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Published: September 3rd 2009
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Claridges at Mt Rushmore.Hello again,
Thursday 27th ,We packed up as usual until Josh went to unplug the trailer and found the electrical cord had welded itself to the plug, Bugger !! So after driving around for an hour and a half , I finally found the parts I needed.So I just cut it off and off we went. From St Louis we headed Northwest, bypassed Kansas City went up from there. From out of the tree laden areas that weve seen for most of the trip. We headed into the flat cropping land of Iowa, Nebraska and into South Dakota. Corn and Soy beans everywhere, The wheat has been harvested , The little towns have become very rural orientated. Like rows of combine harvesters along the main street instead of car yards. Adult superstores and small casinos next to the gas stations are common place around here. The land is alot more Barren. Looks like going through Waiouru. We drove for 9 hrs and stopped at a little town in Nebraska for the night.$22 for the night has to be the cheapest place weve pulled into.
Friday , It was up and on the road again.Through Omaha, Across Iowa where for miles it
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The long boring drive across I-90. was just cropping. Into South Dakota to Sioux Falls and then turn left and head over to Rapid City. We left camp at 8.30am, We got to Sioux Falls about 2pm and the GPS said turn right in 332 miles at Rapid City!!!!! Shit thats about another 6 hours for us. It was a bit demoralising, It is just wide open land. After a while nothing was growing, just tussock grass.It got reaally windy out on the plains and we were getting blown around a bit when I looked in the mirror to see the side of the trailer bulging out.So I pulled over and the wind was blowing in past the front panel and had popped the side out. F........K!! So out with the duck tape and off we set a bit slower now. We finally got to our campground about 8.30pm, Would have been 9.30pm but we crossed another tim zone into Mountain time.
Saturday morning we just got our berings around the place, Kids can ride their ripstiks here as they have a good patch of ashphelt. Josh and I went to talk to the local Rv place but they are all busy this week. On the
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Kids football game we watched. way back we found a school stadium that had Football going on, so we stopped in to watch. It was like a tournament thing between 4 schools. They were playing half the field each, then would have a break and swap over who they were playing. Interseting to watch, Josh and I laughed at all this hype and all the guy had to do was 'catch the ball'!!! One team was no good at throwing so they just kept running in touchdowns. One team kept going backwards then all of a sudden throw one good pass and score a touchdown. We found a mall to go and have a look around, then after tea we went to the County State Fair. Like the A&P show. Walked around the rides for awhile then went to buy tickets to the rodeo and some lady gave us 4 tickets that she said her friends didn't need anymore. At $15 for adults and $8 for the kids that was a good score . So we bought a Bud light Lime to watch the nights entertainment with. Most of the riders were good ole country boys from around the area. One guy was from California
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The gold miners at work !! and they gave him a hard time. It was the final night of the fair and this was Main event for the week, She was a big night out for a lot of the locals thats for sure. Afterwards Tori and i went on one of the rides, then off home.
Sunday was Mr Claridge's big 13th Birthday. He had plenty of cards from very well organised people, which made it a very good morning, I thought he was just going to get a card and some money from us. Then we decided what we should do for the day. He decided that going to Mount Rushmore on your birthday would be pretty cool. So we headed south into Custer state park. $15 to enter the park for a week. So we set off anti-clockwise around the 31 mile loop. We saw Prarie dogs which look like a cross between a ferret and a chipmunk. We thought they would be bigger. Found quite a few deer along the way. Then we got back to the Peter Norbeck visitor center to go panning for gold. She took us across the road to a small creek, They filled their pans with some
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The sign said "Please dont feed the animals" Yeh right. dirt they had gotten from some place that has fools gold and other minerals in it and away they went swirling their little pans for gold. She said one thing you need to be able to do this is lots of patience, so who wants to have a go. That definately not me !! Nor my kids for that matter, after 5 mins of playing in the water they threw it in and went and found rocks in the creek instead. Kylie kept at it and some people even found tiny tiny pieces of garnets. So bloody small I could hardly see them but they got pretty excited about it. From there we headed up the road and came across a big herd of Bison ( Buffalo ) just hanging around beside the road. They are huge !! what an animal, The king of the herd is woolly on his head and shoulders whereas the younger males are woolly all over. Then we drove up Iron mountain road to Mount Rushmore. The windy road up there is amazing, There are 3 tunnels along the way, all were built to see Mt Rushmore thru them. There are these bridges called the
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From a distance. 'Pigtail bridges' as they wind there way around and under each other in a spiral to get down the mountain. Finally we get to Mt Rushmore, What it doesn't show in the photos is where it is. Its in the middle of no where. Once again we watched the movie in a very nice visitors center about the whole idea of carving 4 presidents heads into a mountain. It started as an idea to draw in sightseers ( That worked ) in 1923. So a man called Gutzon Borglum was asked to carve some statues into the rock. They were going to use some of the ' Needles'. These are long skinny rocks around the area, but he decided they were too fragile. So found a large mountain called Mt Rushmore , which large wall of Granite faced southeast so would get sunlight for most of the day. He started in 1927 with a team of men , It took 14 years but only 6 years was actually carving. This was done during the great depression and money was scarce.He spent alot of his time lobbying congress to get funds. $836,000 of the 1 million was federal money. George Washington's
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Up close. head was unveiled in 1930, followed by Jefferson in 1936, Lincoln in 1937 and Roosevelt in 1939. Borglum died in March of 1941. Back to town and we went out to tea at ' Red Lobster' as Josh thought that would be nice and it was. Hopefully a day he will long remember.
Monday we headed down to the ' Crazy Horse Memorial' . This is a Indian memorial to rival Mt Rushmore, thats what I thought when I got there. Its more of a story of one man dedication to something. The Indian chiefs thought they "would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes too". So they invited a man called Korczak Ziolkowski to the black hills to carve ' Crazy Horse'. He started in 1949 at the age of 40. He had won 1st prize at the New York world's fair for his scupture work. He was a strong believer in the free enterprise system, he felt crazy horse should be a nonprofit educational and cultural project, built by the interested public and not the taxpayer. So he twice turned down 10 million dollars in potential federal funding. He started by building
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Crazy horse scupture and the real thing behind him. a set of steps to get up there. Bought an old air compressor and 2000ft of hose and off he went by himself. He knew from the outset Crazy horse was larger than any one person's lifetime. So he and his wife Ruth, prepared three books of detailed plans to be used with his scale models to continue the project. They had 10 children, 5 boys, 5 girls. 7 of them are still working on the mountain today. They now have proper machinery to drill and blast with, tracks to drive up and down with. A huge visitor center where the native indians sell their wears to raise money for the project. It really is an amazing story, one of which I reckon most people wouldn't even know about. I know I didn't. They are having a big day on sunday where you can watch a light show then a night blast after that. So we might head out there again. After Crazy horse we drove through the ' Needles highway'. These strange rocks that poke straight up , More tunnels and narrow windy roads are very scenic. On the way out we passed the Bison again, this time they
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60 years of work. were on the road and we could get better photos of them.
Tuesday, We headed out east on I-90 for about an hour and went to the 'Badlands National Park' This is an area of unusual rock formations. We stopped at the visitor center for another movie presentation on the area and how it cme to be. They re definately very good for people like me who often have no idea why weve come to see something other than Kylie telling me to drive there.It was one of those a million years ago movies that made all this. So we drove around the loop road and yes it was amazing, Bloody hot , but we all got out and walked thru some of the strange shapes and sizes rocks and valleys. At the end of the loop road is the town of Wall. From what i can gather there is nothing really here except for a very clever guy decided that everyone was driving right past his drug store and town and not stopping. So he advertised that if you stopped at 'Wall Drug' store you could have a free cold glass of water or a 5c coffee. It worked
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Looking across the black forest. !! The little town is very busy and his shop is like a mini mall and covers most of the main street. He got signs from all over the world where people have had their photo taken with a "Wall Drug of South Dakota" sign. Photos from Tahiti, Great wall of China, One with Patrick Ewing the basketballer. So yes we helped out them abit and Kylie bought a 5c coffee while we had ice creams. I did repairs to the trailer in the afternoon.
Wednesday was a rest day that started of with waffles, eggs, sausages, toast. Awesome way to start the day !!. Kids did their books, I did this, Kylie did the washing and made some Gluten free food.In the afternoon Josh and I went to see G I Joe at the movies while the girls went to the 'Mall'. Then we went to the Golden Corral for tea. Its a all you can eat buffett. $11 adults, $8 for kids. Not bad as there is something for everyone. Chris took me to one last year and reckons they are called ' The pig trough' as yes there are some very large people in there getting their
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She should be on the cover of women's weekly !!!! moneys worth. After there we walked across the carpark to Walmart for the evening entertainment, Would have been cheaper to drive home !! They are just starting to have some really good end of summer sales.
Thursday, We headed south today to a place called Hot Springs. There they have a very special site. In 1976 a contractor on a bulldozer was clearing a site for a housing project when he dug up some large bones and didnt know what they were. They were Mammouth bones. So the site was shut down and is now a museum and work in progress digging it up. They reckon about 26,000 years ago it was like a hot pool in the middle of no where and the Mammouth would come to drink out of it and fall in and couldn't get out. Over the years dirt would fall in and cover them up then others would fall in also. So there is this massive pit about 50m round with all these bones in it. They have 58 Mammouth so far. Thyve only dug down 20 odd feet and they know its at least 60 odd feet deep so theyve got a bit of
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More rocks along the road. work ahead of them. The guide reckons they dig for 6 weeks a year and spend the rest of the year cleaning it , documenting it , storing it etc. Yep you would have to be a certain type of person to be able to do that job. Afterwards we walked out of there and Josh said " I haven't got any test strips, I used the last one this morning !!" After his mother told him his pedigree we drove aover an hour back to rapid City to get some, before we could have lunch. I think we might just have a quiet afternoon. There is a Summer entertainment thing downtown tonight, so thought we would go and check that out.
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Bruce Burney
non-member comment
Hi Josh. What a geat way to spend birthday and it sounds like you all had a great time. What a wonderful time you all are having and keep up the blogs as it is very interesting. Sounds like Paul is the number one fix it guy. All the best. Bruce