Day 3 - Day 4 Hot Springs, Mt Rushmore

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Day 3-

No internet service for a while - thus the delay in this blog entry - sorry.
We started the day by going to the Mammoth site in Hot Springs, SD. This paleotological site is where they discovered an ancient sink hole with Mammoth bones when excavating for a housing development in the 1970's. Since then they have discovered the remains of over 50 Mammoths - 2 of them Wooly Mammoths and the majority Columbian Mammoths - much larger then the wooly's. We took a guided tour of the now indoor site where active excavation continues. It was pretty neat. We then went to Evan's Plunge which is a hot srings fed gravel bottomed indoor pool with slide, water volley ball, water basketball and other fun things. Ben spent much of his time trying to swing across the pull on gymnastic like rings. We could still see the wildfire burning when we left Hot Springs.

We then drove the 1.5 hours north across the South Dalota praire to Rapid City to see my Uncle Bill and Aunt Phyllis who have lived in Rapid for over 50 years. We stayed at their house and were very grateful for their hospitality. We took a trip up to Dinosaur park on Skyline Drive. This park I remember from my trip here with my family 30 years ago. It is a park of lifesize cement dinosaurs on the top of a hill overlooking the City. We went up to the park both to see dinosaurs but also to find a letterbox.

Fun fact for the day: Camels are related to Mamoths and camel bones have been found at the mamoth site. It is likely that camels originally lived in north america and then later migrated to the middle east/Africa.

Day- 4

Hello everyone! Sorry about not having a blog the past two days. We have not had an internet conection.

We started out our day by going to Mount Rushmore. At Mount Rushmore we went on a ranger led tour. Our tour guide told us all about the mistakes that the carvers made and the problems they ran into while they were carving the four faces into the huge mountain. She brought us on a walkway that went below the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. The tour guide talked about the determination of the artist that dreamed and created one of the nation's treasures as well as the determination of the four men carved on the mountain. As we were eating lunch, mom's phone rang. It was uncle Bill that there was a puddle on the driveway where RoVer had been parked all night. We were going to go to the Crazy Horse monument after Mount Rushmore but on hearing about the problem we decided to check out the RV first. We headed back toward Rapid City trying to get cell phone service to call the rental place to see where they wanted us to take RoVer for a check up. Along the way we came across a RV service center that gave RoVer a check and figured that it was just a loose oil filter that was leaking the oil. We used the land line to finally get through to the rental place and they told us to just get it repaired and they will take care of the cost. So an hour later we were on our way back to Rapid City with RoVer all well and ready to take off for Devils Tower Wyoming in the AM.

We spent the rest of the afternoon swimming with Uncle Bill and Aunt Phyllis at their indoor pool with slide, water fun park, diving, and water basketball. We enjoyed a dinner with them and did a little shopping to get stocked up for the next leg of the trip.

Fun fact for today: Did you know that the artist that did Mount Rushmore also had a dream to build a large cavern behind Mount Rushmore to store all the important records of the United States. He was able to create a cavern (in the shape of a cross) 65 feet before the government found out and threatened to cut off the funding for the monument if he didn't stop. Therefore the "Hall of Records" remained unfinished.

Another fun fact for the day: No one died in the making of Mount Rushmore.

-- Ben/Lisa

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Comments

[Doodleloops]

Answer to Ecology question
Mr. Lehman, The consensus of the Echterlings is that the answer is the amount of available water --very little right now - or usually. Chris

[The Royces]

Cool Mammoths
Wow. Looks like a great stop. We were interested in the Hall of Records behind Mt. Rushmore too. Speaking of Mt. Rushmore, we had a couple of injuries on our trip. When Elliot (11 years) sat down on the wooden benches on the area where you overlook Mr. Rushmore, he got a bunch of wood shards on his shorts and about 15 splinters guess where. I'm hoping the heat wave cools as you drive west.