Saturday, June 18, 2011

South Dakota vacation, part 2

First stop, Mt. Rushmore!! In order to get there from our cabin, we drove on Iron Mountain Road, which has tunnels cut into the mountain through which you can see Mt. Rushmore. It was stunning! The pics didn't turn out so well but here is our crew at the top of the mountain. The mountain in the distance is Mt. Rushmore.


We enjoyed the various films and exhibits and taking the walking trail so that you can get lots of views of the mountain. We took tons of pictures and it was beautiful.




Next stop, Custer State Park. Michael was really wanting to "tromp" with Papa. This involves streams and trails and general exploration and is his favorite thing to do. As we drove through the park, we saw several herds of free ranging buffalo. There were lots of cute calves, too.... it was great!







Next day, we went to The Black Hills Institute museum Hill City. It was packed with tons of fossils, thanks to the area being so full of them.








The highlight is STAN, the T-rex. This is the second most complete T-rex skeleton ever found. Very cool and very impressive. Here are the kids standing in front of STAN.

From there, we drove by Crazy Horse. They are working on his hand this year. Due to time constraints (and $$$ considerations :-) We opted to view him from afar instead of driving in and getting the full experience. We enjoyed driving by, though!

From there, we head to Sylvan Lake, which is very beautiful. The kids and Dad enjoyed climbing hills there.







Dad, Katie, and I started to hike the trail around Sylvan Lake until Katie and I discovered that a lot of rock climbing was involved. We managed to climb up so that we could see the lake through the top of the rocks (Katie above) Then, since one of us was 5 and the other pregnant, we decided that was probably enough and headed back :-)

More to come!!

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