More South Dakota Beauty

Typical South Dakota scenery

We've traveled a lot of roads - major and back roads - and always enjoy seeing the countryside and other sights. But on Tuesday, we saw a rather unusual sight - a vehicle towing an airplane. That's right - on a flatbed behind his truck, a man was towing an airplane.

Our first sightseeing stop of the day on Tuesday was at Wind Cave, the country's seventh oldest National Park. This cave was discovered by settlers in the area who heard the fierce winds rushing in and out through a narrow opening. The cave itself was closed because they were making repairs to the elevator. They had been showing a virtual tour of the cave while the cave is closed, but, unfortunately, the virtual tour was not working. (That's our government at work!). So we viewed some of the exhibits in the Visitor Center, and were able to walk down to view the small opening of the cave that was the source of the fierce-sounding winds upon its discovery.

Dark spot in the center is the opening

In addition to the Visitors Center, the other attraction (at least to us) in Wind Cave National Park was a Geology Driving Tour. We stopped at a few sights to view the geology of the area, which included some sandstones, shales, limestones, schists, and pegmatites. 

Pegmatite rock

We continued to be awed by the beautiful sights of the South Dakota countryside.

We drove through Custer State Park and viewed some more beautiful rock formations, mountains, and lakes.

We then drove to Crazy Horse Memorial. We had been in this area about 35 years ago, and they were just beginning to carve the Crazy Horse Memorial. We thought surely that it would be complete now and we would be able to view the final product. But very little progress was actually made since we were last here, whether that was due to lack of funding, lack of caring, or the death of the man doing the carving. I suppose any of these would hinder its progress.

After leaving the as yet unfinished Crazy Horse Memorial, we continued on to Mt. Rushmore. We had visited here also 35 years ago and the gigantic sculpture on the side of a mountain never fails to impress. What a glorious tribute to four great leaders of America: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt! 

   

After viewing the magnificent Mt. Rushmore, we returned to our campsite. We were planning to leave Wednesday to continue west and drive across Montana, but when we woke up Wednesday morning, we had no electricity in the camper. Ahh, such is the camping life - something always goes wrong. We called the "RV Doctor" - yes there really is such a thing - and he makes house calls, or should I say camper calls. He came out to our camper and replaced a part that hopefully will do the trick. He wasn't able to come until early afternoon, so we took advantage of spending an unplanned day hanging around the campground to rest, do laundry, and getting caught up on this blog. So it wasn't a total loss after all. We should still make it to Seattle on time!