South Dakota Day 1

For Spring Break, we took the family to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore. We drove the 10 long hours in one day. When we finally made it to the hotel, we were greeted with a lovely sunset!

Grandpa Brown flew into South Dakota and met us at the hotel room. It was quite the adventure fitting everyone into the room. Eight people with two double beds and the cot we requested. Bryce found a nice little nook to sleep in (doesn't he look excited?) and Syd and Park also slept on the ground.

Camille and Rachel shared the cot.

And it worked. We all slept mostly comfortably. Probably because we were exhausted by the end of the day.

Our first day, (Thursday), we went to the Ellsworth Air and Space Museum. I didn't get many pictures but we had a good time looking at all the huge planes. And there were a few interactive displays, like this airplane. There was also a video flight simulator. Parker spent a lot of time there and got quite good and taking off and landing a plane.

Then we went to the Reptile Garden. They are in the Guiness Book of World Records for having the most species of reptiles. 

We saw a bald eagle.

We saw some gigantic tortoises.

We also saw a slightly creepy crawly snake show. Eek. Snakes are not my favorite, but the show was really interesting.

The kids poked their heads up in the middle of a prairie dog town.

They had a 3 level jungle dome with all sorts of snakes and bugs and lizards and super colorful, super noisy parrots. They even had a python snake out in the open, up in a tree. We walked right underneath it. 

And then this huge alligator. 15 feet!

And then we headed to Mount Rushmore!

We were interested to find that President Jefferson was the principle author of, not only the Declaration of Independence, but the first ice cream recipe in America!

We had lunch on the steps in front of the monument. A herd of mountain goats joined us. They were very friendly. But the time we left Mount Rushmore, they had moved down to the road to say good-bye.

Seeing Mount Rushmore was quite stunning.

And we were lucky to go on a hike that took us closer. We were there out of season so I was surprised to know this trail was open.

I was hoping to find the hidden cave from National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets but I never found it. I did find this little cave on our short trail walk though and it made for a cool picture!

After Rushmore, we went to the Watiki water park at our hotel. It was awesome. Huge water-slides, big enough to fit these big, double seater (or single) inner-tubes. On this particular slide you go through a closed part that shoots you into a HUGE funnel, then back into a closed section and out into the pool. It was awesome.

Except for that time when I accidentally went down backwards with Hash on the other side. The problem with that was that I hit the water first and I'm a lot heavier than Bryce. So that catapulted hash into the air. He flipped over me, as did the inner-tube. Keep in mind, he doesn't know how to swim. It was a little traumatic for him. It was also his first slide ride of the trip. He refused to go on another slide. But there was enough other things for him to have fun the rest of the night.

We hit the sack pretty hard that night. We were all really tired!