Posts Tagged “wildlife”

More Yellowstone comparisons!

Here are some lady elk lounging by a river in 1979:

and in 2008…

We have soooo many more to post, but we’ve been super busy and haven’t had much blogging time. Stay tuned though!

Settle in, everybody, because we did a lot of stuff today! First, we went here:

Going on the Ben & Jerry’s factory tour in Waterbury, Vermont, has been a longtime dream of mine (akin to seeing Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon), so it was very exciting to fulfill it today. We got to see them packing coffee ice cream, and we enjoyed a sample of exotic Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream at the end of the tour. Plus, we got to stand in a giant pint:

No photography allowed in the actual manufacturing & packing room, but I was allowed to snap through the window of the QC room:

Hooray!

Next, we ventured to Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks in Montpelier, Vt. It’s a working maple sugarhouse where they make maple syrup, sugar, creams, etc. We learned all about the sugaring process from a video we watched in the Woodshed Theatre:

Then we got to wander around and look at equipment and buy things (they weren’t making syrup or anything today; the sugaring season is really, really short and it’s still too warm at this point). We had some delicious maple ice cream and a tasting of all four maple syrup grades!

For some reason, I apparently forgot to take photos of all the sugaring equipment and stuff, but never fear because our next destination was also maple-related! It was the Maple Grove Farms maple candy plant in St. Johnsbury, Vt., and they had sugaring equipment there, too, so I got some pictures there and can explain it. Traditionally, maple trees were tapped and fitted with a little spout and a bucket to catch the sap like this:

Nowadays, though, most producers use a more modern setup involving plastic tubing. This saves them a lot of work moving the sap around. By the way, the tree decides how much sap it’s going to yield, and this depends on the temperatures and such; you can’t force the tree to produce more sap than it’s going to do naturally. The sap comes out very slowly (for example, it would take half a day to a full day to fill a typical bucket like the one above, depending on the age of the tree and the temps), and it takes 35 to 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of maple syrup!

Once extracted, the sap is placed in an evaporator like this one:

The stove part is below (a wood fire burns behind the doors you see at the bottom), and the sap is poured into the trays above and boiled down into syrup.

Maple Grove Farms’ main gig is making maple candy. They get the syrup from local farms and then basically just whip it up into fondant on vintage equipment (all their equipment is vintage); the fondant gets poured into molds, the molds are left to dry overnight, then the candy gets shaken out by hand. After that it is dipped into a vat of maple syrup here:

This forms a crust on the outside of the candy that acts as a natural preservative. Nice! Then the candy is packed by hand and sold. They also make a bunch of bottled products. They weren’t making candy anymore by the time we got there today (around 1:00 or 1:30), but we still had an interesting little tour.

After that, we headed up to Cabot, Vt., to visit the Cabot cheese plant!

This was especially interesting in light of my new cheese knowledge. They make their cheese at Cabot the same way we did at Ricki’s yesterday except (obviously) it’s on a much, much larger scale. Here they are breaking up their curds!

After Cabot, we went back to St. Johnsbury (we had to zigzag a bit today because of the various factories’ tour hours!) so we could go to the Dog Chapel. I think many of you are familiar with artist Stephen Huneck; I have a vague memory of seeing his work in a gallery or shop or something in Annapolis — maybe on State Circle?? He does all this work involving dogs:

So, when I saw a brochure for the Dog Chapel in Vermont and figured out it was also a gallery, I wanted to go check it out. The chapel is a little New England church–shaped building, but instead of the usual religious symbols all around, it has dogs (like the dog angel on top of the chapel):

But I was totally unprepared for the inside. It has dog (and a few cat) sculptures all around and pews with dogs carved into them, but more importantly, there are small pieces of paper and thumbtacks, and the walls are covered with photos, notes, and memorials visitors have written for their dearly departed dogs.

It was, as you can imagine, completely overwhelming and amazing and touching and sad and wonderful. Luckily, there are boxes of Kleenex around. This was just so unexpected but really good and special.

After we picked ourselves up and recovered from that experience, we headed east into New Hampshire!

We didn’t linger in New Hampshire very much, though, because we were trying to get into Maine before it got too dark so we could get a picture of the Maine welcome sign. When we crossed over into Maine, it had gotten pretty dark, and we had to pull over so I could get this fine photograph:

No welcome sign in Maine, apparently. Someone else had pulled over nearby, and we couldn’t figure out why, but then Brian spotted the enormous moose standing right by the side of the road!!! OMG! He was much closer than our previous moose friends, and I guess I already knew the moose was a large animal, but um… he was really big. And I don’t think he was a huge fan of people staring at him, to be honest with you. Because of the lack of light, it was very challenging to get a photo, but Brian did manage to get this one!

I can’t believe we’ve now had two random moose sightings. Thanks, Maine!

Today was all about driving and trying to get as far east as possible, so I thought I wouldn’t have anything to report… but I do!

First of all, when we came into Georgetown, Colo., last night, we noticed a sign for a bighorn sheep “viewing area” in town. Before we left this morning, we went into the Georgetown Welcome Center to get the scoop. We really wanted to see a bighorn sheep to add to our collection of large wild mammals we’ve gotten to see on our trip. The lady at the welcome center told us they have this huge herd of bighorn sheep that live near the town, and she directed us to the viewing area (where there is information as well as pay telescopes) and also told us the next town over often enjoyed the pleasure of bighorn sheep standing in residents’ yards. Soooo, we were very determined, and after trying the viewing area and making two trips across a small stretch of I-70 and back, we were successful!!!

They’re kind of hard to see because they are the same color as the rocks, but these were relatively easy to spot because some dude had decided to double park his car on the shoulder of I-70 and walk straight into the herd with his point-&-shoot camera. Um… wild animals are dangerous?! But go for it, I guess. Anyway, because this guy had disrupted the sheep, they were walking around a bit, possibly in order to get the best angle from which to charge the guy and ram him in the chest. We didn’t stick around to find out. Instead, we drove to Kansas!

(I have to tell you that before we left Colorado, we visited the Colorado Welcome Center at Red Rock Amphitheater, which is a really interesting place where there is a natural amphitheater formed by rocks. We were hoping to find something quick and iconic we could do when we passed through Denver, but the guy we spoke with at the Welcome Center [who was very nice and quite enjoyable to talk to, but reminded Brian of Abe Simpson] had no suggestions whatsoever for Denver and instead told us all about a restaurant in Abilene, Kansas. He also had a lot of difficulty remembering the names of things; for example, he referenced “a big hole in the ground.” He meant the Grand Canyon. We loved him!!)

We made a stop in Goodland, Kan., to see this giant easel:

That easel is 80 feet tall. See Brian (who is 6′2″ tall) in the bottom right corner of the photo? The Van Gogh sunflower reproduction is 24 by 32 feet. Pretty awesome, Goodland, Kansas!

As if that weren’t enough, on the back of the painting, we discovered a bird condo.

See them??

The next highlight of the day was finding a place that had gas for $2.85 a gallon:

I haven’t seen numbers like that in a while. Other than that, the rest of day was mostly like this:

We’re now at the very, very lovely Econo Lodge in Junction City, Kansas, and I mean it when I say it is lovely here. Its loveliness is especially poignant tonight because we had to leave our first hotel, the “Red Carpet Inn,” because it was infested. I sure wish I were joking, but I’m not. That’s what we get, I guess, for trying to save, like, five dollars. Really, almost every place we’ve stayed in has been completely fine and at least clean; I’ve stayed in a lot of cheap motels in my life, and this is the first time I’ve actually had to get my money back and go elsewhere! But anyway, the Econo Lodge suffers no such problem, and we are clean, happy, and unafraid to use the shower. Plus, I think my heart rate is coming down from my near-panic attack in our former room. Hooray!

We’ll have another day of driving tomorrow. I can’t promise more bighorn sheep and giant easels, but you never know!

Our day began in Moab, where we had breakfast at Eklecticafe (a fun place with good food — another Utah haven with vegetarian choices, organics, etc. — we quite liked it except for some reason the girl at the table next to us decided to have an in-depth discussion with someone who worked there about her recent medical procedure complete with bloody, vomity details… kind of spoiled my appetite!!), then we visited Lin Ottinger’s Rock Shop:

(Scott, is this where the guy wouldn’t let you bring in your coffee??)

We went there because we had a coupon for a free dinosaur bone, which we got. Awesome! It’s our first rock shop trip (we’ve seen dozens along our route, but we’ve never actually gone into one).

Anyway, then we went into Arches National Park! It was very exciting!! We saw so many great things even within our relatively limited time. For example… the Three Gossips!

A place where an arch probably used to be next to Sheep Rock! (They all fall down eventually, you know.)

Check out Sheep Rock!! It was one of my favorites of the day.

Balanced Rock!

Windows!!

Double Arch!

Of course, the iconic Delicate Arch!

And Brian’s personal favorite of the day, Skyline Arch!

We saw one of the handful of whiptail lizards (the only wildlife we observed today) we got to meet on the short trail up to Skyline Arch:

Yay. We agreed that Arches was one of the most beautiful and interesting places we’ve been on the entire trip. We hope to come back and hike more of the trails!

After all that, we left Arches and went up to I-70. I think we better get used to looking at this sign:

We’re going to be seeing it quite a bit over the next few days as we head home. When we first decided to go on this trip, we thought we would be able to enjoy a leisurely drive both out west and back east. Of course, we didn’t really count on getting sick in South Dakota!! So, we have to be back by Saturday at the latest so I have a few hours to recover before I teach on Sunday. Fortunately, Arches didn’t take as long as we had allotted for it, and we were able to eliminate a couple of other places we had hoped to visit on the return trip. In a way, I think it’s fitting that Arches was our final planned destination before heading home, since Utah started it all for us!

We drove through Utah and entered Colorado again before the debate started:

Tonight we’re in Georgetown, Colo., at the “uniquely western-themed” Super 8. It’s a perfectly nice place, but the woman at the desk acted like she was doing us a huge favor by honoring our reservation (and we all know how I feel about sub-par customer service). Hopefully we won’t become ill from the secondhand smoke fumes seeping from next door into our non-smoking room! Lovely!!

We got up this morning in Cortez and drove to Mesa Verde National Park. Mesa Verde is famous for the many ruins of cliff dwellings (structures used as homes, communal areas, ceremonial places, etc., built into the sides of cliffs) of the Ancestral Puebloans in the 12th and 13th centuries. It takes quite a while to get into the park (probably about an hour); the visitors center is about 15 miles from the park entrance, but because you have to drive a bunch of switchbacks and the like, it takes quite a while to get there, and then the cliff dwellings themselves are beyond the visitors center. So on our drive out, we enjoyed the diversion of seeing a deer convention:

There are many, many cliff dwellings within the park, but only a handful are actually open to the public. To see most of the major sites, you have to buy a ticket for a ranger-guided tour at the visitors center. We were able to get tickets to two different sites: Cliff Palace and Balcony House. Cliff Palace was first!

Cliff Palace is really interesting and beautiful. We had a great guide who was very passionate and informative. No one knows for sure what exactly went on in the cliff dwellings or why they were abandoned, but they think that Cliff Palace was probably used primarily for ceremonial activities due to the very large number of kivas (rooms used for religious rituals) in the site.

In order to get in and out of these sites, the Ancestral Puebloans apparently just scaled the cliffs with their bare hands. We didn’t have to do that, but we did have to climb a series of ladders and the like to get in and out of Cliff Palace. It was a mere preview of things to come!

Our next tour was at Balcony House. To get in there, we had to climb this 32-foot ladder:

Eek. It wasn’t too scary, though, as long as we followed our guide’s advice to look straight ahead (never look down!) while climbing. Anyway, this site was a residence for two families. At Cliff Palace, you stand around at an overlook of the site before taking the tour; not so with Balcony House (to see the whole site, you have to go to another trail), so it’s quite a bit more difficult to photograph, but we did our best!

Getting out of Balcony House was quite a thing. The guide (accurately) called it the “Indiana Jones exit.” First we had to crawl through a narrow tunnel:

(That’s not Brian, by the way; that’s just some bloke. Sorry, British guy we secretly photographed!)

After that, we had to climb more ladders and then scale this rock thing where you have to place your feet in toeholds and hold on to metal chains on the side so you don’t fall off the cliff (!!):

The fear and the high altitude just made the whole thing more intense, but we both survived!

After we recovered from that adventure, we went to Spruce Tree House, which is one of the few sites in the park where you can take a self-guided tour:

(To reach this one, by the way, we just had to walk down a paved trail… no ladders or rock scaling required.)

At Spruce Tree House, there is a reconstructed kiva with a roof and everything that you may climb into, which was very interesting:

We had a lovely meal at the Metate Room Restaurant inside the park and then left Mesa Verde and drove back through Cortez while enjoying this beautiful sunset:

Then we headed back into Utah — normally I would have a photo of the Utah welcome sign for you here, but it was so dark by the time we reached it that I couldn’t get a decent picture, but it looked just like this one:

Now we’re at the charming Days Inn in Moab, Utah, and we’re ready to enjoy one more national park before we have to start the journey back to DC. Check back tomorrow!

Note: I’m giving Isabel a break from the blog tonight. She’s done the lion’s share of writing up to this point and she deserves a night off. Any and all typos, factual errors, exaggerations, mistakes, fabrications, or other general sloppiness should be blamed on me.

Since we didn’t get into San Francisco until late last night, we thought we’d give it another pass this morning before heading back east. I’ve never been there before, so I wanted to just get a quick taste of it… something to hold me over until we can come back for a proper visit. We decided to hit all of the obvious spots:

Golden Gate Bridge

Alcatraz

Lombard Street

TransAmerica Building

The thing I will remember most, though, is an unintentional turn we took down Filbert Street.

I know it doesn’t convey in the picture, but the hill is so steep, you can’t see the road below us. It was much like being on a rollercoaster, but way scarier. Luckily we had the breaks checked on Pearl before the trip.

Once I got my fill of the city, we were on the road again. This part of California is dry. Really dry.

My aunt Ginny said that they haven’t had rain since March, and that it was typical. Yikes.

After several hours on the road, we reached the base of the Sequoia National Forest.

While it’s not quite as steep or windy as Rt 1, the road into the park is not for the meek. Many, many switchbacks and S-curves are your payment (along with the $20 entrance fee) to see some of the most amazing forests you will ever see. Oh, and also wildlife. Isabel and I had yet another encounter. As you may recall, we’ve already seen deer, antelope, bison, elk, moose, seals, and pelicans. Now we can add bears to the list. Are you kidding me? Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I would actually be in a situation where I was within a few feet of a wild bear–or two.

We have been having a healthy debate over whether these were two baby bears or a mother and her cub. Anyone out there with an expert opinion (ahem, Kenton) should feel free to chime in.

As if we’re not feeling skittish enough from our death-defying drive up the mountain, or our harrowing encounter with vicious (and adorable) man-eating bears, now it turns out that the mountain is on fire.

We passed a sign that warned us of “Smoke Ahead” and then saw that there were about 4 guys working on the situation… we felt pretty confident that they had it under control, so we moved on to the main attraction of the day: the General Sherman.

(Isabel is making me own up to the slight distortion above. We actually saw the smoke BEFORE we saw the cuddly, angry bears. I just think it works better, narratively, the way I wrote it. She’s such a stickler for the facts.)

Not only is the General Sherman the biggest tree in the world, it is the largest living thing on this planet.* Its measurements are: 274 feet high, 36 feet across its base, and has a total trunk volume of over 52,000 cubic feet. Whew. Plus, it’s top-heavy. The park ranger told us that the biggest danger to the sequoias is their weight. They don’t taper like most trees, and they hold most of their weight higher in the tree, so sometimes they just fall over. We were hoping that General Sherman wouldn’t choose this evening to decide that he was tired of standing. He didn’t disappoint.

Then the sun went down…

…and chaos reigned. Out of nowhere, we saw a bright flash of light and then the loud boom of thunder. Uh oh. We raced up the steep trail to try to make it to the car before the rain hit. More lighting, more thunder. Isabel nearly had an asthma attack due to the high elevation (the air is thinner at 7000 feet above sea level). Then, about half way up the trail, the rain hit. We didn’t get drenched, but we weren’t completely dry either. We finally made it back to the car and began the two hour journey down the other side of the mountain. Another great day was over.

*factoid taken from the back of a postcard, so it must be true.

We checked an important item off our list before leaving Sacramento:

We had to go to the western origin of Rt. 50 to see the Ocean City sign. Remember this one (from OC)?

So now we’ve closed the loop (sort of). Hooray!

After that, we stopped by Brian’s aunt Ginny and uncle Joe’s house in Brentwood, Calif. We enjoyed a truly lovely visit with them and with Brian’s other aunt Mill and uncle Rich, who are here visiting Ginny and Joe:

After that, we drove up to the Point Reyes National Seashore, where we finally touched the Pacific Ocean!

Point Reyes looks like a really fabulous place to vacation; it has many beautiful features, including crazy-looking cliffs and a lighthouse and an elk refuge. For us, though, it was just so cold (surprise: the Pacific Ocean is extremely cold north of San Francisco in late September!!) and so cloudy that we couldn’t really enjoy the full effect. Hopefully someday we can go back!

After that, we drove along Highway 1 for a bit. On our way out, we saw some pelicans:

and seals!

After that, things got a little dicey. Highway 1 is famous for winding its way around cliffs near the ocean. It’s so pretty!

But it’s soooo winding! Between the very curvy, frequent turns and my fear that we were going to fall off the cliff (but mostly the twisty turns), I felt really carsick for the first time on this trip (remarkable considering my history). That route was so intense that even Brian felt carsick. We were not very into that! So I think we may scrap plans we had to drive down Highway 1 down to Big Sur. We also realized tonight that we have to be back in D.C. in just two weeks — less than that, actually — so we need to start figuring out what we can skip. We lost quite a few days to illness in South Dakota, and the whole first leg of Michigan was not in our initial plans, so we want to make sure we use our remaining time well!

Anyway, we attempted to go to Muir Woods on our way down from Point Reyes, but alas, we arrived 10 minutes before closing time, so we weren’t allowed in. (In fact, Brian wants to be sure I share that after noticing us take a flash photo of the sign outside the park, the park ranger manning the gate accused us of flicking a cigarette butt into the trees! Oy vey!) So we just kept on driving until we got to San Francisco (via the Golden Gate Bridge):

We stopped in town for a quick dinner and a fresh air/carsickness recovery break and considered staying in SF for the night, but ultimately we decided to stay outside the city at the Super 8 in San Bruno. Right now we’re working on figuring out our next steps. Stay tuned!

Today was mostly a rest day, but we did go into Grand Teton National Park!

So pretty!!

And check this out:

See him?!

We finally saw a moose. We had totally given up, but we got lucky today!

In fact, we got doubly lucky because this guy had a lady friend!

It was very exciting. Once we bagged our moose, we decided our mission was complete and left the park.

On our way back into Jackson, we stopped for a second at the town square where they have these awesome elk antler arches. You see, elks shed their antlers and regrow them every year. There’s a big elk refuge outside of Jackson, and every year the local Boy Scouts go in and collect the antlers and auction them off. Hooray!

Good times. Now we’re back in our Motel 6 with laundry in the dryer. We move on tomorrow!

Cooke City was really cute in the daylight!

It was really cold, though. There was even snow on Pearl (and a lot of it had melted off by the time we took the photo):

Anyway, we drove straight into Yellowstone National Park from Cooke City!

We were barely in the park before we saw our first bison:

Hooray! We saw SO many wild bison today. We went to Antelope Island (near Salt Lake City) last spring and saw a ton of bison there — at least we thought so at the time. After that first group today, we saw herds and herds of them everywhere. We saw a lot of calves, too. One of the most interesting bison incidents we observed was when we were on the road from Tower-Roosevelt to Mammoth Hot Springs. We saw a large herd of bison traveling along the road. One of the bison was rolling around in the dirt!

He loved it!! And as soon as he was done, another bison came up for his turn in the dirt bath. I think we saw three or four of them take turns. It was amazing!!

We saw our first waterfall (Undine Falls) early in the day too!

Then we arrived in Mammoth Hot Springs Historic District, which is overrun with the other star animal of our day, elk!

Now, you may remember from our previous Bear Country USA post that it’s breeding season for elk. Therefore, they will kill you. Brian and I watched an entire safety film about elks chasing people down and stabbing their antlers into cars at the Yellowstone General Store this afternoon. So it’s kind of weird that they just live among people in the Mammoth Hot Springs area. Check out this guy here:

Well, he owns all these lady elks:

He was keeping them all between a couple of buildings in Mammoth Hot Springs, and whenever one of them left the circle, he would freak out and go round them up. Meanwhile, park rangers in reflective vests were herding all the visitors around making sure they weren’t in the path of any angry elk. It was crazy. And so are Mammoth Hot Springs themselves!

After we saw that, we drove around on a falls-finding adventure. We went to Tower Fall:

Tower Fall is 132 feet. Check out those volcanic pinnacles!

Then we went down to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which is home to two major waterfalls in the park, Upper & Lower Falls. Upper Falls (109 feet) is pretty easy to see:

But Lower Falls is a little more work. We elected to take a very intense trail down so we could see it. It’s called Uncle Tom’s Trail and it involves this:

It’s 328 steps and 500 feet down (and back up), so it’s a strenuous trail, but the craziest part for me was that the steps are all made out of this metal grate material, and they are built right next to a canyon obviously, so you can see right through the bottom of the steps to where you are clearly about to plummet to your death. I was completely terrified but managed to make it the whole way down so I could enjoy the 308 feet of Lower Falls:

The Statue of Liberty (with the base and everything) is three feet shorter than those falls. Nicely done, Yellowstone Park.

The hike down to Lower Falls took quite a while (in general, it takes a long time to get places in Yellowstone), so we got to catch the sunset on our way out of the park:

Now we’re at the Days Inn in West Yellowstone, Mont., and we’re trying to figure out what all is going to happen tomorrow. I hear there may be a geyser we need to see, but beyond that, I’m not sure what to expect! Brian and I are hoping for a moose.

When we stopped at Bear Country, USA, we were on our way to Mt. Rushmore!

When my parents came in here in 1979, apparently you couldn’t get very close to the presidents. Since then, a lovely new visitor’s center and amphitheater have been built!

You can actually see the carving quite well from this observation deck — the photos make it seem like we are farther away than we actually are:

I learned some interesting things about Mt. Rushmore at the visitor’s center, especially about the significance of which presidents were chosen. This is from an explanatory sign:

The four American presidents carved into the granite of Mt. Rushmore were chosen by the sculptor to commemorate the founding, growth, preservation, and development of the United States. They symbolize the principles of liberty and freedom on which the nation was founded. George Washington signifies the struggle for independence and the birth of the Republic; Thomas Jefferson, the territorial expansion of the country; Abraham Lincoln, the permanent union of the States and equality for all citizens; and Theodore Roosevelt, the 20th century role of the United States in world affairs and the rights of the common man.

On the drive away from Mt. Rushmore, there’s an area where you can pull over to see this:

Right around the bend from the profile view, we saw a mountain goat!

After that, it was on to the Crazy Horse Memorial:

Are you guys familiar with the Crazy Horse Memorial? I’m a little ashamed to admit that I didn’t even know it existed until recently. It’s a fascinating story; basically, in the 1940s, several Native American elders (most prominently Chief Standing Bear) in the Lakota tribe invited (white American) sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski (who had worked on Mt. Rushmore) to design and execute a memorial to the prominent Lakota leader Crazy Horse. Korczak started carving that mountain with a single jackhammer. He lived at the mountain and worked on it every day, alone, until his ten children were grown up enough to help him. Korczak died in 1982, but his family continues the work on the sculpture and memorial; the entire project is funded by admissions and the like. Anyway, it’s an absolutely incredible story, and the whole experience of seeing the progress on the memorial so far was truly inspirational. We took a bus trip through the work zone (they’re still working actively on the carving, and the best way to carve a mountain is to blow it up — systematically, of course!) so we could go to the base of the mountain:

Crazy Horse’s face was completed in 1998 (after Korczak’s death); since then, lots more people have gotten interested in the project and visited the site. With the increased interest and the technological advances in the mountain-blasting arena, it’s completely possible that the work that Korczak started completely by himself could be finished within the next few decades. It’s a very worthy cause, so I encourage you to consider making a contribution if you have the means!! The finished sculpture is going to look like this:

The completed project is going to be 641 feet wide by 563 feet high; Crazy Horse’s head is going to be 87 feet high (the heads of Mt. Rushmore are only 60 feet high). Shew!

After Crazy Horse, we drove back to Rapid City. We encountered several deer on the way:

They are really everywhere out here. I kind of wish we had gotten Pearl those deer whistles, but hopefully we will be okay. I guess if she had deer whistles, we wouldn’t get to enjoy seeing them on the side of the road…

On our way back, we had to get a closer look at something we had seen from the road when we were heading towards Mt. Rushmore earlier that day:

If you think that is a giant bust of President Reagan in front of a miniature Washington Monument flanked by giant busts of Presidents G.W. Bush and JFK… you’re absolutely right. What?! Turns out this random roadside um… artwork… is kind of a teaser site to get you to go to President’s Park, which apparently includes giant busts of all 43 presidents. And guess what? It’s close to our next destination: Deadwood, S.D.! We can’t wait!!

All right. So, after enjoying mini-President’s Park, we returned to Rapid City (officially, “The City of Presidents”). We had dinner at The Corn Exchange, which was excellent. Now we’re back home in our Motel 6, resting up and rebuilding strength so we can forge ahead tomorrow. We’re both feeling much better and are looking forward to our next adventure!