The weirdest traffic jam I've seen.

So, one of my occasional diversions is roaming the interior regions of America using a combination of Wikipedia and Google's satellite map & Street View features.

Not long ago I was "flying" over Clark, South Dakota* and noticed something weird on the western outskirts of town. It looked like a formation of cars out in a field, and it was too far from the road to be a used car lot, plus the cars were all the same color...

Maximum resolution in the satellite view wasn't enough to solve the riddle, and a "drive by" with Street View didn't clear anything up, either, so it was off to the Google search engine armed with little more than "cars, field, Clark South Dakota, US HWY 212".

The result turned up the answer...

"You’re catching a driveby glimpse of Ken Bell’s Conversation Pieces, one of those abstract interjections you’ll discover any time you make tracks across the Northern Plains. The Parade, as Bell calls the LTD procession, is where it all started."

Huh. It might be one of the largest collections of orange '76 Ford LTD's in private hands!


*Hometown of Urban Odson, a first-round pick in the '42 NFL draft who played 44 games for the Green Bay Packers from '46-'49 after serving in the Navy during WWII. Some of the Wikipedia pages for these little towns are full of nuggets from local history buffs, and others are hilarious puff pieces written by someone from the local Chamber of Commerce, but both are preferable to the dull nothing-but-basic-facts Wiki template pages.
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