Day of Exploring

Karon came by just after 10:00 this morning to drive us around the area today. First, she took us to the property of their friends, where they are parked. The morning skies were gray and the temperature was in the 50's. We all had on long pants!

The turn-off to the Crazy Horse monument is on the way to the property, so we got a distant view of it. Since it was so gray and foggy, we didn't get any good pictures, but we'll be going back at some point while we're here.

After we toured the property and met the friends, Karon, Jim and I took off in Karon's car. She was our tour guide for the day. We headed to Hill City where we stopped at the Slate Creek Grill for lunch.

Karon and I both had the Philly cheese steak sandwich. It was the best one I've had since we were in Philadelphia several years ago.



After lunch, we stopped at a Christmas Store on the outskirts of Hill City and spent quite a while just wandering around looking at things. I bought myself a crystal heart necklace as an early Christmas present!

We then headed to the little town of Keystone, where everyone else in South Dakota gathered today. Even though it's a couple of miles or more from Keystone, up a twisty hill to Mt. Rushmore, there were cars parked along the road in Keystone. Those are the cars of the people who waited too long to get to Mt. Rushmore today and had to walk up to get a spot for the fireworks tonight. I'm sure they're either still walking now, or standing around in a crowd, waiting. From now, as I'm writing this, they have another 4 hour wait until the fireworks.

We walked around town, taking in the sights and the shops.




We went through this tunnel on the way into and out of Keystone.



We took the long, scenic route around the area so we could miss the worst of the traffic close to Mt. Rushmore.

I'm not sure we could find these tee-pees again, but they're somewhere on one of the area county highways:

We were trying to find our way back to the road that would take us through Custer State Park. It took us a couple of wrong or missed turns, but we finally got on the right road.

Getting back to the highway:

We saw scenery like this most of the day:

In Custer State Park, we saw these big horn sheep:

And back home again! We've had a great adventure today. Thanks, Karon!