Serendipity has certainly been on our side on this trip. Our best example of this was Day 18. We left Riverton with the intention of making it to the Badlands area, find a hotel, and see Wind Cave/Mt. Rushmore/Badlands the next day.
We were pleasantly surprised by the progress we were able to make despite yet another construction delay and arrived at Wind Cave National Park just in time for the second to last Natural Entrance tour of the caves. Mark was a little skeptical of having to spend one and quarter hours underground in a cave. Surely, how could a cave possibly be interesting? I reassured him that it would be great and that even if it wasn't it was only $7.00 lost [for his ticket not mine, I was definitely going to love it].
Wind cave is so named because there is a constant current of air rushing into or out of the entrance. When the atmospheric pressure outside is greater, the air rushes into the cave and vice versa. Only 130 miles of the caves have been explored. Apparently, it is also the home of 95% of the world's boxwork formations. Really pretty interesting. Oh, by the way, Mark really liked it.
We completed our tour some time around 7:15 and decided to head towards Mt. Rushmore. Our guess was that we would drive by, see it, and continue towards the Badlands. Shouldn't take too long, it's only 34 miles away right? WRONG! It's 34 miles, but 34 miles through Custer State Park -- Speed Limit 20 mph -- which was more of the windy roads we have come to love occasionally made longer by a traversing herd of bison.
So we arrived at Mt. Rushmore and ask the man at the entry gate how much later the park is open. Imagine our surprise when he tells us we're just in time for the big event of the day -- the lighting of Mt. Rushmore! It was a beautiful program describing the accomplishments of the four great men carved into the rock.
The people of the midwest are quite patriotic. A Boy Scout group led us in the Pledge of Allegiance, we sang the Star Spangled Banner, and honored all of the veterans present. It was a very moving moment, I cried.
Our final adventure of the evening was trying to find a hotel room. We had not anticipated staying in the Mt. Rushmore area very long so had not made any hotel arrangements. By the time we left Rushmore it was 10:30 and too late to drive past Rapid City towards Badlands. "No problem," we thought, "surely Rapid City will have a place." Yeah, wrong again. The only option we had was a very expensive snooty hotel. That was not going to happen. I managed to convince Mark that we should try the Rodeway Inn before giving in to the snooty place because I thought that they would not be in the hotels.com database and so we stood a chance of getting a room. Sure enough I was right and we managed to snatch up one of the last two rooms at the hotel. I think because we worked so hard to get the room and saw our options very limited [no other surrounding city had anything else either] it was probably the happiest we've been in a hotel room in a while.
Tomorrow we will see the Badlands and then go north to Medora and Teddy Roosevelt National Park.
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