In search of North Dakota (day 6)

Monday, May 19, 2008
South Dakota, Wyoming

We began the day with our standard morning routine (eat in the motel, get ready for the day, pack the car, and hit the road). Packing the car always takes a bit of effort—after everything else is in its proper place, Peter then has to add the bicycle rack on the back of the car and secure his bicycle so it doesn't decide to come loose during our travels at high speeds on the highway.

We left Rapid City and drove up into the Black Hills to Mount Rushmore National Monument and spent a couple hours there. We took a scenic loop down toward Custer (it was all scenic, actually) and refueled the car and ate our lunch at a park there. Originally we had planned to go through Jewel Cave, but Anna was still stiff from her marathon and the hiking we did at Mount Rushmore pretty much did her in.

All this area was familiar to me and brought back a flood of pleasant memories from the summer of 2004 when Michael and Shauna and their then four kids, Talmage and Ben, and Claudia and I spent a week here in the Black Hills seeing all these sites and driving through all these various mountains. Ben, who was three years old at the time, referred to the place as Mount Mushmore, but he could proudly recite the names of the four presidents whose images were carved into the mountainside: Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln. That trip had been then-six-year-old Caleb's idea and plan, and we thought he did a good job.

This was Pete and Anna's first visit to Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills.

After fixing our lunch in the park in Custer, we headed west on U.S. 16 into Wyoming and continued through Newcastle until we joined I-90 at Moorcroft. We traveled west on the freeway for nearly a hundred miles. At Buffalo we left the freeway and took U.S. 16 again up and over the Bighorn Mountains toward Worlund, which is in the Bighorn Basin. We went over a summit that was 9,666 feet high. A very scenic drive.

We arrived in Cody, at the western edge of the Bighorn Basin, around 7:30 and stayed at the western end of town at the Cody Cowboy Village, where each unit was a separate cabin. Pete again fixed our supper on his JetBoil, and we ate. The weather had been pleasant, though somewhat windy, but turned cooler after the sun went down. We went and sat for a while in the 35-person hot tub, which felt nice, although I just sat on the edge and put my feet in. Since it was all outside, I didn't care to freeze my entire body after getting out of the warm water and walking back in the night cold to our cabin.