Hello! This is where the adventure starts. Well, sort of at least. The adventure technically started much earlier, with us laughing about the idea for months until there was a lot less laughing and a lot more "actually, yeah...."-ing. Which brought us to here: Rapid City, South Dakota. Of all places.
More specifically, things started with us dying on the plane. You know, a real Lost or Manifest experience. There was turbulence, we died, and that started everything.
Just kidding (maybe?) anyway, somehow we found ourselves landing in the Rapid City airport. "Port", singular, is a good description. This place is small. And I fly to the middle of nowhere all the time and I thought this place was small. Don't believe me? 100 feet from the terminal we had to stop our rental car for a herd of deer to cross the road. 500 feet beyond that we were surrounded by horses and cows and not a soul in sight.
Luckily Rapid City turned out to be bigger than their airport at least. There was some good coffee, a place called Essence of Coffee welcomed us home and revived us from our plane death (it definitely happened okay). Ah, we'd found civilization, this place is starting to look pretty good and livable.
Which brings me to Day 2. Before I dive in, I need to give you some context about us. We are vanilla people living a vanilla life, vanilla here meaning "plain, without the assistance of hardcore drugs". No weed, no crack, no smoke, no alcohol. The hardest drug we do is decaffeinated coffee. So accidentally doing peyote with a bunch of Native Americans was a huge surprise.
I know what you're thinking: "Peyote?! Y'all need Jesus,"... but he's the one who gave it to us. Okay okay, let me back up. So it was Sunday. We woke up, found a nice church to go to, got there on time and went on in. The priest gave us a kind of funny look, clearly surprised to see some out-of-towners. Everything seemed so normal. I even assured Evan church would be in English so we could easily follow what was going on. Wrong! Everyone stands up and starts speaking a language I've never heard before. Then of all horrors, the entire church turns to the back and faces us! Still chanting. Then left, then right, then I don't even know anymore. It was like a alternate universe electric slide, smoke machine included. We turn again and notice the smoke wafting in waves above the congregation. People are carrying it around, blowing it into people's faces. This doesn't smell like any incense I know, and is definitely not the standard church incense. As the source gets closer, I see that it's almost like a ball of dried leaves burning inside an upside-down tortoise shell, being fanned with a giant eagle's feather. I don't know about you, but the only thing I know of that comes burning in a tortoise shell and wafted with an eagle's feather is: peyote. Which is the point when I notice that almost every single person present is a Native American. I dug around and found that we were in a Lakota church, where they blended Christian and Lakota ceremonies and said prayers in Lakota. We'd stumbled into the one place in South Dakota where it's legal to get high. *cue slow applause*
We chilled in Rapid City a few days, letting the peyote run its course exploring our new home state. Then came DMV Day. Woke up early, like 6am early which is truly a feat for us.Went to the DMV... and came out with a South Dakota drivers license. It's official, we did the crazy plan and it worked! We are now residents of South Dakota, home sweet home! Next was to convert my car, MeShip, to join us on this crazy venture. To make that official we drove hours to Deadwood and got new license plates. And you know what? Deadwood kinda sucked. I'm glad we're not from there. If you like gambling and day drinking, great place. 10/10, you should definitely go there, and I'll go somewhere else. The Black Hills were very cool though, dark forest and mysterious. And with that, we were all official!
So anyway, why South Dakota? I'm sure you want to know how on Earth that got on our radar. It's simple: Mount Rushmore. They are very very proud of Mount Rushmore, and so are we. Drove to go see it. It's bigger than you expect, then much smaller than you expect, then bigger again, then smaller again. Thanks movies, for messing up my expectations. Anyway, cool faces! And now that's on our licenses and car plates, awww yeah. True South Dakotan.
Oh yeah, and we saw Big Foot. Looked pretty chill, must have also found the peyote.
Places of note:
Essence of Coffee - great place all around, plus the Mediterranean Scramble changed my life
Colonial House Restaurant and Bar - good for breakfast, went here after we became official :)
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