On the way out of town this morning we stopped at Wayne's Boot Shop to look at the cowgirl boots. The sign looked promising but the only boots I really liked were $1400. They were covered in rhinestones!!!! Once we were out of town we travelled through flat plains surrounded by distant mountains. The road was mostly straight and flat. We passed some antelope like animals from time to time. We don't know if they were wild or not. After a couple of hours of flat road, we came to some enormous mountains. We went through and around the first couple and then started to climb. We went up and up and up. Wyoming seems to have a lot of dinosaur history. We saw a couple of dinosaur places in Cody and now we started passing signs showing how old the rocks were. Some were 330 million years old and some granite was 2.5 billion years old. It was still in excellent condition.
The first few mountains were just rock and then the pine trees came back. At one stage we saw a sign saying we were over 9000 feet up. Once we reached the top, we continued along at that altitude for a while. After a while we started seeing cows. Further along we saw a real life cowboy galloping along on his horse with cowboy boots, a cowboy hat and ropes. His 2 dogs were running along behind the horse. One was wearing a bandana. It was a very cool sight to see!!!!!
What goes up must come down and we started a very long and steep descent. I am very grateful we found out how to put the car in a low gear when going down steep hills. It slowed the car considerably without using the brakes.
Once at the bottom we got on the freeway and stayed on it for several hours. We exited to have lunch at a town called Gillette. We didn't want to go far from the freeway so we stopped at Walmart which had a Subway in it. There were a few tables for eating in and about half of them were occupied by Australians. There was a group of older men & women all wearing badges. We couldn't read what it said so we have no idea what they were doing. It was a bizzare little town for them to be at.
We made another stop for petrol and then crossed the state line into South Dakota. It was about 5pm by the time we arrived in Keystone. It is a very cute tourist town. We walked into town to have dinner and looked in the shops. Most of them were souvenir shops selling tacky t-shirts but there were a couple of nice gift shops and antique shops. We found a restaurant called Ruby's Place which was furnished with old wares and antiques. The bar maids were dressed in saloon type outfits and there was a cowboy playing the guitar in the saloon next door. It was fitting for the town.
We will go to Mt Rushmore in the morning. The park opens at 8am so we intend to be there not long after. We will also visit Crazy Horse which is about 10 miles away.