The day started out with a 1 ½ hour visit to the local GM
dealer. They cleared the error code on the truck (for the third time) but
couldn’t find anything wrong with it. They test drove it hard trying to
make it come on again but it wouldn’t. After all that effort they didn’t
charge us anything which was very nice of them. When we got back to the
RV and talked to the rep at PPEI again, he said he couldn’t do what he’d
recommended yesterday because the problem causing the check-engine light to
come on may be intermittent and he can’t do his part until it’s fixed.
We’re stuck in a catch 22 now. If the light comes on again tomorrow (no
reason to think it won’t after it’s done it for three days) and we take it to
another dealer, we’ll probably be told the same thing as today. We have
no way of knowing if the problem is related to the tuner or not. Rats and
rabbit hutches. (One of my mother’s sayings……takes the place of
unacceptable swearing in print.)
After the dealership visit we went to see Falls Park.
These are the falls for which Sioux Falls is named. They aren’t high but
they stretch out for a good distance.
View from the observation tower deck – the falls on the Big
Sioux River for which the city was named.
One more of the falls for Linda S. The whole area is
beautifully taken care of thanks to a Falls Park restoration project.
The red rocks over which the water flows is Sioux
quartzite. It is extremely dense which makes it highly resistant to
erosion. According to an information plaque in the park it was deposited
over a billion years ago, making it amongst the oldest exposed rock in South
Dakota. It is a commercially valuable rock which was used for building
for many years. It is now used as aggregate in concrete construction.
The rocks are really beautiful. (Everyone knows we
love rocks.)
New and old. New apartments on the edge of Falls Park
with the 100-year-old Catholic Cathedral of St. Joseph behind.
The cathedral is an impressive building. Not as crisp
a picture as I’d like but noon in 94 degree heat is the worst time for
photography.
The two pictures above are the SD State Penitentiary which
was built out of Sioux quartzite cut from the area around the falls starting in
1881. This was the first prison in the Dakota Territories. The
prisoners cut the stone and hauled it up the 100-foot bluff from the river to
the building site. Today the prison houses SD’s most dangerous inmates,
death row and its only execution chamber. It’s a very attractive building
which doesn’t look at all like a prison from the outside.
Sioux Falls has a population of nearly 165,000…..twice that
of the city of Asheville. There are other things to see here besides
Falls Park but the heat was so intense we couldn’t bring ourselves to go out
again. There’s a severe thunderstorm watch for tonight so maybe it will
rain and cool things off.
Tomorrow we’re off to the military campground at Ellsworth
AFB near Rapid City, SD, 335 miles west of here. Temperatures are
forecast to drop from 94 to 79 and back up to 90+ over the next week. It
will be interesting to see what sort of conditions usher in the 15-degree
drop. We’ve had several fly-overs of military jets here which I first
thought had come from Ellsworth (300 miles is nothing for them) but I’ve just
read that the SD Air National Guard is based here and they have F-16’s of their
own so the jets were probably theirs.
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