While we were over in Saskatchewan we had a few days of rain and so decided to take advantage of a couple of days off. Danielle, Chris, James and I headed off on a wee road trip to see Mount Rushmore seeing as we were so close to the American border (as you can see below).
The drive through North Dakota was pretty uneventful (tick - don't need to do that drive again!) But once we got to South Dakota things started picking up. We drove through the badlands which were pretty awesome, I didn't manage to get any great photos so I've stolen one from google to show you how cool it looked.
We stopped off at Belle Fourche on the way through as Chris was keen to check out the old wild west town, and boy are we glad we did. We met a war veteran who (besides the fact he had wet himself because of how drunk he was) he also told us about how he had ripped some guys heart out to save his fellow American soldiers and then he proceeded to give Chris his veterans jacket. After we asked what they did to fill in their time in the town a lovely woman told us that they 'hunt and they f**k' then she tried to tell us how she could teach us a few tricks...we quickly left that bar and I can't emphasize how quickly that was and headed on our way.
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| Chris is Belle Fourche |
After spending the night in Rapid City we set off in the morning to check out the four famous men. We were told that we had to make a stop at Crazy Horse, a memorial and eventually a university site to honor the culture, tradition and living heritage of North American Indians. Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski was commissioned to commence the memorial in 1948 and the project is still far from completion. You can read more about the project at http://crazyhorsememorial.org/ however to give you an idea of the size, the four Mount Rushmore heads fit into the size of crazy's horse alone!!
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| Danielle, Chris, James and I in front of Crazy Horse memorial |
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| A 1/34th size carving of Crazy Horse |
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| What the mountain will look like once it's completed |
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| Crazy Horse Up Close |
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| Chris, Danielle and I |
After Crazy Horse we headed to Mount Rushmore to see the those four famous faces. I think I would recommend to visit Rushmore then Crazy Horse just because Crazy Horse is so big and it made Mt Rushmore seem kinda small! however it was still super impressive and we got some pretty fantastic snaps of the afternoon.
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| Danielle giving Chris a lift up to Mount Rushmore! |
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| Danielle...I mean Chris pondering life in front of the 4 wise men |
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| Danielle, Chris, James and me |
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| Mount Rushmore! |
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| Me and my bearded man |
That night we stayed in Deadwood, the town where the infamous Wild Bill Hickok was killed. We watched the local town play where Wild Bill's murderer Jack McCall was put on trial and sentenced to death. Earlier we also saw the 'shooting' of Wild Bill on the main street of town, it was quite cool how all the tourists got involved and walked Jack down to the courthouse. So glad we made the effort to see Mt Rushmore and lucky we got to see crazy horse cos we didn't even know about it but if you get the chance, totally worth it!
