My sweet angel Mac

So we're headed toward Sioux Falls, SD and we implore the Garmin to find us an oil changery. And she points us toward the downtown, where we take the tired Subaru. I found out there that my rear tires had "zero tread" on them. I asked the sweet Midwesterner if that was dangerous and he said "oh yeah, it is." I went and looked at the tires and they were flat, with no tread at all.

I would count this as a victory for my guardian angel Mac, who clearly guided me to get my oil changed, and furthermore made my oil changer Firestone, where they gave me four new tires. It wasn't cheap, but we're not dead.

Also, Sioux Falls has a giant bronze recreation of David. Nicely done, too.



Oddly, though, it's really hard to find, it's isolated, and it's on this kind of ugly, concrete-bound river that is completely surrounded by ugly hotels. Not the fronts of the hotels, the backs of them. The "falls," presumably, are somewhere on that river. But the town was poorly planned, at least for humans.

But the people in Sioux Falls are the best, and all across the Midwest we encountered the same friendliness. We let it wash over us, until we were covered in a fine dusting of sugary sweetness.