Bath, South Dakota is the smallest of the Baths. And we mean small. Amtrak sends goods trains through this place that are longer than the village.

There are no shops in the village, just a collection of houses around a square of heathazed dirt roads, though there are plenty of grain silos to keep fans of farming architecture happy. The only place you'll reliably find anyone around is the post office, and the post mistress Joyce Fluke told us the history of their little village (which is documented in a detailed book that she gave us).

We were by no means the first visitors from England's West Country - a couple from Frome dropped in as recently as 1989 - but make no mistake, this is a way out place, but the friendliness of the farmers who gave us lifts where Greyhound doesn't go (i.e. everywhere in South Dakota) was as boundless as the Dakotan landscape.