Rapid City, SD, Monday, 30 July

Steam triains, SD wines, German schnitzels --- and Crazy Horse!  Our first morning in the Rapid City, SD, area found us first heading to our new “home,” America’s Mailbox (AM), which will be our permanent mailing address as we continue on this great adventure in LynDen Haus.  AM is also the company that will periodically forward our mail to us.  We picked up whatever mail we had waiting for us and tried to make sure we had whatever paperwork we would need to obtain our SDakota drivers’ licenses and register the motorhome and the Saturn VUE while we’re here in Rapid City.   SD’s DMV is closed on Mondays, so we couldn’t do anything today.  After leaving AM, we decided to do some sightseeing and headed south on Hiway 16 toward the Mt Rushmore area.  Along the way we “managed” to hit three wineries in the local area:  Prairie Berry Winery; Stone Faces Winery; and Naked Winery…all on the way to Hill City, SD.  The biggest surprise was how good some of the wines were, especially the rhubarb wines.  We picked up several bottles since they were so good and I think we ended up with almost a full case from the three wineries.  Once we had our “booze” we headed for Hill City to catch the 1880 Train, part of SD’s State Railroad Museum.  The converted vintage coal engine (now runs on oil) is a fully-restored authentic steam engine train that pulls several open air passenger cars up into the surrounding hills to Keystone, a mountain resort just outside the Mt Rushmore Memorial.  We saw loads of beautiful scenery, some deer, and several wild turkeys.  Well worth the price of admission and very relaxing. 

After the train ride we headed into Custer State Park on a series of very curvy roads. This is one very beautiful state park, with numerous small recreational lakes and resorts, and countless campgrounds for everything from tents to pop-up campers to full-sized motorhomes. And many of them were definitely full of tourists.  Before arriving in the Rapid City area we had heard about another huge rock memorial construction that would eventually pay tribute to the Native American Indians: the Crazy Horse Memorial.  

This thing is humongous!  The entire four presidents in the Mt Rushmore Memorial would fit inside just the head of the Crazy Horse Memorial.  Anyway, we found the entrance and spent an hour or so visiting the on-going (since 1948) construction site and co-located museum.  Believe I've got a couple pix that will do justice to the partly finished memorial.

By now both of us were getting hungry so we decided we’d look for someplace to get a bite to eat and headed for the town of Custer, the oldest town in the state.  Just on the outskirts of this little town that’s tucked into the surrounding hills we found the Bavarian Inn.  And yes, this very quaint, cozy little restaurant had one of my favorite German dishes on the menu: Jaeger schnitzel.  Lynette joined me in ordering this delicious German standard and we washed it down with some fine German Mosel Riesling.

Since it was getting late in the day, we decided to head back to our campground on the outskirts of Rapid City, and save more sightseeing when we come back to do the actual Mt Rushmore Memorial.