Where is Summer when you need it

 It's been so long since I shared an excerpt from "The Journal of Our Journeys", that I'm not totally sure this is where I left off. I decided to just jump in. With the wonderfully awful winter weather we are having, I thought I should look back on some of those summer vacations, when the sun was hot and our shorts were short. 

Journal of Our Journeys 

Chapter 11 - South Dakota I

How can I remember so much about some trips and so little about others? It seems every trip has had something memorable, something that needs to be passed down through the generations. A story that would make the headlines if there were a news channel dedicated to just our family. Or that at least would haunt my social media in this century. There was no such story from our first trip to the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota.

But by now, you realize that I won’t leave it at that. If there is no story, I will have to create one.

In 1971, we went out west again, but this time, our destination was the southwest corner of South Dakota, where yet another tourist mecca lies, the Black Hills.

The Needles Highway is incredible, with its hairpin curves, fascinating rock outcroppings, and narrow road. Where the highway went through the solid granite mountain, Mom would get out and film Dad driving the camper through. If we had stuck our hands out the camper windows, we would have been able to touch the sides of the mountain.

It was fun at the time, but I think now that it contributed to my growing claustrophobia. Those first seeds of my mortal fear started in kindergarten when, for some reason, one of our activities was crawling through a tunnel made of a gigantic Slinky covered in plastic. Then, a few years later, Pat dared me to crawl into a safe, and she shut the door on me. So many stories! So much trauma!

But back to South Dakota.

Custer State Park has an impressive herd of American bison (I hate that we all call them “buffalo”) and a band of friendly burros on its wide-open prairies. I’m pretty sure we fed those burros out of the truck window, while Mom kept an eye out for the bison, which had gotten a lot of bad press for attacking people who were stupid enough to walk up to them. (And that continues to happen to this day.)

The Badlands area, by contrast, is stark and moody. Throughout a single day, the weather can change from warm to cold, from sunny to rainy, and the rainbow-colored hills go through a wide range of hues with every change.

One of the prominent tourist attractions of the Black Hills is, of course, Mount Rushmore. The giant heads of four of our most adored leaders are stunning. It is so hard to believe someone could carve that out of the side of a mountain.

Well, okay, that a crew of 400 could carve it still seems unreal. Mount Rushmore was a finished work when we first saw it. It was built between 1927 and 1941 for just under one million dollars, with at least half of the cost funded by the government.

Another carving is a little further down the road, but sometimes it’s hard to compare the two. Dad was always fascinated by Crazy Horse. Work on the Crazy Horse Memorial began in 1947 and has accepted no government funds. It is being built strictly on donations and admissions to the grounds. I haven’t found any cost estimates, and no one knows precisely when it will be finished.

We stopped there for the first time on our way to Yellowstone in 1969. Two years later, no one could tell that any work had been done on it. We traveled through the area again in 1976, and I still couldn’t see any advances. But they were there. What appeared as a small fragment from 1,500 feet away amounted to several tons of rock.

The whole story of Crazy Horse is fascinating; I can see what Dad saw in it. I would recount it all here, but you can find it on the web just as easily as I can, with pictures, too. 

Unfortunately, we had to stop at yet another tourist trap on the way home. Everyone stops at Wall Drug, and I don’t think anyone knows why. Advertising free ice water since the 1930s, the small drug store grew and grew and now encompasses most of downtown Wall, a small town with a population of less than a thousand.

So, we stopped, wandered around, looked at all the cheesy souvenirs for sale, had our pictures taken on the bucking bronco statue, and got our free ice water. If I remember correctly, the only time we ever spent money there was when Dad bought each of us a leather belt with Native American beadwork sewn into it.

Aren't I just too cute?