Jill in her Cosmos t-shirt
Jill and I hung out very briefly there, and actually missed the benchmark itself (it was getting dark very quickly), which is in the center of the road in the middle of the intersection. I'm not gonna hurry back for that photograph - I'm satisfied to know that I was there, and that the rubber of my tires touched the benchmark (or came pretty close). The monument, then, was about 30 yards to the northwest of the actual tri-point, in South Dakota.
Jill and I camped (after considerable looking around) at the Newton Hills State Park. It's funny that we stayed there because earlier in the day I was telling Jill stories about my old elementary school chum Billy Newton from Monroe, NH.
In the morning, we had to high-tail it (via interstates, alas) to Des Moines for Jill to catch her plane, but we did have time for one more tri-point together...
This tri-point is an easy one to find - along a paved country road along the IA-SD line. Sioux Falls went past in a flash as we were in a bit of a hurry to get to the tri-point by sunset. SD hwy 42 is the main westward drag out of town, and about 5 miles from the outskirts of Sioux Falls, we passed through Rowena and soon saw Iowa for the first time on the trip. We bore left onto the state line road and, after about four miles of ups and downs through the fields, we came upon a well-maintained roadside park with a monument. The plaque, set in 1980, was a modern design and somewhat worn, and not particularly informative: "1859: Set at junction of Minnesota, Iowa and Dakota Territory by the Federal Land Office Survey of Minnesota's Western Boundary."
One pretty cool thing about this spot was that there were road signs indicating the names of the two intersecting roads in the road labeling systems of each of the three states.
