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| Crazy Horse Memorial |
Unfortunately neither of us slept during our first night of camping much at all. It actually got really cold at night, which I wasn’t prepared for. Breakfast turned into a fiasco too, because we still couldn’t produce enough heat in our fire pit to cook the eggs and bacon that we had planned. We had to abandon breakfast plans midway because nothing was cooking, and ended up going to Baker’s Bakery & Café in Custer for brunch instead. Our over-enthusiastic Drew Barrymore waitress made the meal quite pleasant.
We had some time to kill before our 2:20 Jewel Cave tour reservation, so we stopped by the Crazy Horse Memorial, which is an Indian statue being built into the mountains that would be the largest in the world if it is ever completed. The project began over 60 years ago, and only a fraction has been finished. After leaving the site, we did a tour of the Jewel Cave, the second largest cave in the world, which was pretty cool. It took about 1.5 hours to go through, and our tour guide was even more enthusiastic than our waitress had been earlier in the day. These South Dakotans sure get excited about the simple things in life.
We made a shopping trip to pick up some dinner for our second night of camping, and made sure to pick up a lighter and some firewood. This caused our second night at Custer State Park to go way smoother. We made some delicious triple bacon cheeseburgers, and had an actual campfire for the night, and capped off the night with smores.
Civic update: Struggling a little more to accelerate quickly now that the landscape is a lot hillier than it was first week of the trip. Added more oil yesterday, and it ran noticeably smoother today.
Random South Dakota Observations: Even in the Black Hills area which is fairly well known as a big touristy area, towns are even smaller and more spread out than I would have expected. The population count on some of these towns are in the hundreds, and if the Biker Rally wasn’t going on this week most of the towns and restaurants we went to would be completely deserted. The whole state seems really dependent on the tourism boost from the rally. Every restaurant, gas station, bar, tourist attraction, store, etc has a sign up welcoming the bikers and offering special deals for bikers. The one rock radio station we found seems to spend as much time talking about the rally as it does playing music.
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