8:45 am We departed for Mt. Rushmore. We decided to ignore Mandy and take an “improved gravel road” which looked to us like a road that was once paved but not maintained, definitely not a gravel road by our Iowan standards (not that I'm an Iowan, mind you). We had a great drive to the “dead guys” (as Stephanie and I jokingly refer to the four presidents). We drove through three tunnels (one was a double tunnel), met met a group from Chugiak, AK in a diesel Ford Explorer (they didn’t recognize my sisters last name), took the Pigtail round-a-bout thingy and spied the four "guys" from a distance.
11:00 am We finally made it to the Mt. Rushmore visitor center… We had to pay $10 to park… but it is a year pass and there are no other fees, oh well! We took lots of pictures, including a sad Morgan (something to do with Uncle Michael and Pickle Loaf sandwich some 20 years ago). We walked as much of the Presidential trail as we could, with the two strollers, checked out the gift shop, squashed a penny and headed out.
12:30 We pulled in to see the Crazy Horse monument. Jeremy insists nothing has changed since his childhood visit, and they want $20 for us to enter the park, so we turned around and took a picture from the road… good enough. We stopped later to look at some Buffalo along the road (and took photos, of course).
1:00 pm We found the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, SD. We started out taking a tour and then visited the gift shop where Jeremy had Blythe and Ephraim in hysterics over a mammoth hand puppet; it is, unfortunately gone when I went back to get it! After the tour Morgan got to do his Junior Paleo Dig; he found a mammoth vertebrae after a lot of digging! We did not leave empty handed... Morgan picked out a glow-in-the-dark sweatshirt and I got a deck of cards (the one thing I can’t seem to keep myself from collecting).
As we left the site, everyone fell quickly asleep, so we leisurely head back to camp, stopping to take pictures of Buffalo, Prairie Dogs, Prong Horns, and other assorted "stuff".
In the evening we had dinner, roasted marshmallows and took a little walk before bed. Ephraim did not nurse tonight; I guess I am officially done nursing. Tonight, I decided we needed more warmth. The kiddos are all bundled in long pants and sweatshirts… I planned on sleeping in my thin “summer” sweater. As I huddled under the blankets while Jeremy showered, I remembered we have the kids’ quilts in the van (thank you Miss Willa)! These four blankets manage to cover me and kept me a bit warmer… Blythe slept through the night without any problems.
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