What) If you’ve ever driven within 200 miles of it then you know it’s coming. Like the bygone Burma-Shave ads, Wall Drug proclaims its existence up and down the interstate with rhyming, staggered highway signs that are like easy clues in a shopping scavenger hunt.

    From its humble beginnings as a drugstore offering free ice water to Depression-era drivers, it grew to engulf the entire town of Wall and corner the knickknack market with seemingly endless interconnected storefronts selling every imaginable inventory. Today the pie is stellar and the water’s still free. (1)

    Where) Wall is 55 miles east of Rapid City along I-90, just outside the boundary of Badlands National Park.

    Why) When we were driving back from another trip we drove by 100 miles of Wall Drug billboards before taking a turn away from Wall because of an impending blizzard. This time I have scheduled a drive by all 200 miles of billboards and a stop in Wall. How can all this hype possibly be worth it?

You probably know what's coming too. I spent the 200 mile drive to Wall photographing as many of their billboards as I could.

You can probably also work out that Pam would not stop the car for this purpose so all of these images were taken from a moving vehicle.

What you might not know is that I have slightly edited each of these photographs.

I increased the contrast on the billboard part of the image to brighten the colours and make it stand out from the background.

The post-winter/pre-spring landscape was really this bleak though and in a way this contrast enhanced the attraction the Wall ads exerted.

If you are tiring of these scenes by now then know that there were 13 other ones that I decided not to include and there were many more ...

... that I failed to photograph at all. Anyway, this is by far my favourite of the bunch. Now it is time to see how well these ads worked for ... 

... Wall Drug's bottom line. I ended up buying this three dimensional poster for myself for reasons I won't be going into. I also bought ...

... this strange bobblehead as a gift for my father.

Pam purchased this angel bell and that was it. There was lots of other merchandise but nothing else that even tempted us.