Day 4 (Mount Rushmore)

Here are some pics from Mount Rushmore (copy and paste the link)...

http://www5.snapfish.com/snapfish/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=1605738026/a=3145779026_3145779026/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/

On Day 4 (June 13) we got a little later start than we had hoped to due to Julie and me “sleeping in” until 6:30. We all were pretty worn out from our walk-about in the Badlands the previous day, but still talked about it the whole day. We took the scenic route from our campsite to Mount Rushmore and got to see some things we definitely would not have had the opportunity to had we taken the interstate (we saw a small herd of bison at a cattle farm, not to mention the extremely small towns along the way). After about an hour and 45 minutes of driving, we reached Mount Rushmore and spent about 30 minutes looking around and taking pictures. I can now say that I’ve seen the great landmark in my lifetime and really have no desires to go back to it. Leaving Mount Rushmore proved to be a bigger task than getting there due to our Garmin’s need to send us through gravel roads through the Black Hills—which I was not about to do in a 31-foot RV. After a long detour (on in which about caused us to get t-boned from an oncoming tourist train), we finally made it back on course to Yellowstone. Along the way, we saw more things that normally aren’t seen on a daily basis (such as a daddy cow getting intimate with mommy cow, “Crazy Woman Creek” in Wyoming, and the town sign for Emblem, WY “population 10”—which had more sheep in the town than people apparently). The drive was fairly easy until we hit Big Horn National Park. Julie was driving at this point and things went fine up the mountains until we hit an elevation of about 8000 feet, and then she had to drive through a rain cloud with about 25 feet of visibility for 20 miles (driving at 15-20 mph can be really frustrating!). The cloud finally left us as we began our descent at which point we began to see some pretty extraordinary views. We made several pull-offs to snap a few pictures and I took the helm for the final leg of the drive into Yellowstone. As we passed the town of Cody, WY, our anticipation was heightened to finally arrive as we only had 50 more miles to go to the park entrance. Once we hit the entrance (we still had 26 more miles to go to our campsite at Fishing Bridge) we saw at least one moose, an elk, and a few dozen deer. We finally got checked in and parked at about 8:45, and then we made a mad dash to get dinner ready. I fired up the portable grill and served up some hellacious burgers in the near-freezing temperatures. With full bellies, we called it a day and turned in around 10:00, completely looking forward to the next day’s activities…