We got up good time that morning to be sure and leave enough time to explore our final destination – Mt. Rushmore. A few more hours of driving and two cups of AWEFUL iced gas station coffee we finally arrived at our halfway point that had been advertized all along I-90 – Wall Drugs. What is Wall Drugs? Well, it is a little pull off western model town filled with nick-nack shops and fun-totally-tourist statues that you can take your picture with. There was even a T-Rex!!! Not only did we take our picture with about every statue possible, but we also took the time to scope out the parking lots for any new license plates, which I believe we did find West Virginia that day. We strolled around a bit longer and then jumped back into the car and were on the road again.
A few hours more and we had reached Rapid City. We swung by our KOA and checked in and before we knew it we were turning our wheels up to the four stone heads of Mt. Rushmore. Before seeing the mountain, we drove through yet another made-for-tourists town where the streets were packed with out-of-towners. It was cute and bustly, but we didn’t want to dilly dally, we wanted to get up that mountain.
We continued to wind up the highway and eventually started getting glimpses of the faces. We paid $10for parking and walked up to the monument. There were a good amount of people there, so we had no problem following the crowd to where the best view was. We walked through the flag archways and ended up on a terrace like area where we looked up at the four carved faces. They were SO COOL!! We were both a little surprised at how far away they were – I guess we had imagined that you could actually get pretty close to them, but either way it was a pretty awing experience. We stopped at the museum and learned about the making of the mountain then we took some more pictures and decided to head back. We scanned the parking lot one more time for license plates – Vermont was found on that round – and then we headed back down.
It was Ali’s birthday that day, so we decided to go to Olive Garden and get some dinner and then we walked around downtown Rapid City for a bit. That part of town was really cute, really quiet, but cute. All of the shops closed at about 7 and so we did a lot of window shopping. Afterwards, we went to an Irish pub (which wasn’t really Irish at all) where we had a beer and people watched for a while. We decided to call it a night, so we head back to the KOA where we were going to get in the hot tub for a bit, but it was filled – literally FILLED – with little children. Instead we washed our faces, laid out the sleeping bags, put up our bug net and went to sleep.
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