Reading Lolita in Iowa

Clear Lake to Ellendale, ND (10/14):

A huge day of driving awaited us today after waking up to a slushy and rainy morning, though the driving was broken up by listening to an audiobook of Lolita read by Jeremy Irons, who happily sounds a bit like Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons. In South Dakota, we took a great detour to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. This city has built a civic center with giant domes, decorated it with murals fashioned out of corn, and then put billboards up all over the highway letting people know of this feat. You have to respect a small town for coming up with creative ways to drum up tourism. We planned many more hours of driving post-Corn Palace, but after a couple hours the persistent rain turned into a light snow which then turned into scary snow in the early evening. As southerners who’ve lived car-less for the last 5 years, we don’t have much snow-driving experience and after I freaked out about the slushing and skidding, we stopped at the first opportunity, which was Ellendale, North Dakota. Our motel is connected to a restaurant/bar, so we had a few enjoyable beers with other motel patrons, mostly hunters from Minnesota, who didn’t entirely understand why we would be in North Dakota if we didn’t hunt.
-M