Trip....part dos

As we made our way to South Dakota I was amazed at how beautiful Wyoming was. There was very little in Wyoming but the landscape itself was beautiful! We arrived in South Dakota and couldnt wait to get to our hotel and plan the next few days. We drove the route where we got a sneak peak at Crazy Horse, Bear Country and a few other places. We drove into Rapid City and were excited to see that our hotel wasn't a complete dump this time. We got settled into our hotel room, fed Gidget and fell asleep.....boy does driving tire you out!!!! I convinced Andrew to give Taco John's a try, being as he had never eaten there before....he really enjoyed the potato ole's and that is more than I an ask for! I was very excited to eat at Taco John's :) The next morning we got up early to see a bunch of different place....we started out at crazy horse...I was amazed to see the progress that had been made since I had last been there in 92. We took a lot of pictures and enjoyed seeing all of the old artifacts from the architect's house.

Me at crazy horse :)

the wall of change over the years since this project started

a view driving into crazy horse monument

a close up...the face is done and now they are working on the horse and arm streching out

After Crazy Horse we headed to Mount Rushmore...as my second graders called it last year Rount Mushrore :)

Here the afternoon got a little HOT! We started out up top looking at all of the flags and getting some sweet pictures of the monument...

I am going to try to set up a slideshow link where you can click on it and see all of our pictures...we shall see how this works on..

more later :)

The trip.... part uno

Well, I know I should have been doing this along our trip, but it was just too hard to try and keep up! I cant believe we were gone for an entire month and are already back here dreading the beginning of the school year :(

Our plan was to leave at 4 am on June 25th, this was to beat the morning traffic as well as arrive in Denver at a decent hour. Andrew and I got ready and headed to bed around 9. After another wonderful episode of Jon and Kate plus eight, if you dont watch this you SHOULD we tried to go to sleep. After laying around until about midnight, we both looked at each other and decided to just get ready to go and leave. We had everything unplugged and ready for the month we would be gone by 1 am. We hopped in the car and took off!!!!!

The drive started off just fine we were both wide awake and totally enjoying ourselves. Somewhere along the way I got sleepy...... I took a nap and then we switched drivers...I am telling you NEVER again will I drive through t hose mountains EVER! When we made it abour 4 hours out of Denver we were both EXHAUSTED and didn't know if we would make it! We finally arrived to find out what a dump our hotel room was! It was around 3 and we decided to let Gidget eat and drink and we would take a nap. Denver was not that amazing, maybe we were both just tired and we knew we wouldnt be there long, but I could haave done without. We went out for dinner, not great and drove past Coors Field, that was pretty cool! Headed back to the hotel room and went back to sleep! Knowing we would have traffic to deal with we got up early the next morning to head on our journey to South Dakota!

Here are some of the pictures along the way.............