Day ½ and 1 – Mt. Rushmore Trip

We left about 6:30 on Wednesday night for our Mt. Rushmore trip. We drove to Rawlins and stayed the night at a campground then drove the rest of the way on Thursday morning. This is pretty much what we saw the whole drive…

(This is the Sellers' camper)

I didn’t get a picture of the Welcome to South Dakota sign. This is a South Dakota cloud though. It’s very pretty…

I guess it looks a little like a Utah cloud…

We stopped in at Jewel Cave on the way to the campground. It was very cool!

One of the rules at Jewel Cave was not to touch anything…

There is spelunking at this cave. There is a cement box with an 8 ½” opening with a sign on it saying that if you can get through this hole you can go on the spelunking tour. So of course everyone standing around waiting for their tour of the cave to start HAS to try to get through the hole. Our friend Brian tried. He got stuck! Scott had to lift the top off for Brian to get out.

After another man about his size got through he tried again without a belt and wallet and got through.

We got to Flintstones Campground and I noticed that there was a Holiday Inn across the street. When we first started planning this trip with our friends the Sellers, we invited our friend Lasca to come too. She doesn’t like to camp and she asked if there was a hotel. I said, “There are cabins.” She looked at me like I was just about dense and said, “I said a HO-TEL.” It was hilarious! Maybe you had to be there… Anyhoo – there WAS in fact a hotel just across the street. Sorry Lasca! You could have come!

There is a mini golf place here and so we got the kids some balls and they played for a bit. Dallin had never been mini golfing before and didn’t know what to do. Brian helped him out.

Maggie saw what was going on and when the ball went into the hole people got happy. So when she put hers in the hole she jumped up and down for joy!

This is just a totally Maggie picture. Hair in her face, shirt is a mess, dirt on her pants with a look on her face that says, “ya – so???”

We went to Mt. Rushmore to see it first with the lights on. It was so amazing. Of course I left my tripod at home and didn’t get a really great shot of it in the night. It was totally awesome to see it in the dark and then watch as the lights turned on. I can’t believe that people actually carved these great men into the mountain….