Train's Great Western Adventure Travel Blog Part IV

Day 4 –Denver, CO to Rapid City, SD 6/28/08 Total milage to this point: 1740 miles

We arose early to pack and leave Denver. We met Scott and Carmen at 7:30 a.m. at their apartment and got on the road to Rapid City, SD. We stopped at McDonald’s for Scott to get some breakfast and me to use the bathroom before we hit the road.

On the way out of the city, I made the mistake of listening to the woman on the GPS who gave me the instructions to exit about 1/10^th of a second too late. Scott called me as he watched me head toward Colorado Springs to tell me I went the wrong way.

After 5 minutes of driving through “the Denver that never was”, we were back on the road to Wyoming.

It was going to be a long day, as Google estimates driving time to be about 7 hours.

We caught up with and passed Carmen and Scott as they pulled over multiple times because their dog got carsick. Scott had to stop at one of those ‘trucker’ showers to clean up. Yuck.

So we stopped at the Wyoming welcome center to wait on them and take pictures. It was just before this we saw our first herd of buffalo on the side of the road. Plenty of antelope too!

Lots of open plain to look at and we passed through Cheyenne, I think the smallest state capitol in the west. We did see the Air Force Base where they have all the missiles at though…pretty cool.

We stopped at a Burger King in Wyoming to eat which was...pretty much like any other Burger King.

We drove about 7 hours and made one right turn. Pretty open space.

We arrived at the Crazy Horse memorial first and stopped and toured the site for around an hour. It’s privately owned and funded, which I didn’t know, as they refuse to sell to the government. The tour included a 20 minute movie and lots of museum pieces. Parker wanted a piece of the mountain to take home so Carmen donated some change and got him one. Just what I needed to carry 5000miles across the country…a piece of granite.

We drove on the Cosmos mystery Cabin area because we had some time to kill and Jennifer had been there as a kid and had fond memories of it. We drove by Mount Rushmore to get there and took an initial “picture from the road”. Cosmos was fun and Parker really got into it volunteering for several demonstrations. “I survived it!” was the catch phrase.

We went back into Keystone to eat at Ariba Mexican restaurant which was pretty good but Emma was voicing her discontent the whole time and it was hard to enjoy it.

From there, we hurried down to Mt. Rushmore where we had just enough time to run through the gift shop and change a diaper before watching the lighting ceremony from 8-9 p.m. It started with a film about the four presidents and a talk by a park ranger. The sun was down so it got pretty cold pretty fast. Emma was throwing a fit by now and Jen had to walk up to the observatory part to avoid the screams disturbing everyone around us. She came back after 20 minutes or so when she fell asleep. At the end of the night after the lighting ceremony, Scott got called up on stage along with all veterans to thank them for their service. It was very moving.

After it was over, Parker ran back to the gift shop to get his latest obsession, “bobbleheads”…(Thanks Scott.).

It was getting late at this point and we had a 30 minute drive back to Rapid City to our hotel. We wound up getting to the America’s Best Value Inn in Rapid City around 11pm.

It was a good day.