Vacation!!!

We drove to South Dakota on Wednesday. It was a pretty good trip - only about six hours. It started raining, but luckily it only rained for a short while. We're staying at a KOA in Hot Springs. It's a decent place. It has a pool, so the kids are happy. We're going to have to go back up there soon! They have a mini golf course here at the KOA. Of course, they charge $2 per 9 hole game which is kind of cheezy considering it's a crappy little course. Oh well. We took the kids once. Here's is Louis' version of mini-golf.

Thursday we visited The Mammoth Site. Mammoth bones were found when a new housing development was going up in the 70's. It was eventually discovered that there was an ancient sink hole there and many mammoth (and other animal) bones have been excavated. They only dig one month out of the year, and we were lucky enough to visit when there was excavation happening.

After we went to the Mammoth Site, we went out to Wind Cave National Park. We were able to get tickets for one of the last tours of the day. Wind Cave has several unique features. The one that got it "discovered" is the fact that wind will either rush or out of the cave depending on the barometric pressure. You can see Olivia's hair being blown through the cave entrance in this picture.

Here's how Louis spent most of the tour! When he woke up, he looked at me like, "Where the heck are we woman???"

This stuff is called box work. 95% of the world's box work is in this cave system. A 16 year kid who did a lot of exploring in this cave named it. He said it looked like post office boxes. I agree with him. They look like weird, twisted, Tim Burton style post office boxes, but post office boxes nonetheless!!!

Here's a picture of all of us at 250 feet below the surface.

Here's the kids at the sign in front of the visitor's center.

This morning we got up early and headed up to Mt. Rushmore. We saw a coyote, prairie dogs, buffalo, and pronghorns on the way.

Mt. Rushmore was so cool! We walked the trail which was pretty darn strenuous! Whew. We were beat after that. We had to go inside and watch two movies about the park. LOL. People I have talked to said that Rushmore wasn't that cool, but I disagree. We really enjoyed it.