Day 1: Chicago to Mitchell, SD, home of the Corn Palace! I remember both Mitchell and the Corn Palace being bigger when I did this trip as a 12 year old! We got to town late afternoon, checked into our hotel and then drove the main drag and explored the building. There were some neat things to read inside but we weren't interested in being indoors long. Mask compliance inside and out was incredibly low and there were no patios to eat, so we ordered Pizza Hut and ate in our room after a nerve-wracking trip to the grocery store for drinks (again, no masks except the checkers, one of whom was wearing hers just hanging off her ear instead of over her face...we did the self-checkout).
Day 3: Mount Rushmore, Iron Mountain Road, Custer Wildlife Loop, downtown Custer. Mount Rushmore was much more developed than when I was a kid. The presidential trail gets you right up under the monument for cool views. We listened to a ranger presentation and I learned a lot more about the selection of the site than I remember from childhood when I was very focused on the building of it. The entire park was quite crowded and less than 50% of the people were wearing masks, so we didn't explore quite a thoroughly as we may have in other circumstances. I was expecting to be more relaxed outdoors versus someplace like Wall Drug, but due to Sturgis coming up the next week - and it being summer - there were shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in some spots, so we tried to avoid the touristy stops that we could like the restaurants and souvenir shops. The scenic drives were stellar. Only one buffalo in it all but the natural formations were gorgeous.
Day 4: Custer State Park, Sunday Gulch Trail hike, Needles Highway. After breakfast at the lovely cafe at our hotel, The Bavarian Inn, we head out for nature! I had a particular hike planned in advance for our long hike but as we read the tour magazine we got at the ranger station, we did an audible and picked one that was shorter but involved "rock scrambling" and waterfalls! It was so beautiful! It also made my heart race a million miles a minute as we had to scramble almost entirely vertically up wet boulders at the end of our 3 hours of hiking. There were some hand rails but it still took all the energy I had left to make it up and control my nerves!
Day 5: Custer to Rapid City via Scenic Byway. A few miles down the road from our hotel was Crazy Horse, which we just drove by and admired from the road, We finish the Norbeck Scenic Loop by going that way, though, and with the sighting of one more deer closed out our wildlife viewing. Our awesome find for the afternoon was the South Dakota Air and Space Museum. Only the outdoors was open but we spent over an hour reading all of the plaques for the planes they had displayed outside. We had hoped to visit a Minuteman Missile Silo according to our original itinerary that had us driving from Custer across the state of South Dakota to Sioux Falls on day 5. But we had discovered a screw in our tire on day 3 so we had to wait for new tires to be shipped to Rapid City in order to drive the 900 miles home. My car has run flat tires so they can't be patched and the car doesn't carry a spare. The tires had to be shipped from Colorado and took two days to arrive. On our extra night in Rapid City we ordered Chinese Food and ate in our room and slept in the next morning while waiting for checkout/picking up our car.
Day 6: The car was done about noon, since the tires weren't delivered until late morning. Crazy enough when they got it up on the lift and pulled out the screw, the tire was not punctured. So we loaded up the two new tires in the trunk, crammed in our luggage all around it and hauled it home.....an exhausting 13+ hour drive. There was obviously no way to know this until the screw was pulled out. And we weren't willing to attempt that when we still had to drive for two more days on windy mountain roads. Luckily everything fit into the car and now we've got two new tires when we need them someday!
Day 2: Mitchell to Rapid City, SD, via scenic road through the Badlands and a stop at Wall Drug. The Badlands were beautiful! I don't remember seeing any of this as a kid. We got out for a few hours to hike around Door, Window and Notch Trails. The Notch Trail hike involves a big ladder in/out. We took it in but the crowd to get back down was too long, so we took the shortcut down. It was a good test of the treads on our hiking boots! On our drive we saw a Big Horn, pronghorns and prairie dogs. We didn't linger long at Wall Drug due to crowds. I wanted an ice cream but the ice cream shop wasn't open and we only had option of chocolate or vanilla at the restaurant. William got a piece of cherry pie ala mode and really enjoyed it!
