South Dakota Vacation - First Day

I (Brent) am still on a vacation rationing plan as I get through my first three years at Leprino Foods, so we tried to look a bit more local for vacation options.  We had heard amazing things about the Black Hills of South Dakota and realized it's only about a five to six hour drive from us.  It had been quite a long time since I had driven north out of Colorado, but it is really a pretty drive up their through southeastern Wyoming and into South Dakota.  We were all excited when we finally got close to our destination (Rapid City) where we rented a hotel room for the week.  We actually drove by a few monuments on the way in, starting with Crazy Horse above.  We decided not to pay the extra $20 or $30 to get a closer look, but it was pretty cool from a mile or two away.

With the kids getting a bit stir crazy in the car, we had to stop at a mountain lake before we made it to Mount Rushmore, which was the main destination for the first day.  We stopped and had a picnic lunch, as well as put our feet in the icy lake, looking for crawdads and other things.  Other people were actually swimming in this lake and, just to the right of the picture, were jumping off of these cliffs into the cold water.  Gavin and Gage were thinking about it, but we decided it might just be better to stick to the shore activities. 

Another 5-10 minutes down the road from the lake was Mount Rushmore.  I would say that it looks so very impressive in person that the pictures barely do it justice.  It is amazing to look at the work it must have taken to carve this huge monument into the side of the mountain.  We stayed for a few hours touring the area and going to this museum area where the had presentations on how the carving was done and all the history tied to the site.  I would like to note that one of the benefits of visiting in the middle of the week was that the crowds were very reasonable and we were able to just pull right up and take it all in.

This is a picture from along this short hiking trail that takes you a bit closer to the base of Rushmore than the main gallery walk.  It is good to see Gavin smiling in this picture, as he was quite angry right before this, that I wouldn't let him crawl all over the mountain side and rock climb at will at a federal monument.

After finishing up at Mount Rushmore, we headed toward our hotel for the week but had to stop at what was advertised to be an amazing dinosaur park on the west side of Rapid City.  After getting there, we were extremely underwhelmed to say the least.  What you see above is one of about six dinosaur statues with disintegrating paint, some dying grass, and a crumbling sidewalk linking them all together.  After spending all of about 15 minutes here, we decided to head back to the car, thankful that someone didn't try to charge some sort of entrance fee for this "park."