Woo Hoo! A great day to see the sights!

We woke up on Friday morning to some very nice weather. A bit on the cool side, but hey! global warming will kick in any day now... First stop, The Badlands.

I believe it is an appropriately named area. I can't imagine what early travelers thought when they encountered this area. I found out that the town of Wall, SD got its' name because of the local terrain. There is a "wall" that forms a barrier between the lower prairie and the upper prairie and that wall made it hard for early travelers to get from one area to another.



After our tour of the badlands we headed over to Custer state park to take the wildlife loop and some of the Needles Scenic Drive. The wildlife loop turned out to be a bit of a bust for us as there wasn't a whole lot of wildlife that wanted to have their picture taken. We did have this critter greet us right at the park entrance:

The Needles Scenic Drive was very cool. Very nice scenery and it included a few narrow tunnels. I've been making Bev do most of the driving so I could hang out the window and take pictures. She had a bit of fun navigating this 8 1/2 foot wide tunnel, but she made it!


We even found some places where we could do a bit of climbing on the rocks and get some great scenery pictures at the same time.


After Custer State Park we cruised past the Crazy Horse Memorial. We were running a bit short on time so we decided to just enjoy the view from the road and forgo paying the entry fee to see it closer (OK, we're cheap!). We then headed over to the dead presidents, er, Mt. Rushmore. By this time in the day the sky had grown overcast, so it was actually excellent for taking pictures of the monument. The Mt. Rushmore memorial is very nicely done and we enjoyed the presidents trail that allowed multiple different views of the memorial. We wanted to stay another 45 minutes or so for the lighting ceremony, but we hadn't made any hotel reservations yet so we decided to play it safe and go find a place to stay. Good thing! Most of the less expensive hotels were full, so we felt fortunate to find an opening at one of the lesser known places around the Rushmore area.


We're already finding that each area we visit is difficult to see well in the time frame that we allotted for it, but we expected that before we ever left the house. The whole Black Hills area is one that I definitely want to revisit someday (on the Goldwing...).