Our Home: Sioux Falls, SD

We left Mitchell yesterday, Monday, morning about ten and arrived at the Tower Campground, Sioux Falls, SD about 11:30 after a very uneventful drive. Tower Campground is divided into three separate areas, mobile home park, efficiency apartments and RV park. The RV park has an older section for mostly extended stay campers and the other is an area, I believe, was part of the mobile home park and is now being made into campsites. We were given a large site, next to the manager’s motorhome. We are here to establish South Dakota residency.

Our quest began Monday afternoon with a visit to Alternative Resources, our mail forwarding agent, to pick up our mail and begin the process of establishing our residency. Alternative Resources offers a service of handling the paperwork to get our vehicle license plates and titles, I immediately accepted that offer, even though they charge for it I didn’t want to deal with the beauracy that I envisioned. Anyway, we filled out all the paperwork and left with a cost for the transaction and instructions to bring our new driver’s licenses to the office so they could make a copy. So today we went to the DMV at 8:30, we were given an application to fill out and had a seat. About 30 minutes later Sarah was called and I followed a few minutes later. The agent, Jim, began to enter my information into the computer, took my picture, my money, I took the eye test and Jim crossed all the t’s and dotted the eyes. He couldn’t get the system to take my information. So he asked me to have a seat and I did. A while later he called me up to the counter and gave me my license. He said he had to call Pierre and they had to enter me as a regular license, the CDL information and it finally took. So we are now South Dakota residents.

The rest of today was spent downtown doing some touristy things. We stopped at the USS South Dakota Battleship Memorial. Now I wanted to see this because I saw the Big Sioux river and there was no way the navy could float a battleship up it to Sioux Falls. It turns out to be a very nice memorial, it is an outline of the ship with some of the original pieces off the ship.

They have made an outline of the ship with a cement wall and put some guns etc. in the same place they would be on the original ship. This boat was a lot larger that the USS Texas we saw in Houston. The information building wasn’t open, I wish it had been it would have been very interesting. Here is some very good material on the battleship; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_South_Dakota_(BB-57).

From the battleship memorial we headed for Falls Park. I wanted to see the falls that gave Sioux Falls it’s name, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sioux_Falls,_South_Dakota.

This is a very nice town, Falls Park is great. Here are some pictures, In 1881 prisoners from the local state prison were quarrying rock from the area of the Big Sioux river and hauled it up the hill to the prison. The rock was used to build the prison walls and the warden’s home. You can still see the prison on the hill from the park. I was told the one of the original buildings is still there and is an information center.