Road Trip Home: Day 3

This day, we went from North Dakota to South Dakota.

Along the way, the roads winded through much of the Black Hills, which made for an awesome backdrop.

We also ran into a ton of traffic as we passed through the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. There were all kinds of motorcycles everywhere and lots of people in leather and chaps. We actually saw a lot of motorcyclists during a majority of the road trip, so I guess it’s just a big northern-midwest thing to do?

Our first stop was Mount Rushmore, which was cool to see. Four presidents who had profound impacts on our nation: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln were prominently carved into the mountain.

There wasn’t much in the area outside of the monument and a small museum, so we charged forward to the next destination, Crazy Horse Memorial.

This is the world’s largest mountain carving and honors Native American culture. They broke ground on the carving in 1948 and it is still in progress. As you can see from the 1/34th scale model (left) and unfinished mountain carving (right), there’s much work to be done.

We lost cell reception and data for a majority of the trip when we were in the middle of the country, and had to rely on physical maps a few times. This was funny because in this day and age, Brian and I have rarely had to read a map to find directions. It was good brain training to get back to these roots.

And of course: new day, new national park.

It was really cool driving into Badlands National Park because we could see the terrain instantly change to the famous jagged rock formations (buttes) and vast plains.

The weather was quite cloudy and periodically rainy, showing some epic sunlight and cloud combinations.

When we finally got to the park entrance, it started storming extremely hard. After picking out a campsite at Cedar Pass campground, we waited out the storm to set up our tent. As the rain subsided though, we got to see a beautiful sunset and clear end-to-end rainbows that stretched from ground to way up in the sky to back to the ground. It was majestic.

Later before bed, we saw lots of lighting blistering the sky behind giant clouds. That night’s sleep was rough, as winds gusted to 25 mph and rain poured down. It felt like our tent was about to collapse a few times.