On the Road with Papa

 Well, the vacation was over but we still had to make the long drive back home.  Brian had to get back to work so he flew home and my dad flew in to ride back home with us.

 We made a few pit stops in the Black Hills to show Daddy some of our favorite spots.

 We spent our first night in Wall and had another meal at the famous Wall Drug.  Olivia was happy that she got to have another buffalo hot dog.

 We drove through the Badlands on our second day home so that Daddy could see the beautiful scenery.

 On the third day we stopped at one of the kids' favorite places on earth- City Museum.  They have both declared this to be there favorite thing of the whole trip.  The roof was open this time, and they got to go up there.  They crawled, climbed, slid, and played for four hours.  We even got my dad on a few of the slides (including the 10-story slide).  This is the neatest place.

On the last day of our trip home, we stopped in Atlanta to visit the two cutest baby boys in the world (my nephews).  We got lots of love and baby sugar.  Those boys are growing so fast.

We are home now, and are resting up.  Being on the road for nearly two weeks will certainly take it out of you.  Even though it was a busy vacation, we all enjoyed seeing new parts of the country.  We are definitely going to do more extended road trips in the future.

The Mammoth Site

 On our last day in the Black Hills area, we traveled south to Hot Springs to visit the Mammoth Site.  During the ice age, there was a hot spring that had steep sides.  Because the water in the spring was warm, vegetation would grow around it year-round.  Animals would come to eat, fall in the spring, get stuck, and die.  As a result, there are tons of bones from various animals in one spot. This is an active dig site which has uncovered bones from 61 different mammoths so far.  There are bones from other animals as well.  I'd never heard of a short faced bear before visiting this site, but this ancient animal would have been terrifying.  I'm glad it's extinct.  We had a nice visit and then headed to Rapid City so that Brian could catch his plane the next day.  We really enjoyed our time in South Dakota.

Devil's Tower and Deadwood

 We spent one full day traveling north and west of our hotel in Custer.  Our first stop was Devil's Tower NM in Wyoming.  We didn't have any "close encounters of the third kind", but we did hike the trail around the base of the monument. That was about all that there was to do there.  Let me just say this about Wyoming- there is nothing there.  We googled it, and it ranks 51st in population.  Washington D.C. has more people than the entire state of Wyoming.  It was crazy driving for miles and not seeing any towns or cars or anything.

 After leaving Wyoming we traveled to the north part of the Black Hills and ended up in the town of Deadwood.  Back in the day, this boom town was full of gambling and alcohol.  Not much has changed.  The historic buildings are now bars, casinos, and souvenir shops.  Not really a kid-friendly place.  We did see the saloon where Wild Bill Hickok was shot and we went to his and Calamity Jane's graves.

 Since we were up in the north section of the park anyway, we decided to do the Spearfish Canyon scenic drive, which began in the town of Spearfish.  We made a quick stop off at the D.C. Booth fish hatchery where we saw tons of trout.  We were there at feeding time, and the kids (and Brian) got to help with that.

 The Spearfish Canyon Loop ran along a stream and there were several waterfalls right off the road.  We stopped at two.  The second required a short hike, but was worth the effort.  The kids wanted to touch the water wherever we went to see how cold it was.  It was always really cold.

Rock Climbing

We had the best time at our rock climbing lesson.  This is something that I have always wanted to try, but have never had the opportunity to because we do not live in a location where climbing is possible.  We signed up for the "discovery" lesson, which lasted for four hours.  After getting us fitted for shoes, helmets, and harnesses, the guides took us on a short hike to our climbing location.  We started off with the basics of how to get strapped in and secure ourselves.  We did it ourselves each time, but they always double checked everything before we were allowed to climb.  I really liked that they taught us how to do all of the knots and security procedures instead of just doing it for us.

This is what our climbing area looked like- several ropes set up next to each other with multiple climbers and belayers going at the same time.  We all had to learn the basics of hand and foot position before we went up high, but we were climbing before we knew it.

We were in a group with several other people and four guides (one of whom had to leave after about two hours).  Since we were climbing using a belay device, it was important that some of us "students" learned to belay.  Otherwise, we would not get many climbs in because you can't climb if you don't have a belayer. I made two ascents- the first on a challenging (for me) route and then the second on an easy one.  I seriously couldn't believe that I made it up the first route.  It was really tough.  After my two ascents, I took a lesson on how to belay, and that's all I did after that.  Once Olivia and Owen saw that I could give them a belay, I spent the rest of the morning doing just that so that they could get in a lot of climbs.

Brian got in a couple of good climbs.  All of his were on the more challenging ropes.  He even made it through a difficult pass where he had to jump from one place to another.

We discovered that both of the kids loved climbing.  Owen had a rough start because he tried to go up one of the harder ropes first and then got upset when he couldn't make it up all the way.  After a pep talk from his dad, he tried the easier rope, was successful on that, and then had no trouble for the rest of the day.  He even made it up the rope that had tripped him up in the beginning.

Olivia was a little climbing machine.  I think that she and Owen went up almost ever rope.  They would come down from a climb and want to go right back up.  The guide was like "Don't y'all want a break?" , but they just wanted to get right back to climbing.  This is why I had to learn to belay.  We've created two little climbing monsters.






The climbing lesson was a highlight of our trip, and we will definitely be looking to do other climbing excursions in the future.

Chuckwagon Dinner

On one afternoon of our trip we took a horseback ride through the Black Hills.  Our destination was a little shelter in a clearing where some chefs were preparing a meal over a fire.  Other guests arrived via covered wagon, but we opted to go to the cook-out by horseback and then return on the wagon.  Getting there was definitely half the fun. We wound through trails in the Black Hills spotting deer and yellow bellied marmots along the way.  This was the kids' first time riding a full-sized horse by themselves, and they did great.  Olivia's horse, Diesel, liked to stop a lot, but she handled it well.  My horse, Indy, wanted to be first and kept trying to pass the guide's horse.  Owen's horse, TJ, and Brian's horse, Crow, were well behaved for the most part.  You can tell we don't ride a lot as we were all a little saddle sore when we reached the cook-out site.  One hour of riding was definitely enough.  While we waited for our steak to finish cooking, we enjoyed a little show.  The show consisted of folk songs and comedy.  The steak was delicious.  Brian and Owen went back for seconds.  It was a beautiful afternoon.

Caving

The national park service oversees two different cave systems in the Black Hills area.  We visited both- the first being Jewel Cave NM.  Jewel Cave is the third longest cave system in the world and is so named because of its numerous calcite formations.  We saw several examples of stalagmites, stalactites, cave popcorn, and cave bacon during our tour.

 We had time to kill before our tour, so the kids worked on activities to earn their Junior Ranger badge.

 Jewel Cave was nice (but I still like Mammoth Cave better).

The other cave in the region is Wind Cave NP- the sixth longest cave system in the world. Wind Cave is known for having a rare cave feature called boxwork, and we saw a lot of that.

 I didn't want the two cave experiences to be the same, so I booked us on a "Candlelight" tour at Wind Cave.  This was really fun.  We went off of the beaten path- literally- there were times where we were crawling and we had only a small candle bucket for light. Because of the requirements for this tour, we were not allowed to take photos inside of the cave.  The guide took one and texted it to us, but it turned out bad because the light from the flash blinded us. We would all like to try a "wild cave" tour at some point, but are not able to yet because there is usually an age requirement that the kids don't meet yet.  The candlelight tour was a good way to have a more adventurous experience in the cave that the kids can do.

The Black Hills

After our two days / one night in the Badlands, we made a quick stop at Wall Drug for food (and to look around a bit) and then drove to the Black Hills where we would spend the rest of our vacation.  Our base was the town of Custer, and we found it to be a nice, centrally located place to come back to every night.  The kids discovered a pizza place across the street from the hotel that they loved and we ended up eating a meal there every single day of our stay.  We did a lot of driving, hiking, and sightseeing in different areas of the Black Hills region throughout the week.  We visited Mount Rushmore on our first day.  There wasn't much to do there except look at the monument, so we didn't spend a ton of time at that location.

One area that we all liked a lot was the Sylvan Lake area.  We did a two-and-a-half hour hike here along the Sunday Gulch Trail.  This trail wound through varied landscapes and ended up being a bit more adventurous than I thought it would be.  Toward the end we were criss-crossing a stream on tree limbs and small wooden footbridges.

 We did three scenic drives in the Custer area of the Black Hills.  My favorite was the Needles Highway because of its dramatic views and narrow tunnels.

We had no problem spotting wildlife along the Wildlife Loop and Iron Mountain Road.  This buffalo was just strolling down the road without a care in the world.  This whole area was so beautiful and different than what we have in Georgia.  I really enjoyed seeing it.