Friday morning, Rick left work early & we headed north. Our first attraction of the trip was going to see the sculpture of Crazy Horse. Although it's not finished, & maybe never will be, it was still an impressive site. We thought it was pretty cool that on multiple occasions, Korczak (the sculptor), turned down offers of millions of dollars from the government to help finish the project. He felt it would be more meaningful having it completed with private funds rather than with a government handout.
Saturday morning we started out at Mt. Rushmore. It was a beautiful morning & really neat that there were maybe 10 other people there. It was nice to hike around the trail & appreciate the beautiful scenery.
Bear Country was a fun stop where we could drive through a park with free-roaming animals. The kids were scared because the animals were so close. Lexie had a close encounter with goat, & after that, they weren't quite as scared of the animals.
Then we headed out to the Rapid City area. Our intention was to go to Storybook Island, but they were closed for the season (as were many other things). So we stopped at the park & let the kids play in the leaves & then to the Dinosaur Park that had lots of green dinosaurs to climb on.
The Jewel Cave was our final attraction (until we decided to go to the tourist hot spot, Dewey, SD-but more on that later). It's the 2nd longest cave in the world with more still being mapped out almost daily. We took a brief tour into the main cavern of the cave & got to see the sparkling calcite which gave the cave it's name.
As we began the trip back to Colorado, Rick found on the map a great scenic route for us to take. The thought was to take some back roads & experience some of the small town Americana of rural South Dakota. Little did we know how rural it was. What we expected to be well maintained state highways ended up being washed out dirt roads with ruts so deep we had to drive around many of them. (Boy, was Cheryl glad she was driving...) (Oh & we took the Maxima on this roadtrip, not the Expedition.) This was one of the better roads. We sure thought we'd taken a wrong turn, or two, or three.
It's amazing that 2 tire tracks running through a field would show up as a road on our GPS. This was our view a lot of the time. It was really beautiful & peaceful out in the middle of nowhere.
We saw the town of Dewey, SD on the map & thought we'd drive through that town before heading back out to the main highway. Imagine our surprise when we saw this sign...
We even saw 2 of the 7 people who live there. It's a good thing there was a sign or else we wouldn't have even known that was a town. There were only a few buildings, none of which looked inhabited.
We were happy to see this sign so at least we knew we were going in the right direction (you probably don't have people say they are happy to be in Wyoming too often, but we were).
We crossed a few narrow bridges & when we crossed one of them we scared a herd of antelope. There were about 30 of them. This is some of them running away from us, thus not a great picture. But it was pretty cool to see.
And then our wonderful adventure was over. We made it back to well maintained highways/freeways & stuck to them for the rest of the trip home. We had a great adventure & will definitely take a few more scenic routes in the future.
1 comment:
Well that sounds like a road trip and then some..... Awesome!!!! I am sure my heart would have been beating a little faster on those rough roads. I am glad you made it back home. What a great adventure.
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