A quick glance at a map will tell you: the first stop on a bike trip from Washington, DC, has to be South Dakota.

Besides the basic geography, why South Dakota? Well:

• I can now work remotely and DC is expensive. I don’t plan to live permanently in DC again.
• South Dakota has no state income tax. My marginal income tax rate in DC is 8.5%. I would rather be the resident of state with no income tax.
• It is very easy to establish residency in South Dakota.

I enjoyed getting to know a tiny corner of this state. It has lots of space. The roads are wide and the buildings are flat. In between cities are vast stretches of plains and farms. People are friendly and I did get a genuine “howdy” or two. There are many motorcycles. Plenty of people looked like they had Native American ancestry.

Establishing South Dakota residency

I stressed myself out pretty effectively making sure I had the right documents – I didn’t want to get all the way to the DMV in South Dakota and not have the right stuff! But it really was pretty easy.

Here’s what I did:

• Set up an address with a private mailbox service. They give you a South Dakota address and then, whatever mail you receive there, they forward on to wherever you would like. I went with Your Best Address.
• Made an appointment with the DMV to get a South Dakota driver’s license. I couldn’t get an appointment in Sioux Falls (the capital, where I would fly into and where my new address would be) during the week that I would be there, so I made one in Mitchell, about an hour away.
• Flew to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
• Spent one night in a hotel and got a receipt with my new address on it. Then moved to a cheaper, more centrally located and nicer Airbnb for the rest of my South Dakota stay.
• Went to the private mailbox service office to get a copy of my contract with my new address on it.
• Rented a car and drove to the Mitchell DMV with my contract, my receipt, my DC driver’s license and a residency affidavit form I got online. (I also had my social security card and a W-2, but didn’t need them; I would have if I had had a license from a state that doesn’t verify social security numbers.)
• Got my license in just a few minutes.
• Enjoyed South Dakota for a few more days.
• Flew back.

Ta da!

Ta da!

The woman at the DMV had an accent that sounded right out of Fargo to me.

Eating in Around Sioux Falls

South Dakotan food is famous all across South Dakota. Here are some highlights!

Chislic are cubes of seasoned and deep fried meat. They seem to be an import from Eastern Europe (and yes, I did notice an Eastern European presence here – at least I heard some people speaking what I think was Russian). I had some at Urban Chislic, and they taste like cubes of seasoned and deep fried meat.

Extremely authentic Native American food from a food truck. This included an Indian taco, which was fry bread (actually very delicious) and all sorts of 100% authentic Sioux ingredients, like black olives, tomatoes and ground beef flavored with (I think) Old El Paso taco seasoning. It was pretty tasty, whether or not the plains Indians really munched on these things while contemplating bison.

And for desert, I had wojapa, which was some of this very same fry bread dipped in strawberry “pudding.” The strawberry pudding tasted like straight up sugar and water. It was gross.

Daylight donuts is a very small chain found in Sioux Falls and in Mitchell. These were some goddamn good donuts, rolls and other treats with weird names like dog bones and rosebuds.

In downtown I ate at Phillips Avenue Diner, which I guess is a big deal here. It was pretty bland and they didn’t have pie. A diner without pie is like a bowling ball without a liquid center.

And I went to Mama’s Phried and Phillies, which at least one website rated as having the best fried chicken in Sioux Falls. Well, it was OK, and the philly cheesesteak was just as good as what you could make at home with Steak-Umms.

I even tried some fine dining at Minervas. I had some walleye for lunch, which happens to be the most popular fish in South Dakota. You’d be wise to know that the service was excellent, but the food was not especially well-prepared.

The best meal I had was probably I very tasty Guinness beef stew at Blarney Stone Pub.

Drinking around Sioux Falls

Sioux Falls had some pretty tasty microbreweries (but no distilleries that I found). Remedy Microbrewing was a pretty decent brewpub where I had a tasty Amber, and Monk’s House of Ale Repute wins a gold star from me for a good South Dakota barrel-aged stout and a cool name. Woodgrain Brewing Co. wasn’t bad either. And I even went to a swanky cocktail bar, Carpenter Bar.

The most interesting drinks I had, though, were at Covert Artisan Ales and Cellars, which brews up some really interesting infused beers. They taste pretty good too.

Sights around Sioux Falls

So, the city of Sioux Falls has the falls of Sioux Falls in it. Probably a coincidence but isn’t that weird? It’s a pretty nice park to walk around.

About a half-hour away from Sioux Falls is Porter Sculpture Park, the weirdest sculpture garden you’re likely to see. And all sculpture gardens are weird. For $10 you can walk around a sculpture garden run by a nice fellow who build all the sculpture gardens himself with his dog. His dog is the brains of the operation, I’m told, and comes up with the weird poems that go with the sculptures, and the human does most of the heavy lifting on account of having thumbs.

This place is pretty big and in the middle of a cow and corn farm (no shortage of cow and corn farms in southeast South Dakota.) The pictures below are just a few small samples.

And, finally, Sioux Falls has the safest Uber driver in all the land.