Sheila wrote:
563-miles and 12 more hours!
Iowa to Minnesota to Badlands & finally Mt. Rushmore!
Our morning in Iowa started out cloudy and cool but not bad. We first drove over to the Lewis & Clark State Park and saw some beautiful log cabins, something I have always wanted. Then we saw a Keel boat which I guess was the type that Lewis & Clark traveled in but the visitor's center wasn't open yet so we didn't get any information on it. Then we started driving on the highway and we had forgotten to start the day off with our morning prayer so it was Joyce's turn to say it. Joyce was driving now so when I said it's your turn to say the prayer, what does she do? She started to close her eyes to pray! I started yelling at her to open her eyes because she was driving and then we both started laughing. Thank God he was looking after us and from now on we have decided not to close our eyes to pray-especially when driving, do you think that's a good idea or what!
Boy have we had a couple of long crazy days! After this one we will not try to push so hard any more.
It rained for about 3-4 hours off and on sometimes really hard but the worst battle was the WIND! It was really hard to keep Ms.Dot (the RV-named after our Mother) in the road and we were praying that she wouldn't tip over. We did see a construction port-a-potty blown over by the wind along the road somewhere!
Today we were leaving Iowa and headed to South Dakota but we wanted to make a short detour into Minnesota so Joyce could say she had been in that state as well. At least this time we didn't miss it and we only had to drive about 10 miles off our route to squeeze Minnesota into the trip.
South Dakota is a really big state with nothing much but fields and fields and more fields, not too many houses and not too many towns here and there. Soon the wind died down some and the sun came out and we were trying to make it to Mt. Rushmore for the night. But low and below we decided on another detour! We headed into the BADLANDS about 7:00-7:30pm Mountain time so the sun was still up and the rain had stopped but it was still windy. The Badlands national park is about a 30 mile loop that runs off of I-90 and it is like no other place I have seen. It looks like big mud piles stuck up all over the place with a lot of different colors, red, yellow, green and brown. At one of the rest areas a lady told us we would see better colors if it had rained and so we got to see all the colors. We saw the sunset while in this park and it was getting a little spooky since there were not too many other cars going through there that time of day- but we made it through safely. The only thing that went BAD in the BADLANDs was I dropped my camera on the pavement and it has been shutting down on me every 3-5 pictures but at least it still works.
When we finally made it through the Badlands we still had about 80miles to get to our next campsite which we had made reservations for along the way and was at the bottom of Mt Rushmore. So we had to drive in the dark around some pretty steep mountain grades and the directions to the place were not very good and they told us the GPS would not get the directions right either. We stopped at McDonald's and I asked some people driving a EMS truck and they were very helpful. We rolled into the campsite about 10:30 Mountain time and we were exhausted! We had a great day but it was long and tiring.
Tomorrow we will tour Mt Rushmore and rest some before we get "on the road again".
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