sad day

 9-4-2021 Saturday

We are both saddened to announce the passing of our dear friend, David Johnson, this afternoon.  He lost his battle to cancer today, and will sorely missed by his wife and all his friends.  Rest in Peace, Dave,  we shared many good times together.

We will be heading back to Arizona tomorrow to help Mazie with the details of Dave's death, so this was our last day in Pierre, and in South Dakota.  We are about 1350 miles away so we have some hard driving days ahead of us.  But we have had some good rest here.  We explored more of the countryside today, beginning with driving the other campground right here.  And we found some deer.  We think it is a momma and 2 fawns, you can still see the spots on two of them.

We took the road down to the river and spotted some kind of "bird house or nest" out in this swampy field.  We assume it is something for an endangered specie of bird but didn't find any information.  There were 5 or 6 of these in this field.  It is not attached to the branch in the side of the picture.

Then we headed into town, back to the Capitol area to find the Fighting Stallions monument, which is on the grounds there.

"Fighting Stallions Memorial was constructed by the people of South Dakota as a lasting memorial to eight South Dakotans who perished in an airplane crash on April 19, 1993. The state plane, N86SD, crashed due to propeller assembly failure in poor weather on a farm near Dubuque, Iowa."  "Four state employees, the Governor, and three Sioux Falls corporate leaders were on an economic development mission to save the largest agricultural processing employer in South Dakota."

I had to keep Joe from going the wrong way again in front of the Capitol, but we did finally get a picture from the front.

Then we went out of town to the Oahe Dam.  This is quite an impressive dam, built by the Corp of Engineers, of course.  When Joe saw this sign, he said the castle on it was the insignia he wore on his uniform in the Army, since he was with the Construction Engineers.  I never knew about the insignia (and I thought we had no secrets!) and really never connected him with the Corp of Engineers.

What really amazed us about this dam was how close we could drive to it.  There were roads on both sides, and boat ramps.

The river is beautiful, water very clear.  And there were several fishing boats making use of it -- the current from the dam made for a pretty fast troll, but they were certainly using it.

We watched this one fisherman actually catch a fish, but it was really small.  It's a small white fish in his hand.  Joe talked to a couple getting ready to walk down the bank to fish, and they said they catch walleye, salmon, paddle fish, and one other kind, but he couldn't remember it.  

As we were leaving, an all-weather boat came racing by, and stopped right in this area.  This is probably the kind to have up here, if you want to fish in cold weather.

We continued on past the dam and came out in Ft. Pierre again, so we explored it a little more.  Then we grabbed some lunch and went back to the RV for a while.  Later, we drove back to Pizza Ranch for dinner, and Joe saw there was an events center next door to the restaurant.  It looked like they had a wedding going on, so we drove over there and saw this beautiful set of horses getting ready to give a carriage ride -- we assume to the bride and groom.  The horses were awesome.

After dinner, we drove out to the Walmart to do a little shopping, then headed back to the campground.  As we turned onto our road, we caught a beautiful sunset -- goodbye South Dakota.

It was a beautiful day here, 70s again, and sunny.  It was a bit chilly when I got up though, 59 degrees -- nice.  We were happy to have the opportunity to explore this part of the country, but are ready to head home.  We hope Arizona is over its 100-degrees by the time we get there.  We are going directly to Sierra Vista to Mazie, and they are usually 10-15 degrees cooler than the Phoenix area, so there is hope.