An interesting tidbit to show we aren't in Virginia anymore, last night (Thursday) it got down to thirty-five degrees. Thank you lord for electric heat! We had in interesting day. We started off by returning to Custer State Park to take a truly scenic drive up to Rushmore. The drive was great, three small tunnels that framed Rushmore as you drive through. In order to kill some time, we took a three mile hike through the prairies. It was very pretty and no...

A slight change of plans. We decided to save Rushmore for tomorrow and today we did the Crazy Horse memorial and Custer State Park. Crazy Horse was much more interesting than I anticipated. It was started in 1948 and is no where near done. The face was finished in 1998. The anticipation is that by 2030, they will have finished his hand, started on the horses mane and done Crazy horses hair. That will still be a long way from finished. The original sculpt...

We are having a quiet lazy sort of day. After a latish start we drove into Rapid City to replenish our groceries. We took the opportunity to visit the Chapel in the Hills,a small chapel that duplicates one in Norway. It was very different. I'll post some pictures when I get to a place with stronger wifi signal. They even had a small museum with statues of Oly and Lena out front. For anyone not familiar with Oly and Lena they are a fictional old couple who ar...

After watching the sun rise over the Missouri, we headed west over the prairie. We are starting to see more cattle and the crops are mainly sunflowers and maize. If you haven't ever seen the tassel on maize it is a bright red (sorry no picture). Our first stop was the prairie homestead. This was an original homestead with a sod house. There was also a small colony of white prairie dogs. (Pictures of both in South Dakota album). Then it was on to Badlands...

A few general travel comments before I get to the events of the day. After days of flat, flat, flat countryside, it was good to see some gently rolling hills in eastern Nebraska. Now in South Dakota we are back to flat. However, to add some visual interest, many of the road surfaces are pink. According to Dale, my road building expert, the asphalt is overlaid with a gravel containing a large amount of pink Quartz and eureka, pink roads. We made a short stop ...