The second half of the tour was a lot of driving time, with stops along the way.

On Day 5 there was literally not much to write home about as it was all on the road. Our camp for the night was in the shadow of Devil's Tower National Monument, which is basically a big rock in the middle of nowhere. For some reason it didn't make it into the Lonely Planet USA book, but it did look pretty at sunrise, as it glowed orange, so it was something worth seeing.

Day 6 was the one I've been waiting for... Mount Rushmore. It might just be four presidents' heads carved into the rock, but this one did make it into the Lonely Planet, and the Ultimate Travelist top 500 nonetheless. After an unnecessary amount of photos, we moved on to the Crazy Horse memorial. This is the native American version of Rushmore, being constructed to commemorate their leader Crazy Horse . However, it's not exactly finished. It has been being built since the 80s and currently only has a face, instead of the full design which also includes his arm and a horse.

Day 7 was another long drive day. First stop was in Wall, South Dakota, the town with possibly the most advertised drug store in the World. The billboards for Wall Drug start at least 50 miles away and we counted 62 of them advertising thier milkshakes, homemade pie, 5c coffee, burgers, new dinosaur, chuck wagon quartet and who could forget the free ice cold water! And when we arrived it wasn't a disappointment. The milkshake was awesome and as well as watching the new dinosaur eating, we also found a monkey playing the piano, measured our weight and horoscope on the same machine and had our fortunes told by Pappy the cowboy.

Overnight stop was in Mitchell, SD, home of the Corn Palace, which was the first stop on day 8. It's basically a sports/entertainment venue that is decorated on the outside with 275,000 ears of corn. Weirdly we stumbled into a high school volleyball tournament! After crossing into Minnesota, we came to Austin, a town that had something even better to offer. Not a tasteless tourist trap, we visited the SPAM museum. Yep. Importantly, I learnt that I'm 19 cans of spam tall, Big Ben is 1,163 and the British celebrate SPAM Appreciation Week every year!

The last night of camping was in mosquito land, otherwise known as Great River Bluff state park. As we'd run out of money in the food kitty, we went out for dinner at Famous Dave's Barbecue, and that little taste of civilisation made it so much more difficult to go back to sleeping in the tents for one last time. Once again, camping was made more fun by the rain that started at 3am and pretty much didn't stop til we got in the van.

The final notable stop on the way into Chicago was the Mousehouse cheesehaus in Wisconsin. Sadly they didn't have any snack size cheese so I didn't get any to take away, but I did taste their chocolate flavour cheese.

And that is the end of my Intrepid tour. Some mentions for my Aussie tour mates for making it a great 9 days: time-lapse Tami, an awesome tent mate whose southern Christian ways brightened up every day; Kylie for being my s***head buddy on the rare occasion that we actually had time to play (and when she wasn't shopping); and last but definitely not least, my two new children Brad and Teal for being English, considerate, pointing out all the trains, telling the time in bongs, complaining about power lines, losing M&Ms and generally being a constant source of laughter. Thanks guys.