Fact: Day Twenty-Two

We got up SUPER early this morning, ate breakfast in the car, lost count of the billboards advertising Wall Drug (and passed Wall, SD before the drugstore even opened), ignored the thousands of other bizarre, contrived attractions on I-90 in South Dakota, sang songs from "Calamity Jane" (well, only I did), carefully navigated the winding roads of the Black Hills...and made it to MOUNT RUSHMORE....

Huh?
Seriously, it was misty/cloudy/foggy the entire day.
Sometimes it cleared to this and we could see the faint outline of Washington. The mist was getting the carving wet-ish so the water dripping down Washington's face was a bit skull-like. Awesome effect (when we could actually see it).
And we had a perfectly clear view of the rocks BELOW the presidents.
It made for a lovely, cool day...sort of romantic and misty. Not exactly the perfect viewing-a-national-monument type of day. But still.
Ah, what photoshop and a mostly-clear moment can produce!
We think Dwight belongs right...about....here. Don't you agree?
We are continuing our trip. Now it's become the trip home, officially. We can tell that we're getting closer. We passed through Wyoming (which I would say nice things about except for ALL THE CONSTRUCTION THAT SLOWED US DOWN!)

And since it was only 7 miles out of our way, we skipped over and said hi to Nebraska.
We stopped for the night in Ft Collins, CO at my sister, Jamie's house.
The consensus in the van was that maybe Colorado needs a definition of "colorful"...
We went for a walk with Jamie, Ryan, and their kids. You can see the pictures I took...and then Jamie gave me a few that she snapped along the way. Show off.
Will karate-chopping a giant stick.
The boys and Jamie and Emma launching a bark boat down the rapids.
Marta!
Ryan made us dessert...hot chocolate with a scoop of ice cream. Yum!

Jamie's pictures of the walk...Will and his skills.



There was a prairie dog field we passed and Will and Emma were sure they could catch one. There were about 75,000 prairie dog holes in this field. I was hoping that while they were stalking this hole, a prairie dog would pop up right behind them. We never saw any. The fox in the field could have had something to do with that...

The boat is ready to launch.
Off it goes, down the rapids!
The six of us crashed out in the living room. It was a super fun day!

The final story: When Jim was in college, he went with a roommate for a weekend trip to Mt Rushmore. When they got to the monument, they were at the viewing platform enjoying the view (a better view than we had). While they stood there, a man walked up with a dog on a leash. He approached the edge, looked up, paused for one second and then said "Well, there's Mt Rushmore. Come on, dog.", turned around and walked away. They thought it was funny that he made all the effort to get there and only stood for (literally) one second. It's been our trip's motto. We say the line everywhere about everything (Well, there's Niagra Falls. Come on, dog).

Will even asked if we could buy a dog and then give it away so we could be completely accurate when we got to Mt Rushmore.

Since that didn't work out, we contented ourselves with just saying the line about 55,000 times while we were there. Here's Matt and his rushed, slurred interpretation of "Well, there's Mt Rushmore. Come on, dog."