We checked out early and managed not to leave anything behind in the room. We got to the gates of the Mount Rushmore park about ten minutes before it opened. Mount Rushmore is definitely a great place to visit last on a long trip. You take a few pictures, walk around the museum part and read a little on the construction and you're done. In and out of the park in less than an hour, unless you're fascinated by the construction story and feel compelled to read every plaque and watch every video.
There was this cool interactive video, where you pick a picture, then push down on this lever and watch the video playing of them blasting that part of the mountain away.
We checked out the gift shop there by the mountain and bought a couple overpriced souvenirs(which of course is redundant). Then we stopped by another gift shop which had a much better gift selection. We should've waited. We spent about half an hour there picking out a gift for my mother-in-law, who was watching our kids for the past four days. We got her a Sioux pottery vase thing.
Then it was time to hit the road again for the long long drive home. South Dakota is not nearly so interesting on the way back through as it was on the way out there. There were a lot of hayfields filled with round bales that only a few farmers bother to stack. Maybe they just leave them there and turn the cows loose. Somebody even bales the grass between the east- and west-bound lanes of the highway. Once again, they just left the bales sitting there to rot. They probably wouldn't rot so fast there as the air is much drier, but still, it seems wasteful. After awhile, I got so sick of seeing round bales I stopped looking out the window except to see road signs.
Somewhere in the middle of South Dakota we were passed by a black Corvette. The license plate said 04 FUN, to which I jokingly replied "that is SO last year".
It seemed to take a lot longer to get back across SD than it did to cross it in the first place. We finally got back into Minnesota for another 3 or 4 hours of driving. Then we came up to this black Corvette. It was the same one that had dusted us back in SD. We passed it and later it passed us again. Then we caught up to it again. The mileage on those things sucks. It finally got way ahead of us and the chase was over.
About halfway through MN, we called the in-laws to let them know about what time we thought we'd be there. Throughout the long long drive, going both ways, I kept track of where we were going by watching all of the signs and corresponding towns in the road atlas., something I had a lot of trouble with in signless Wyoming. Not to mention the difficulty in keeping my travel time estimates accurate when the the distance scale changes from map to map.
We made it to Winona finally somewhere around 7:30 pm where we stopped for gas. Guess what car was at the next pump. That's right, it was the black Corvette. We had caught up to it for the last time. We beat it out of the station and probably out of the state too.
It was good to see Wisconsin again. We got home about half an hour after our predicted time.
Hubby is already talking about next year's trip. He wants to go to Chicago to see some science museum or something and he intends to take all the kids with us. Maybe by next year we'll be ready for another trip.
