The Three L’s Travel The West

An easy start today.  I slept until 8AM, and let Louie and Lynnae sleep until they woke up (about an hour later).  We were too late for the hotel’s continental breakfast, so we decided to seek out our breakfast.

After I checked the oil level in the Buick and added a quart to top it off, we were off to Sonic for breakfast.  We noted there were hundreds of dead bugs under the hood and on the radiator.

After breakfast, we filled up the gas tank at $4.05/gallon and headed toward Mt. Rushmore.  It was only a 30-minute drive from Rapid City, and I think the number of motorcycles outnumbered the cars on the road.  Sturgis week is coming up, and I think they are starting to arrive now.

The town of Keystone was very small and lined with Black Hills Gold shops and other souvenir shops.  Harleys lined the streets and I tried to picture them as horses instead to go back in time.  If we ever come back this way, I will definitely stay in Keystone.  Cute hotels and you can walk to everything.

We arrived at Mt. Rushmore and paid our $10.00 to park.  It didn’t seem too crowded as we found a great place to park and didn’t have to fight crowds.  Took plenty of pictures and strolled along a short trail to the base of the monument.  It was awesome to look upon something so huge.  (I swear I saw a zit on Washington’s nose).  As we contemplated the work involved, Lynnae suddenly asked me if this was the same place that was in “National Treasure; Book of Secrets”.  I advised yes, but you couldn’t get in behind the faces.

After dropping a few dollars at the gift shop (I found some great books about Laura Ingalls Wilder), we headed out of the park toward the Christmas Shop to get some local ornaments.  Then we stopped at the Bear Wildlife Park.  This is a drive through park where you are right in with the animals.  We had a pair of reindeer come right up to the car.  The best part was the bears.  There had to be at least 50 grizzly and black bears ambling around their enclosure as we drove through.  I was hoping one of them would start licking the bugs off the bumper, but no luck!We arrived back in Rapid City and took a short rest until dinner.  We walked across the street to the “Golden Corral” restaurant and took in their buffet.  They had a lot to offer, but the wait staff was very slow in our section.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.