Wall Drug

Wall Drug

A little adventure and mystery.

Drive I-90 through SouthDakota. Find WallDrug, get out, stretch your legs, and congratulate yourself.

Don't be disappointed. The ice-water is as good as you'll ever have.

And don't spoil the secret.

WallDrug is located in the town of Wall, South Dakota; approximately 60 miles east of Rapid City. It lies on the north side of InterstateNinety? just opposite the Badlands National Park. The store is a collection of buildings that house a truly fantastic array of merchandise. The first bumper sticker is still free and if you ask nicely, you can probably get a couple more for friends and family.

The badlands will make a stronger impression on you, but WallDrug literally demands that you stop to take a look. I bought a pocket knife and a whetstone there in 1993 when I was headed to Chicago (from California) to start grad school at the University of Chicago.

Everyone takes a knife to Chicago :-)

The best part of WallDrug are the thousand and one roadsigns you see (starting in Minnesota). You become so intrigued by them that you have to stop. The store (which used to be a tiny pharmacy) is now almost the entire block. It also pretty much made the town of Wall, which if it weren't for WallDrug, wouldn't be worth stopping for. I actually had a better time at the CornPalace.

I haven't been to WallDrug in years, so this might not be true any more. But after several hundred miles of driving, past the numerous road signs mentioned above, I was disappointed that when I got back into my car and continued driving west, there were no signs that said "You have just driven past WallDrug" or "You are now five miles past WallDrug" or something similar. It would have been hilarious.

Twenty years ago I was on a dock in Amsterdam waiting to get into a glass-roofed tourist boat. On the dock was a very official-looking sign with an arrow pointing west saying "Wall Drug: 3760 miles" (or whatever the distance was).

Other "SignsForHundredsOfMilesInEveryDirection" attractions:

MerrimacCaverns? in Missouri -- "Jesse James' hideout!" (...old route 66)
Anderson split pea soup, in California. Sadly now turned into a TGIF.
South of the Border, just south of the North/South Carolina border on Rt 95. Billboards are on I95 from Florida to Virginia.
RockCity?, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. RockCity? is a series of natural rock formations located on Lookout Mountain. You can't go anywhere in TheSouth? without seeing a barn roof painted with the slogan "See Rock City". (And it's not cheap to get in; it's an amusement park.)
The Thing, Texas Canyon, Arizona, between Benson and Willcox. Impossible to miss, as there's absolutely nothing else out there besides it, billboards mentioning it, and of course, a nice, large lamp array.
The Virginia Diner, Wakefield, VA. Southern cooking.

During the 1950s and 1960s (you know, last century), they may have sold more bumper stickers than all other companies combined. I think they listed a SouthDakota address. I've never been in SouthDakota, so WallDrug is just an imaginary place to folks like me, MarcVeeneman.

In the early 1960s the bumper stickers were free, whether you wanted them or not, just for parking in the WallDrug parking lot.

There are pictures of GI's with signs in or near their foxholes in WWII with how many miles to WallDrug.

They even have an online store and website; see: http://www.walldrug.com/history.htm.

Some advice from the site: "Free Ice Water. It brought us Husteads a long way and it taught me my greatest lesson, and that's that there's absolutely no place on God's earth that's Godforsaken. No matter where you live, you can succeed, because wherever you are, you can reach out to other people with something that they need!"

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