We woke up to a surprisingly foggy day, rather annoyingly since our towel and bikinis were outside! Hanging these on the back seat of Carl (the car... have we mentioned his name before?), we head off for a morning of sightseeing!
Arriving at Mount Rushmore, having paid $11 to get in, we were a little surprised to find out it was a little less... distinctly carved than people say, i.e. it looked a little like this:
Can you see it? No, neither could we. Unfortunately it seemed Mount Rushmore was covered with fog and there was nothing we could do about it. We hung around for a bit, seeing some chipmunks and even a goat but alas, no presidents. The fog actually seemed worse when we left! So there you go folks, how many people can say they went to Mount Rushmore without seeing Mount Rushmore?
Continuing onwards, we headed for the scenic and very windy Iron Mountain road and Needles highway. Our first (but not last, oooh spoilers!) trip up into mountainous areas, this was super picturesque with many wooden bridges and terrifyingly narrow stone tunnels. The views from the top looked out to the famous name-sake needles of rock:
The final sightseeing stop of the tour was the Crazy Horse monument. Luckily, as you will have seen from the photos, the fog cleared to a beautiful day! The Crazy Horse memorial was very impressive despite its lack of completion: the project of one man and his family for over 4 decades run only from donations and viewing fees, the statue of important Native American Crazy Horse dwarfs Mount Fogmore. With no date for completion, we are not sure when we will be able to see this project completed but for now we could see the completed head and underway arm of Crazy Horse pointing towards his peoples lands.
From here, we took off on a race against the sunset to Montana, trying to see the monument to the Battle of Little Bighorn before days end. We managed to gain quite a bit of time on our way out of South Dakota, through Wyoming to Montana.
In Wyoming, I (Jessie) took over the driving for awhile. However, within 10 minutes of this we began to get rain. And within 30 seconds of this, we caught the worst storm either of us have ever seen! Before I had even had time to put the wipers on full, I could see not 2 feet in front of the car for the torrential rain. With massive lightning striking the sky, I pulled onto the hard shoulder, quickly to be joined by a bunch of American cars, just in time. We sat, pretty scared, for the next 15 minutes as golf ball sized hailstones rained down on us! The road was entirely flooded and the noise deafening, we even experienced a 30 degree Fahrenheit drop in temperature! Eventually the hail stopped, but the roads were covered in ice! Mum bravely took over the reins, and we slowly moved onwards, with the road eventually clearing and Carl seeming ok.
A little traumatised, we nonetheless still wanted to beat the now returned sun to Montana, so we raced on! With no more natural disasters, we arrived at the battleground a little after 7pm with the sun still out to find the site closed at 6pm, gah! We therefore made plans to find a nearby motel and return in the morning.
Heading to closest town Hardin, just off the Indian Reservation we had been travelling through, we luckily found a vacancy at the first motel we tried and settled into our new room for the night. With Pizza Hut for dinner, we planned our next day with great difficulty due to the unforeseen expense of Yellowstone lodging. We couldn't possibly end the day without one more crisis however! On heading out to get the sat nav (Clint) from the car (Carl), we noticed that our dear Carl had not quite got away from the storm as unscathed as we thought. His bodywork is pitted all over with the marks of hailstones! Hopefully we shall have pictures in a later blog, but he is undeniably dented all over D:
Let's hope the insurance covers it! Dammit Carl!
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