July 14-15th, day 3 & 4

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Well we inended to get up early and go to Mt Rushmore right away but we were behind schedule as we discovered the campground did in fact have showers down by the beach, sw we took advantage of them. So, we decided to run into Rapid City first to pick up somethings we needed and then get to Mt Rushmore in the afternoon.

Rapid city and the tourist sprawl toward Mt Rushmore is incredible compared to the last time Patti & I were there about 15 years ago. It took me a while to get used to those curvey mtn roads and those narrow tunnels, but the views are worth it.

The plan to visit Rushmore later in the afternoon was a good one as there was no line for parking...and the $10. parking fee is good for the rest of the calender year (if anyone wants ours, let us know, ..its for sale - cheap!). The buildings at Rushmore are all changed since we were last there as well. Its very well done. Even though the parking lot was full it didnt really seem that crowded. Seeing the faces up there in real life is always great. Even Nate & Katie were impressed. Katie found the same crack in Lincolns nose I saw 15 years ago, but sadly we did not see our cousin "Moth" no matter how hard we looked.

Back at the campground, we dined on our pie iron pizza sandwiches and finished off with dutch oven peach cobbler - yum!

The next day (wednesday) we drove out to Sheridan Lake north of Mt Rushmore and rented a pontoon boat for the afternoon and early evening. The weather was nice and we had a great time swimming in the lake, unfortunatley the fish were not biting. The only bad thing about the lake was no matter how hard we tried, we couldnt get away from the noise and waves of all the water skiers, tubers and Jet skis zipping around. There were about 8 of them on this lake which wasnt very big, and this was a wednesday, cant imigine what it would be like on a weekend.

We finished up the day with a good mexican dinner at the Holy Terror mexican restaurant in Keystone. It was very good!

We got back to the campground around 10pm dead tired and went straight to bed only to be woken up around 1am by a SCREAMING LOUD hail storm. We literally had to plug our ears it was so loud in the tent camper. The cieling vent was open but by the time we thought of it, it was virtually filled with hail, so we had nothing to to but throw down towels to sop up the dripping water, which is not much of an inconvienience compared to if we had been using a tent.

Fortunately in the morning light, no damage was done to either the tent camper or my pick up - but there were a lot of empty campsites where there were tenters the night before.

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Photos

Katie at the binoculars
Katie finds the crack in Lincoln's nose