Devil's Tower and Mt. Rushmore

Rounding the bend and heading home. That's what it felt like after leaving Yellowstone. No more national parks to check out, just a few little stops on the way to Chicago and then on home. It was a mixture of feelings. I loved seeing all the sites but there was also a part of me that was ready to be able to wake up take a shower and do my normal things during the day.

After the fiasco at Yellowstone, sleeping in near freezing temperatures and then the next day taking over an hour to pack up just the tent, we were done camping out. The next night on our way back east we opted to pull over in to a rest stop and sleep in the car. I don't know why but I always get a little paranoid doing things like that. I guess it's just all the stories you'll hear, so I remember having a knife by my side, "just in case."

So, we still had Devil's Tower and Mt. Rushmore to check out. Devil's Tower was a neat stop, it's not too far off of i-80 and it's worth it to see. There isn't much to do there except for walk around it, which we did. One thing that was nice about getting there early in the morning was being able to see all the prairie dogs eat breakfast. They were so cute! haha. As we were heading back to the car, we saw a group of people arriving. They asked us how the trail was, and if it was cold enough that they should bring their jackets. They were a nice group of people and evidently they were on the same route as us...

From Devil's Tower we made our way to Mt. Rushmore. This is another site not too far off of i-80 and I was very glad to see it. Ever since I was a young kid I've wanted to see Mt. Rushmore in person but I always saw how far it was, up in South Dakota, I figured I would never get the chance to see it, since when would I ever be that far north? But, I did get to see it!

Then, on to Chicago. But not without taking an unplanned stop at Wall-Drug. Oh man, I'm not sure whether I would recommend this stop to anyone or not... Starting back a hundred miles or so you begin to see all kinds of billboards. Almost every single billboard from that point on tells you how many more miles it is to Wall-Drug. It reminded me of the old cartoons that used to have the same joke. It is right off of the highway so it's not too inconvenient. It's just I'm still confused about what the point of this place is. It's basically an over sized convenient-drug-flea market-store. One funny thing though is that we ran in to the same people we saw hundreds of miles west at Devil's Tower. They were having fun with us, telling Kelli to tell her husband (me) to climb up on this huge fake jack-rabbit so she could take a picture. haha. I'm pretty sure we stayed there way too long, and so we headed out from there, spending the night at a rest stop somewhere in Iowa, and to Chicago mid-afternoon the next day.