100 jacuzzi suite. We didn't have any other choice, so we decided to enjoy it with Chinese take-out and champagne.

- Emily