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May 31, 2010 - "Fire in the hole!"...and no...I don't mean that kind! Sickos! Happy Memorial Day to all from South Dakota. We slept in a bit this morning and still found time to pack a lot in. We're so used to having to move our clocks ahead an hour, it's been kind of weird setting them back.
The temperatures were chilly last night, but not too bad. The extra blankets we packed helped. We began our day with a return trip to Crazy Horse. They had a blast scheduled and we didn't want to miss that. We arrived with time to tailgate out the back of the truck. We're getting good at throwing together some simple sandwiches. Karen even invented a new sandwich yesterday...Peanut Butter and Lettuce? Yes, lettuce. You know...it wasn't that bad.
It's funny how if you ask the right person, you can get some inside tips on where and when to be in a certain place. Most everyone was in the upper parking lot at Crazy Horse staking out their spots for the blast. We were concerned that if we stayed outside we would miss the loud speaker announcements and the count down. We would
have been right. I had asked a volunteer and he confirmed our concern. I took the time to ask him where he would watch the blast and he told me...in a quiet voice, "You know...if it were me, I would watch from right over there. You'll see and hear everything." He had pointed to the corner of the "Bus Tour" shack. He told us that there would be a bus driver standing nearby and we would hear his two way radio traffic from the control center and the men on the mountain. He was right and we took our places.
They sound a five minute warning before the blast for all to hear. The radio counted down from three minutes, to one minute, to 5...4...3...2...Fire in the hole! I must admit, the blast was a little anti-climatic, but how many kids get to grow up, return to the monument and say, "You know when I was 13 and 9, we watched them carve this monument." I hope it was worth their memory. Isaac asked and was told that the explosion today took down 18,000 tons of rock off of the monument. You couldn't really tell. There were no large rocks being sent flying, but you did see some smoke. We took video and will try to download if we can figure it out.
From there, we headed to Mount Rushmore. It wasn't too awful of a drive, shorter than I expected. We came to one pull off that had a picuresque view that we decided to stop for, photograph and have a picnic lunch before finishing the drive. As I got out of the truck, I turned around and, sure enough, there sat George peering down at us. Apparently, the pull off was so travelers could stop and take a profile picture of the first face on the mountain. It was pretty neat. Isaac found the National Treasure 2 cave at the same spot. Not really, but it was fun pretending.
We reloaded and made the final drive to the monument. It's a pretty awesome site to see. We took in a short interpretive walk with one of the young naturalists. He had to refer to his little notebook, but he really did a good job of it. He overheard Isaac and I talking about National Treasure 2 and joined in the conversation. He told us that the first thing he did when he started working at Mt. Rushmore was to go find the lake they used in the movie.
We finished our time there with a movie narrated by Tom Brokaw about the building of Mt. Rushmore. We decided to go back to Custer State Park to take in just a little bit more of the park before departing tomorrow. It's back on the road for us. We've managed to see two buffalo, alot of deer and some pronghorn antelope. We'll see what is instore for us as we continue the journey. - J.
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Vicky
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Jim and Karen - these have all been fascinating!!! I just subscribed this afternoon, then I was online tonight to make some work changes and I got all the Emails of the blogs from the last few days. You are having a trip of a lifetime - I'm so happy for you that you are getting to do this!!!!!