Musical Morning, and Drive Drive Drive

Inlay and carved interior of guitar soundhole

Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2018

We had a very long day yesterday, and for the first time on this trip, I was just too tired to write before I went to bed. Luckily, today was scheduled to be a non-traveling day. I had reservations for last night and tonight at Angostura State Recreation Area, just south of Hot Springs, South Dakota. So now it’s just about 1pm, and I am sitting under a tree looking at the Angostura Reservoir to type this. It’s in the 80s, I think, with a lovely breeze blowing and only 30% humidity, so I am quite comfortable!

Indonesian Gamelan

Lutes, c.1600

Yesterday we left our campground after both taking EXCELLENT showers. The campground was very strange-- it was a county park campground, and was quite pretty, with well spaced out sites, most with electricity. It had a VERY clean and up to date bath house with, as I said, excellent showers. But many of the sites were taken by unoccupied trailers-- they had no vehicles (and no people), just the trailers on the sites. A number of sites had reserved tags on them for dates more than a week in advance. There was a campground host who I never laid eyes on-- in fact, i never laid eyes on ONE SINGLE PERSON while we were there. It was completely bizarre. It’s a good thing the showers were so wonderful, because we found out after we left that there was a small park in Vermillion, right on the main drag, which looked fine (although probably had no showers) and was FREE (including electric in some of the sites!) for TWO nights, and only $5 thereafter. That is a great deal, if you don’t want a shower. Which we did .

Stradivarius Viola da Gamba, violin, choral mandolino, and guitar

Anyway, our destination was the National Music Museum, which turns out to be on the University of South Dakota campus. The museum was absolutely amazing-- definitely a “Gem attraction,” as AAA books would (and do) say. It is an old stone building which contains about 9 or 10 separate galleries of musical instruments. The entry fee includes a an ipod-type thing which includes guided information about each room, and about many of the individual instruments to be found in them. It is a fantastic thing to use, because it allows you to hear many of the instruments being played (some of them are quite unusual.) It also includes a lot of videos, so you can SEE them being played. It greatly enhanced our visit.

Bass on left made from a barrel, on right from a stovepipe

The first room we walked into contained a set-up of a gamelan, the traditional percussive instruments of Indonesia. This was the first instance where seeing them played and hearing them was SO important-- we had no idea otherwise, although they were certainly impressive to look at. Already, we were in love with the museum. But the next room sealed it-- it was entirely filled with stringed instruments, beginning with lutes from the 17th century, and including the entire range of violins, violas, and related types of instruments), . Many of them were from the 17th and 18th centuries, including examples made for kings (Henry IV, for example) and by famous luthiers (Stradivarius and Amati, well represented.) Again we were able to hear many of them, and learn a lot about them as well.

Korn Kobblers homemade band

From there, we went to a room filled with examples of acoustic guitars, starting with some of the earliest, and with explanations of the different styles and some modern well-known guitar builders, including a “workshop” set up. There was another room with organs (everything from a an early American pipe organ to a box organ operated by hand bellows), harpshichords, and early pianos. That was the first floor.

On the second floor, we saw everything from early brass instruments (and unusual ones, such as trumpets with two bells), and woodwinds, to more “folk” oriented instruments like the balalaika, Bohemian
bagpipes, harmonicas, and accordions. There was a room with lots of varieties of modern electric organs of various sizes and types, and displays representing the golden age of bands, which I think would be typified by the band from “The Music Man"-- people in a community playing mostly brass instruments on a bandstand is what came to my mind. That section included things like home-made instruments, such as a string bass made from a barrel, and one made with only one string, from a stovepipe. There was also a “one-man-band” set-up from a group called the Korn Kobblers, sort of a cross between vaudevillians and street buskers, I guess, with a customized set up which included things like a spittoon, and a trombone rigged to squirt water!

Bohemian bagpipe with top like a goat (enlarge to see)

There was also a display involved with the amplification of the electric guitars, and some unique examples of those (such as one shaped like a crutch, which was made for Barbara Mandrell after she was in a very bad auto accident.) There was a fantastic nickelodeon machine which was more rightly called an “orchestron”, because although it looked on the outside like just a player piano, inside the top it had a snare drum, cymbals, and a triangle, and there were a few other percussion instruments somewhere in there. We were very lucky, because one of the museum docents came up with two other people and opened it up and turned it on, so we could see it playing. I took a short video of it, I will try to upload that if I can to the blog.

Gibson harp-guitar

We were disappointed that two of the galleries were already closed and packed up, because the museum is actually closing in October to be given a big renovation. It won’t be open again until 2021! So we are so glad we didn’t put off seeing it now. The galleries we missed had instruments from other cultures, and I saw in the digital guide that one was a shofar! I’m sure it would have been an interesting gallery, so we will now plan to come back here in a few more years. But spanning the universe of music from a Stradivarius violin to Bob Dylan’s harmonica is really QUITE an amazing experience, and each individual collection was excellent. I see that on the Internet, the museum’s holdings can be experienced to some degree, and I recommend it!

We spent about 3 hours there, at which point it was time for lunch and to get underway. And that is pretty much what we did for the rest of the day-- drive. We crossed the Missouri River (for the second time, because the day before we crossed from Iowa into SD) at the Fort Randall Damn. We stopped for the scenic overlook, and I took photos while Joey and Cassie lay in the grass. Then back on the road. We were not using the Interstate (we were mostly on US 18) and it was some of the

Early pianos w/decorative inlay

most empty roads we’ve ever driven. There was corn in the eastern end of the state, but after the dam the scenery became more like open range, and then finally we started to see buttes and other more rugged landscape. It was a VERY long drive for one afternoon, and we were both quite tired. Within an hour of our destination, we had to stop on the side of the road just to clean the windshield--the combination of setting sun and intense bug activity had rendered it too shmeary to see through safely. Cleaning it helped, and we finally turned off Route 18 to the local road leading to Angostura.

Missouri River dammed into Lewis and Clark Lake

I am now trying to decide the route to take from here, because there is no question, the fires make it

Two tired puppies relaxing

very unappealing to go to northern California. I am having a craving to revisit some of the things we saw on our first time RVing out west in 2007, so I think we will stick to the original plan for now-- toward Cody, WY with a stop in Thermopolis so we can go in the hot springs there, and then up into Idaho as expected. But from there, we may go north before we turn south again. I’m leaving it up to chance and a little serendipity.