Happy Birthday Michaela. Myt. Rushmore.

Today I got a message from my mommy telling me that Mikaela was born. My cousin Lisa had her baby girl!! Happy Birthday Mikaela!!!!!! We started off the day at Mt. Rushmore and had their “Monumental breakfast” of bacon, eggs, hash browns and biscuits for just $4.00! We ate under the great stone faces and then went on a park ranger guided tour and learned all sorts of interesting facts. Originally the idea was to create carvings of Western Figures such as Sitting Bull, Lewis and Clark, etc. When they contracted Gutzon Borglum to do the carving, he thought it would be better to do Presidents. He also chose its current location (the original idea was to do it in the Needles in the Black Hills). The first president chosen was Abe Lincoln, then George Washington, then Thomas Jefferson, and finally Theodore Roosevelt. Originally it was only going to be the first three, but the layout had to be changed secondary to the non-carvability of some of the rock. They actually had to blast off the original Thomas Jefferson face! Miraculously no one got hurt when carving this – which took years to do!


Mount Rushmore

I got myself a great souvenir from Mt. Rushmore!! George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.

Well, after checking out the guys, we were feeling pretty grubby (no real shower in quite a few days) so we decided to go to a Water Park in Rapid City. Which happened to have free unlimited mini golf. Bonus! We had some fun going down the slides for a little while, I dared to go down the speedy one, but Bryan opted out. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be! Hmm, I seem to becoming more daring with speedy water activities these days! We took a shower there and then decided to go to one more National Park that we hadn’t planned on originally seeing, Wind Cave.

We got there just in time for a guided tour (which is the only way to go inside the caves). We learned the cave was formed from standing water, so it was quite different from your typical cave formed from running water with soft walls and stalactites and stalagmites. Instead it had TONS of boxwork crystals (check our the pictures). They said gazillions of years ago cracks formed in limestone rock, and inside these cracks oozed a substance. Then years and years after that, standing water gradually deteriorated the limestone, leaving only the substance in the cracks behind – which formed these boxwork crystals. It was also nice and cool down there, as we had spent a few days in hot hot temperatures! After cave exploration we drove through the above-ground part of the park and saw lots of buffalo crossing the street and many prairie dogs, which I instantly fell in love with, as they are so cute when the stand up on their back legs and look around. I was so intent on getting a picture of them standing up and was bummed when we drove too quickly past a trio of them having a conference. Little did I know I would have many the opportunity another day for prairie dog pics!

Then I remembered from our Mt. Rushmore Tour, that they had originally wanted to carve thee heads in “the Needles”, and I saw something on the map called the Needles Highway. So we thought we would try our luck and race against the clock to get back up to Mount Rushmore via the Needles Highway in time to see the great 9:00 show. Well, we will never know if we would have made it in time to see any of the show as we ended up traveling through one of the coolest places we had ever been in!! The Needles in the Black Hills are so freakin awesome!!!!! Very curvy and hilly drive, much longer than we expected, but the views were fantastic. We saw rock formations all over the place and came upon Sylvan Lake just in time to watch the sunset! Check out those pics!! Very pretty. We tried to camp near the lake, but everything was full L. We traveled a bit further down the road and ended up at Horsethief Campground. We are still to this day regretting that we didn’t spend more time in the Needles and on that lake. We may just have to go back there some day!

Quote of the day: “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving,” Lao Tzu. Will have to remember that one and stay longer in cool places like the Needles!