The Too Hot Day and Spearfish Canyon

The next day was in the mid 90s (or 35C) so we just headed to a lakeside beach and mucked around for the whole morning and into the afternoon, this being South Dakota there are not many people around either so we had it to ourselves for a good while.
The next day was a lot milder so we headed up to Spearfish Canyon.




You can't tell from Becky's demenour but she was bitten by a radioactive spider and her wrist really swelled up (you can kind of see its red in the picture below) so we took her to the hospital in Spearfish. We had to wait a while but eventually got to see a doctor and Andy explained that Becky had a bite and a swollen arm to which the doctor, no doubt expecting a little bite said 'let's take a look' and then when he saw it was quite taken aback and said 'Oh - that doesn't look good' - he wasn't sure what had caused it (so I'm sticking with the radioactive spider) and we had to get some medicine from the drive thru pharmacy!

on the way home we stopped for one last sit by a lake
and Becky got the medicine she really wanted
And that was our last day in the Black Hills and all that was standing in the way of our own beds was 650 miles of driving. one thing I will say is that Dan and Becky have bladders of steel as we did 320 miles in-between stopping. Kudos to Andy too for doing that much of a drive in one go!
I drove the first and last sections, handing over to Andy in Chamberlain, which is on the Missouri river and we let the kids have a splash given how cooped up they were for the rest of the day.

Reptiles, Bears and Fairies

Based on a recommendation (albeit from someone who goes to lots of Renaissance fairs - where people dress up in civil war costume and reenact battles) we decided to visit the Reptile gardens. It turned out to be a great recommendation, lots of slow moving tortoises, cold blooded reptiles and poisonous snakes - so just like being at work then.

This was actually the 3rd largest display of reptiles in the world, so its was pretty impressive.
Dan and Becky enjoyed it loads - how can you not love a 150 year old tortoise.

Demonstration of how to climb onto a crocodile's back, should the fancy ever take youThere were loads of very poisonous snakes (this one was harmless though) all graded by how venomous they were which obviously appealed to Dan and me.
They also had prairie dogs, not sure if they breed them to feed to the snakes?
After the reptiles we went to find dinosaurs (they have a dinosaur park apparently) but even with the aid of GPS we were unable to find it (how hopeless is that). So off we went to see the bears in Bear Country USA.

All in all the bears were impressive but you had to drive around this loop road and it was pretty expensive for 10 minutes of bear spotting. Back at the shed, Dan had managed t wiggle the second of his front teeth free, so we also got to spot fairies that evening.

The Needles

Here's a picture of our 'cabin' in South Dakota, more of a glorified semi detached shed really. Not quite sure about it when we first arrived but soon got used to it, just a little noisy and closer to the road than we would have liked.


The good thing about our driving now is that Dan is really into reading Harry Potter so our journeys are a little quieter One of the things we were told to do was drive on the Needles Scenic Highway which we did after visiting Custer State Park. This is one of the places you can see herds of buffalo - we didn't though, just some wild donkeys which somehow was less impressive.

Eagle eyed Andy managed to spot one buffalo (almost sounds like it needs a different word for a single buffalo, like a buffali or something) thoughAnd the Needles were certainly impressive
Just time for some swimming in Stockade Lake

And a picnic

Can you take us to Mount Splashmore

No we can't, but instead here are far too many pictures of Mount Rushmore interspersed with factoids to lure you into viewing all of them.

They were adding 'security' measures when we visited, hence the work going on in this picture, but open this up and check out the specs on Roosevelt - bet you've never noticed those before. Oh, and if you're not sure the 4 presidents from left to right are Washington (1st president), Jefferson (3rd president, primary author of the declaration of independence and cunning man behind the Louisiana purchase), Roosevelt (26th and youngest president) and Lincoln (16th president, president at the time of the US Civil war, introduced measures that ended the practice of slavery and was a semi finalist in the very first X-Factor).
Here is the man behind the sculptures - Gutzon Borglum. He crafted a number of patriotic American works such as the statue of Philip Sheridan (civil war general) and Stone Mountain. Probably best to drop the bit about being a member of the KKK from your CV though Gutzon.
The way to the mountain is via a set of pillars that have each of the state flags and the year the state was admitted in the union (possibly in much the same way that people are admitted into any other insane asylum). The interesting fact that you may not know is that the American quarter dollar coins either have on them the bald eagle, or the flag and entry date of one of the states. So now we're trying to collect them all.


This picture is taken from the Needles highway, more of that next time.