South Dakota or Bust!

Break Away From The Ordinary

Archive for 2010/04


South Dakota Bumper Stickers

Jim Reese is a poet and prof at Mount Marty College in Yankton. His latest book, Ghost on Third, includes a poem titled “South Dakota Bumper Stickers.” Yes, even I could have written this one … and I wish I had. It’s simply a collection of sayings he’s seen on cars. Here are a few [...]

Dinner With The Rat Pack

From our March/April 2010 Traveler:
Visit The Beanery during lunch and you’ll find a simple deli downtown Rapid City. Go on Friday or Saturday night and you’ll find yourself in the 1940s.
The Beanery transforms for its weekly 2nd and Main Dinner Show featuring music by the Potter family. Matriarch Clover Potter (a one-time Las [...]

History Conference to Explore Politics

The South Dakota State History Conference is less than a month away, and the agenda arrived in today’s mailbox. This year’s event (April 29-May 1) will focus on “Prairie Politics … From Territory to Today.”
The annual conference, hosted by the State Historical Society, is a too-well-kept secret. I’m as guilty as most of you for [...]

Bikes for the Rez

One sure sign of spring is when piles of tree branches, old furniture, and other used household items begin piling up in the front yards of Yankton’s residents for city wide cleanup.  Think twice before you banish battered bicycles to the curb during spring cleaning.
In the Dakotiana section of our March/April issue, we wrote about [...]

A Taste of Al’s

Wish you could make that famous lemon cream cheese pie from Al’s Oasis in Oacoma? You’re not alone, and the crew at Al’s is happy to help. Customer demand for the popular recipe became so great, they began handing it out at the cash register. All you have to do is ask.
Al’s home-baked pies [...]

A Successful Main Street Coffee Shop

Yankton has always struggled to support a downtown coffee shop. So have many towns, larger and smaller, in our state. Too many of us just figure that coffee should be free — or five cents at best.
But coffee shops certainly add much to a business/retail street, and while spending the last few weeks in Pierre [...]

Let There Be Less Light

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch [...]

Kayak the Mighty Mo

By John Andrews

Our upcoming issue (May/June) will feature our third special 25th anniversary story on 25 things everyone should do in South Dakota. One of our ideas is to canoe the last wild stretch of the Missouri River from Yankton to Ponca, Neb. The rest of the river is all channels and reservoirs, but that [...]