The Roberts Family: Cross Country Roadtrip: Mount Rushmore, SD

I dont have a new map for this part of the trip because we really haven't moved very far. There is so much to see in this part of the country. We actually came to Rapid City, South Dakota right at the beginning of Sturgis Bike Week. Its a huge deal up here, and they have about 50,000 bikers decend on the small town of Sturgis, SD.

We started our morning off at Mount Rushmore. Jeremy's first comment when he saw it was "awwww, come on... why is Candice's face not on it!" Maybe we watch a little too much Phineas and Ferb.

Jeremy loved this part of the museum at the park because when you pushed the handle down it would make an explosion on the TV to show how they created the president's profiles.

Most of the places we went were in the Black Hills National Forrest. One small section was called Custer State Park and I think that was our favorite part of the Black Hills. There were tall "needles" of rock that stuck up on the mountians. To me, they resembled Flibberaloo on Veggietales because the rocks looked like someone carefully stacked them on top of each other and if you blew on them too hard they would fall.

There were a couple of tunnels like this one that were barely big enough for a car, much less a small SUV.

On the other side of the mountian was this amazing grassland where 1,500 buffalo and even more staghorn deer roamed around. All those brown dots in the distance are buffalo.

This one was standing on the road.

There were also tons of prarie dogs. They are so much fun to watch!

On the other side of Custer was Wind Cave. We tried to go on a cave tour, but all the tours were done for the day. It was a little disapointing, but there was a ton to see on the surface.

We kept going south toward Hot Springs and stopped in the Mammoth Site (just for Jeremy!)

This is an actual hot springs that was discovered several years ago when construction workers were building a housing development.

When we arrived in Rapid City, we saw this guy on the news. He found a new mammoth skull on Saturday. The cool thing was that a skull had not been found in over ten years.

The next day we went to Wanda's favorite place, Crazy Horse. This memorial is still under constuction... and has been for almost 60 years. This thing is HUGE! They said that all four of the presidents on Mount Rushmore would fit on the face of Crazy Horse. Really, you should click on the link for all the information about this mountian.