A Day in South Dakota

We left the KOA campground fairly early in the morning; the weather was good again and we made good time. Our first stop was in the town of Wall to see Wall Drug. For about 100 miles, we had been seeing signs about this Wall Drug like it was some famous place. Turned out to be a very old drug store which now includes the usual tourist souvenirs.

This is a picture of the store front; the next pictures are from inside.

We also took a picture of this motorcycle that was parked on the main street. Take a close look at the details on it. Moooo..

Notice the 'horseshoe' mufflers too.

Our next stop was the Flying J (a truck stop) in Rapid City, South Dakota where we fueled the motorhome and then parked it in the parking lot. We unhooked the car to drive to Mount Rushmore. It is a pretty awesome landmark. Most of us have trouble drawing a face on a piece of paper; can't imagine the difficulties in sculpting four faces in the side of a mountain. You can see the faces from the highway as you drive towards it.

This is the entrance to the monument with the faces in the background.

This is a close up...

We then went to visit Crazy Horse monument. The original sculpture is dead now but his wife and 7 of their 10 children are continuing the project. At the rate they are going, it probably won't be finished for another 50 years because it's not government funded. The work is funded only by private donations. They have finished the face. Look at the picture and you will see where they have marked in white where the horse's head will be. We watched a short film and they showed how the Mount Rushmore fits into the top half of the head of Crazy Horse. Here is the model statue to compare with the real thing.

Above is a picture of the South Dakota badlands. We got back to the Flying J to pick up the motorhome and got back on the road. We didn't know motorcycle week in Sturgis began this week and there have been thousands of motorcycles and trucks pulling motorcycles on trailers. The traffic on I-90 was incredibly heavy because of this. Every campground and motel for miles around were full of people and motorcycles. Rather than keep driving we decided to stop and the campground we picked, only a couple of miles from Sturgis, did have space for big rigs. When we got out of the rig to set up we noticed our car was completely covered in a white dust from the gravel road we had to drive on to the campground. It had been a long day so we just decided to make the best of it, get a good night's sleep and get on the road early the next day. Total mileage for the day was 204 miles. That doesn't include driving from to Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Monument in the car.