We started today with driving on the Needles Highway. This is a beautiful drive in the Black Hills. Even though these are not quite mountains, the Black Hills has a beauty all their own. The hills look black from afar, thus their name. This drive was called Needles because the rock formations look like needles. There was even one that looked like it was the eye of a needle. There were too many people at that stop, so we didn't stop, we had too much to do today.

Then we stopped at Wind Cave. Paul and I did the Natural Entrance Cave Tour. We didn't actually go through the natural entrance. It was too small. This was a pretty easy tour. 300 steps, but most of them were going down. It was very cool to see inside a cave. We got to see the natural state of the cave, or also known as complete darkness. I have done that a few times, and it still makes me a bit nervous after a while. It is just sooooo dark! Overall the tour was really neat. I'm so glad I did it.

On our way up to our hotel in Keystone, we drove through the Wildlife loop of Custer State Park. Paul's dad said that we would definitely see animals on this road. But it took a while. It seemed that we drove for a many miles before we actually saw animals. And these animals were seen UP CLOSE! Our first encounter was with "wild" burros. I put wild in quotes because these donkeys came up to the windows of cars for handouts. We were taking pictures of some donkeys at another car with our windows down, when all of a sudden one walked right by my window and stuck its head in Connie's window! It freaked us both out! These burros were right in the street so we had to take it slow. But not as slow as our next encounter. There were a ton of buffalo in the road. This is called a South Dakota traffic jam. There were so many cars backed up that we couldn't even see the buffalo at first. These buffalo were not afraid of the cars either. They would just cross the road without worrying about the huge things coming up by them. Wow!

Once we got away from the animals, we drove on a road that had tunnels that lined up with Mount Rushmore. We couldn't get any good pictures because there were too many cars on the road. But it was a really neat surprise as you are going through the tunnel to see the Presidents perfectly framed by the tunnel.

We were staying at the Powder House Lodge for this evening. The reason I am mentioning this is because this is where John and Connie stayed during their honeymoon. It was such a cute place! I can see why they wanted to go back to this place. We were able to sneak in dinner here as well before moving on to Mount Rushmore. Paul and I shared the game sampler. It had buffalo BBQ short rib, elk medallion with sauteed apples, and some sort of game sausage. It was so yummy!

Our final activity of today was to go to the lighting ceremony of Mount Rushmore. I have been to see the faces twice, but never at night. It was started by a ranger talk. He did a great speech about having the American spirit without any preachy-ness. Then we watched a video that reviewed each president and their impact on American history. After the video, we looked up and the faces were lit up. The talk and the video were great, but the lighting of the monument left something to be desired. I expected there to be a spotlight on each president as he was being talked about, or some sort of interaction with the lights and the speech. After all this, the flag was brought down. All the veterans in the audience were invited up to the stage to be honored. I couldn't believe how many veterans were up there. What a great way to end the night.