Black Hills of South Dakota

From Rapid City, South Dakota – We woke refreshed after a good night’s sleep and had an enormous breakfast provided by the nice owner of our B&B stay.  Soon we were on our way (in a convoy of two cars again) and made our first stop in Aladdin, Wyoming, near the South Dakota border.  We stopped at an old general store that advertised it was over 110 years old.  It had character and several funny signs on the front that I had to photograph.  By the way, if you aren’t getting my photographs, let me know and I’ll include you on the distribution list.

We soon crossed the border into South Dakota – first time for Rita and me.  We filled up with gasoline in Belle Fourche and turned south to Spearfish and Deadwood, the same Deadwood of the HBO series.  It was a wild gold mining town in the old days where Calamity Jane lived and where Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back as he played poker.  Today all the nice old buildings have been turned into casinos.  We walked through the town which took all of an hour.

We continued to the town of Lead, home of the famous Homestake Gold Mine, past Hill City and stopped at the Crazy Horse Memorial which will be huge some day when it is finished.  We had lunch here and viewed the rock carving of Chief Crazy Horse as well as the many Indian artifacts in the information center.  

Next we drove to Mount Rushmore National Monument to see the famous rock carvings of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.  We took a ranger led walk which was fairly short in distance and time.  After a while here we drove north through Keystone to Rapid City where we stopped for the night.

After checking into our motel, we drove into downtown Rapid City to eat dinner.  What a pleasant surprise is Rapid City!  Many of the nice old buildings are still in use and nicely restored.  Rapid City has many more nice restaurants than we expected and if they are all as good as ours was Rapid City is a good find.  We ate at Tally’s Silver Spoon restaurant and had an excellent meal at gourmet standards.  After dinner we walked around town looking at the al fresco diners enjoying the nice evening.

We have been fortunate in our good weather - mostly clear, sunny skies with temperatures in the low 70s.  The coldest we have had was 31 degrees with frost the morning we woke in Laramie.  How long will our nice weather hold out?