While four days remain for us to enjoy our Out West vacation, this would be the last day for us to visit scenic sites on our list. We began by driving from Rapid City, South Dakota to nearby Mt. Rushmore. To say the images of the presidential faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt loom larger than life is an understatement. The scale is such that a full sized statue of any one man would stand 465 feet tall.Visually, Mt. Rushmore looks exactly like all the pictures I’ve seen of it, but having visited the site, I was able to see some of the less photographed beauty of this national treasure. There is a visitor center and gift shop, as well as a columned entrance to funnel visitors into a courtyard for prime viewing of the faces on the mountainside. The granite columns are square and contain the name of each state and the date that state joined the Union.
It doesn’t take a long time to see all one wants to see of Mt. Rushmore, at least it didn’t for us, and we were soon on our way to visit the Chief Crazy Horse Memorial, the world’s largest mountain carving. It’s a long, long way from being completed, but the sheer size of it is impressive. There was a scheduled blast* around noon the day we were there but we didn’t stay to see it. Instead, we left to drive toward the Badlands of South Dakota.
On the Interstate we saw sign after sign along the way promoting Wall Drug Store. Barbara mentioned that someone had told her we should stop to see it, too. The sites folks suggested we see are too numerous to mention here, and too numerous to see them all in a two-week tour, but Wall Drug Store was on our way to the Badlands, so we took the appropriate exit and soon found the Wall Drug Store in downtown Wall, SD.
I’m not sure there would still be a Wall, SD, were there no Wall Drug Store, and from what I could see Wall Drug Store comprised a city block. It had “tourist trap” written all over it, but the best way for me to describe it to others is to say, “Think of Gatlinburg, Tennessee compressed into one block.”
It was lunchtime when we arrived, and we soon found the restaurant, which adjoins an old-fashioned ice cream parlor. Now, that was a hard decision, but the restaurant won out.
We were settled into eating our sandwiches when the already full restaurant got a lot fuller. Two busloads of “old people” lined up in two, single-file lines. I spoke briefly to a woman in charge of the tour and learned they had departed South Georgia a few days prior on a thirty-one day trip that would take them to Alaska. Suddenly, our two-week adventure paled in comparison theirs.
Barbara want to check the souvenir shops, afterwards, and while perusing them we saw four Native-Americans in traditional bead and buckskin apparel enter a jewelry store and soon emerge. As most of the folks in town, were tourist, the Indians drew a crowd of the curious, including us. One mother asked if they would pose for a picture with their daughter. They obliged her, and thus afforded the rest of us the opportunity to photograph them as well.
Refreshed, we hit the road once more and were soon entering the Badlands National Park. Barbara had little prior knowledge as to what the Badlands looked like, while I had seen the Badlands vicariously via various media, I was unable to offer her much of a perspective. In some respects the Badlands look like a smaller version of The Grand Canyon, but there are many areas where rock formations rise above the plains.
The beauty of the Badlands is a quiet one. Like the Grand Canyon, it too was breathtaking, but I didn’t feel as though it would pull me into its depths, were I to get too close. I felt ill at ease walking along a ramp to a viewing area, but I wasn’t frozen with fear. Though signs warned visitors to beware or rattlesnakes, I saw numerous individuals pay no heed to the message and with children in tow were walking on narrow ledges to more scenic point. I could imagine one or more of them sliding down a steep slope into one of the ravines, knowing I would be powerless to help them.
Like so many of the natural wonders we had already visited on our vacation, we didn’t stay long at the Badlands, either, but it’s a place we’d love to visit once more.
Our pics and comments can be viewed at http://rrnews.org/Week2Day11
*The following video is not mine, but it was filmed the same day we were at the Crazy Horse Memorial. http://vimeo.com/14274844
No comments:
Post a Comment