Day 7 (Friday). We started our morning at Mt. Rushmore. If you haven't seen this national monument yet, you need to get off the computer right now and drive to South Dakota. It's incredible! Watch the 14 minute film about how they sculpted the mountain. Take pictures.
Go through the museum slowly. Pay $5.50 to eat Thomas Jefferson's original recipe vanilla ice cream (soooo worth it, made with real vanilla beans and enough to feed 3 people, plus you get sa-weet pictures with TJ).
Pay $0.00 to become a master sculpture of ice cream (see the likeness of Jefferson? It's truly uncanny).
Heck, even pose with Gutzon Borglum (the sculptor who spent the last 17 years of his older life hanging off the side of a mountain).
Whatever you do at Mt. Rushmore, I promise you won't be disappointed! It's been one of our very favorite stops so far.
Next we stopped by Wall Drug. How this even makes the list on TripAdvisor is beyond me. Just don't.
On the other hand, the Badlands were well worth the time! Gorgeous views, fossil hiking trails, and lots and lots of prairie dogs made for a great afternoon. The boys also did a lot of climbing (I stuck to the small hills :)).
Lastly we made a stop at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. It came highly recommended from people back home and...well, it was definitely interesting. For those of you unfamiliar with the World's Only Corn Palace, it's a Russian-style building containing a large arena on the inside and corncob murals on the outside. The town spends $120,000 per year changing out the corncob murals and also hosts an annual Corn Festival which we were just so...lucky...enough to see.
The whole thing was so close to an episode of Parks and Rec it was almost funny, but eventually we left just feeling sad. We bypassed the $22.00 bucket of flavored cheese curds and the plastic smiling corn sippy cups and made our way to Minnesota. Here's hoping our dud of a Hotwire purchase doesn't still have the fleas mentioned in the TripAdvisor reviews AND that all that Wisconsin cheese tomorrow makes up for our unexpectedly interesting evening. :)
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