11 hours...

***Miles travelled today: 101

***Total Miles: Will need to figure this out...

***States travelled through: Stayed in South Dakota...

What an eventful 11 hours they have been... leaving the hotel at 08h00 and arriving back at 19h00!!!

The question should be, not 'what did we do today?' but 'what didn't we do today?'

There are a number of scenic byways in the Black Hills, and we decided that we would do one today, that encompassed a number of different things... which meant that we had to be up early... I have discovered on holiday that I am up at 06h30 nearly every morning - which is totally unheard of for me... there is just so much to see and so much to do... I think we will need a break when we get home!!!

So after breakfast we were at Mount Rushmore before 09h00... before all the crowds arrived... Keystone, where we are staying is only about a mile away from the Mount Rushmore Memorial... well... how amazing to see the carving in stone... the sculptor must have had such vision, as the likeness to the individuals represented is amazing... we watched part of a DVD that had one of the carvers talking... he must have been a young man at the time that he was working on it, and when the DVD was made he was elderly... and he said that as the 'carvers' they could not see what Borglam (the sculptor) saw... but he would come up to the mountain and paint where he wanted more rock to be blasted away or carved... well the result is phenomenal... I read somewhere that he had intended for the finished work to be from their heads to their waists... it's a good job he started at the top... otherwise it would be a weird looking memorial!!!

We have some good photographs from the visit... but we are only putting one on the blog... (I'm trying to plan our scrapbooks as we go... but they are just getting bigger and bigger in my mind - as we do more and more...)

It seemed only fitting to then go to the Crazy Horse Memorial... that memorial was started in 1948... and it was worked on by one man alone for nearly 40 years until he passed away... he and his wife had ten children and they still work on it together now as a family... the monument and the museum to Native American history is really comprehensive... it seems odd somehow that the sculptor and his family who have taken it on as a family project are Polish in origin, not American nor Native American Indian... when you look at the proposed finished work, it will take another century, at least to complete...

From here we continued on our loop road, which took us through part of the Black Hills called the Needles Highway... WOW!!! The photo that we have included of this section is called the eye of the needle... the designer of this road decided that he wanted people to experience the Black Hills, and the road is simply for pleasure, it does not have specific destinations in mind... well, the road actually winds through needles of granite rock... and various tunnels had to be blasted through the rock... so there were no Winnebagos on our trip today as they wouldn't fit through the tunnels...

...we journeyed on to Custer State Park... and took a lovely walk around Sylvan lake, where we stopped for a coffee, and then carried on... we were looking for wild life... but all we got were donkeys!!! (The photo that we have included is especially for Suzi!!! Do you remember the last trip we took to the New Forest and the donkey was drooling all over me??? Well - this one was doing the same - with Tia Cinta trying to feed it!!!)

By late afternoon we were making our way out of the park, and towards another road called the Iron Mountain Highway...

...but before we got there we had another awesome experience awaiting us... coming up one of the roads, having rounded a bend, we came across a herd of buffalo, on the move... well... we journeyed for over half an hour and we kept stopping to let them pass us... we were in the middle of what seemed like hundreds of buffalo... there was just one scary moment... when one turned away from the herd and kinda looked straight at me... and I suggested to Jay that we should move on...

...we then got to the Iron Mountain road... (have added another link to the handy websites, all about the Black hills and South Dakota... these byways are referenced... as is the stunning scenery)... the drive on this road was spectacular... the hairpin bends and 'S' bends like none we have ever seen before as well as what they called Pig tail bends, that actually loop totally round on themselves and you end up going in a complete circle over a small bridge, over the road you just travelled on...

Jay is now fast asleep... completely exhausted from a day of doing some fantastic driving - there were a few what we are calling 'map flapping incidents' from the navigator... but nothing that we couldn't handle...

I am now planning tomorrow... although I think a quiet, restful day may be on the cards!!!