We needed to make up some millage so we spend a whole day speeding through South Dakota, stopping for a breather at a town called Huron – which proudly boasts as being the home to the world’s largest pheasant. As far as we know there’s no real story behind why it’s there other than shooting pheasants to death seems to be very popular in that area. There is however a legend:

Once there was a giant ring-neck pheasant whom all the hunters wanted to claim as a trophy. One day a young boy happened upon the Giant Pheasant and, because of its magnificent beauty, spared the bird’s life. In exchange, the pheasant promised to remain always at that spot, until every person in the world has seen the World’s Largest Pheasant and his [smaller] offspring.

We’ve been pulled over by the cops twice today, once for some odd rule us foreigners didn’t know about, and once because we were speeding, although we were not, it’s more likely because we had out of town plates. This really is middle America folks.

OK, we had to see it, it’s the Biggest Ball of Twine, well not really, the biggest one is somewhere else and is a tiny bit bigger, but that one was rolled by any passing joe, the ball we visited (in Darwin, Minnesota) was all rolled by one person, a guy called Francis Johnson, so it’s really the only one that counts. Unfortunately Francis is long dead, and there was no-one there to give us the tour so our visit was a bit fleeting, seeing as we were about 300 miles behind schedule. I’m pretty sure we covered all angles, I mean it’s just a large ball in a gazebo, what else is there to say?

(of course this is twine we’re talking about here, and not string, that a whole other deal, obviousley).

It seems the more middle America we get, the cheaper the hotels are. Last night we scored a hotel room (in Darwin, Minnesota) with wi-fi, a pool, continental breakfast and stunning views of the mcDonalds drive-through for only 60 bucks, which works out to about 8 good old British Pounds each. The breakfast was of course crap.

Today we visited Dr. Evermore and Lady Eleanor and had a tour of the Doctor’s massive machine; The Forevertron, which (once complete) will blast him into space in a glass egg within a copper frame to live forever on a beam of light. There are many other machines and characters to help him on his way such as the Gravitron which will remove all the water and excess weight from his body, as well as a viewing platform for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to view the launch and a huge band of birds to play a tune during the fantastical celebrations on the day.

Dr. Evermore is actually Tom Every, Lady Eleanor is his ex-wife (Eleanor), and the Forevertron is part of Tom’s huge sculpture garden full of steam-punk scrap metal sculptures all involved in the fantasy story Tom has created around Dr.Evermore’s journey into space. He’s been building it for 25 years and it really is pretty damn huge and pretty amazing to wander around. Tom and Eleanor spoke to us for 4 hours, bought us drinks, gave us a door knob, a signed book, dvd and two letters we’re waiting for an appropriate time to open. It was hard to leave the place but we had 5 hours to drive today as we are running a little behind today.

During this five hour drive we came up with a new idea for a title for this thing, what do you guys think of ‘The World’s Greatest Documentary (What We’ve Made)’? Answers in the comments below please.

Thought I’d mention today about some of the obstacles the lord has chosen to fling in our path. The glorious image above is a screen grab from our camera. As you can tell, it’s poorly. The trippy effect seemed to come and go in a seemingly random fashion. We tried keeping it at a constant temperature, and it seemed to help it. Until it finally just decided to not turn on at all and go play with all the top loading VHS decks in the big Dixons in the sky. We have since bought a standby camera. It’s a top of the line consumer camera from Sony. Shockingly good picture, and we’ve made a Frankenstein converter for our pro mic. What else has gone wrong… ah yes, after searching behind a wrecker’s yard and an army ammo factory and opening up various chained gates labelled “DO NOT TRESPASS” we found Dr Evermore’s Forevertron. Only to discover it was chained up (with padlocks) and no sign of the good Doctor. It’s not all bad though. We’ve rearranged to meet Dr Evermore this morning and spent yesterday getting the crapped knocked out of us on terribly built huge roller coasters, and bombing around the Wisconsin Dells in a huge jet boat.

Found ourselves in a scary place deep in Indiana. The image above, left is taken from inside a tomb in the grounds of a Carmelite Monastery. They happened to be having some kind of big to do, and the place was full of Polish people chanting and generally being scary. These were not our people. THEN we found ourselves in Ella’s Deli in Wisconsin (above, right). An amazing place full of animatronic toys and stuff having from the ceiling and embedded in our table. The food was giant, as was the welcome from Ken and Katie who we chatted to for ages about the amazing place.