Our first stop of the day was in Vermillion, South Dakota, the home of the National Music Museum. Started with a collection of a few thousand musical instruments, the museum now has over 15,000 pieces. Those on display that are not one-of-a-kind are, at the least, often extraordinarily rare.

We walked around and marveled at the exhibits for nearly four hours. My parents learned more than I did, and my dad would often point at something, look up at me, and ask if I'd heard of whatever he was pointing at, only for me to tell him that I'd either already read it or already knew about it. Still, my knowledge didn't make the exhibits any less enjoyable; I was simply able to get through them faster. We listened to a number of these instruments being played through iPods provided to us at the beginning of the tour.

Among the instruments on display: piccolos in D, D-flat, and E-flat, a remarkable assortment of intricate violins, violas, and cellos built by famous luthiers Amati and Stradivari, earlier string instruments such as lutes and viols, a significant number of harpsichords, pianofortes, clavichords, and virginals (including a Viennese piano with a bass drum and triangle inside of it and one of the earliest known pianos), a Polish-style "chest organ," helicons, sousaphones, a double-bell trombone-euphonium hybrid, bugles with woodwind-style keys, an extraordinary number of guitars including the Dobro, early brass instruments such as the serpent, ophicleide, and bombardon, a Benjamin Franklin-style glass armonica (not harmonica as many people think), a "jazzophone" with two bells (one with a built-in wah-wah mute), a glass flute, a good number of the fifteen surviving ivory clarinets, an alto rothphone, original Adolph Sax-built saxhorns, saxophones, and one of 24 "grand parade trumpets," early attempts at fully chromatic harps, a portable piano known as an orphica, a harp-piano known as an euphonicon, miniature pocket-sized violins used by dance teachers, a strange harp-like instrument known as the "trumpet-marine" that sounds exactly like a trumpet when played, the only English cittern known to have survived, a massive collection of folk and world instruments including a set of Javanese gamelan instruments commissioned by the museum a few years ago and an armadillo-shell ukulele-esque Bolivian instrument, a nearly full set of instruments used by Civil War-era brass bands, cellos made from barrels and stove pipes, one of the original Hammond organs, a Janko-style piano with a keyboard that looks like a cross between a piano's and a computer's, one of five baritone trombacellos, a B-flat saxello, a theremin, an X-shaped double chromatic harp, a heart-shaped trumpet used as a prop in the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie, Art Deco-engraved trombones and saxophones, a guitar owned by Furry Lewis, a guitar slightly broken by an Elvis Presley throw, and—last but not least—an extraordinary collection of harmonicas that included a harmonica shaped like a dead fish.

Our feet hurt something fierce after going through the two levels which contained all of this, and I know we didn't see but a fraction of their collection. (Two or three major items are currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and who knows what else they've got squirreled away somewhere that can't fit into their exhibit space.)

The tiny town of Vermillion doesn't have very many restaurants and after filling up with gas, we ate at a Jimmy John's. I like Jimmy John's more than Subway in many ways—I think it's a more fresh sandwich despite the fewer options.

We got back to the Interstate and up to the town of Sioux Falls, which my dad has often confused with the three iterations of Sioux City from whence we had come. The speed limit ramped up to eighty, so we got there in a hurry.

Our stop in Sioux Falls was for the independent-league Sioux Falls Canaries. The folks were nice but their meager gift shop had no pennant. Nonetheless, we got our first hat of the trip, Mom got a magnet for free, and we took pictures of the field and stadium before I got behind the wheel headed for Mitchell.

I seemed to handle the car better than my dad, perhaps because I have more experience behind this wheel. (Also, I wasn't trying to go perpendicular to the wind, as he had in the northward journey from Vermillion to Sioux Falls.) It wasn't long before we had gotten to Mitchell, where it was early enough for us to go by the world's only corn palace in the downtown area.

The Corn Palace has not been finished this year, but the gigantic corn murals that adorn its exterior are well under way. It's attached to the Mitchell City Hall and is across from the Community Theater. The interior of the Corn Palace is a great big basketball court with seats on one whole half of its gigantic interior, because the other side has a stage. In the court was a gift shop, which sold all manner of corn-, South Dakota-, and Mitchell-related gifts. Some of the items, however, had no relation to anything, such as an entire rack of hot sauces with hilarious, yet NSFBZP names.

Despite these mostly unsavory items, much of the other things for sale were normal. My dad tried to remember the missing fridge magnets of our long-dormant basement collection and got the ones he remembered not having while my mom got an ornament. We asked if they had any ridiculous corn hats, but they did not. (The people there seemed to think that selling such a product would be a good idea.)

Having seen the incomplete yet still somehow epic monstrosity that is the Corn Palace, we got to our hotel.

After unpacking, we wanted to find a local place to eat. Online research and hotel employee queries led us to Chef Louie's, a steakhouse marked by the giant steer on the street corner. This did not disappoint. The place wasn't crowded; we were the only ones left by the end of the meal.

I had a filet wrapped in bacon and topped with creamy blue cheese and pecans. The steak was cooked slightly over the medium I'd ordered, but it was no worse for wear on tenderness or flavor. A large helping of garlic mashed potatoes—hand-mashed to creamy perfection—was an excellent side, and the whole thing was covered in a small amount of deliciously pungent cognac peppercorn sauce. Needless to say, not even the parsley garnished went untouched.

My parents went for the same thing—well, my mom did, and then my dad, not knowing what to get, doubled her order. They got prime rib served with excellent au jus with a side of baked sweet potato. The sweet potato was great by itself (I had two bites), but what really took the cake was the caramel sauce on top.

There was a brief scare post-meal when we thought we had lost one of our keys, but it turned out to have fallen out of my pocket underneath the seat. Nonetheless, this led to my dad talking to the owner of the restaurant, who had just acquired a copy of the restaurant's menu from 1950. (Steaks were three dollars.)

Tomorrow: across the state to Rapid City. Wind Cave National Park may also be in the cards depending on various factors.