Day 3 Story

Halfway through day 3

So I said we were camping in Yellowstone and I would give no blog updates...wrong!  More about that in the Day 4 story though.  For now, here's what happened on day 3.

We embarked very early from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  There was grass, farms, open space, grass farms, open space, etc.  For a long while.  I was driving, and coach was on the phone.  At the last possible second, he desperately pointed to a rest stop, and once I barely pulled off on the exit, explained to me he needed to go to the bathroom.  Well, I'm glad he had to go to the bathroom, because this particular rest stop happened to have the most unbelieveable view of the Missouri river.

After a quick stop and more plenty more pictures being taken (which you'll be able to see on my facebook, I need to save space on the blog), we were back on the road.  Once we crossed the Missouri River, it opened up into the plains.  The great plains, I guess.  Long, straight, unending roads.

For fun, I decided to pick a point on the horizon, and see how long it took us to get there.  Going at about 70-75mph, it took us 5 mins, 43 seconds to get to the point on the horizon we picked.  It was 7 miles away.  We saw one point and it just kept getting closer, but it took over 5 minutes to get to it!  It was totally different than any highway ride you'll experience in NJ, PA, or NY.  Like I said, long, straight, and seems to go on forever.

Eventually, we stopped off at a certain National Memorial you've probably all heard of...



It was pretty far off the highway, farther than we originally thought.  It took a long time to get there.  At one point, Coach (whose idea it was to see Mt. Rushmore in the first place) wondered out loud, "why are we even going to see this thing?  Its really just a big sculpture, right?  Whats the big deal?" 

It might just be a big sculpture, but it was pretty damn cool.  The picture says it all, but the scale of it is just so incredible.  There is a museum there showing how it was constructed (90% of the construction was precision blasting with dynamite).  There's a trail to walk around so you can see it from all different angles.  If you're lucky, you might even see some wildlife, like I did:

They say you need to spend about 2 hours at Mt. Rushmore to get the full experience, so thats what we did.  After the 2 hours there, it was back on the road.  We stopped at a Wallmart somewhere in western South Dakota and picked up some cheap camping gear so we could spend the night in Yellowstone.  We heaved towards Wyoming to get as close as possible to Yellowstone before setting up camp for the night.  The crazy part is that in Wyoming, while on a state road, we ran into some "construction", if you can call it that.  We saw a sign that said "Pavement ends" - the road literally just ended!  No road!  An official state road, just gone!  There were cones marking the path the pavement should have been, but there was nothing but dirt for a couple miles.  I guess thats how its done in Wyoming.

Eventually we arrived at a campground in Greybull, Wyoming, and set up camp for the night.  I woke up the next morning thinking to myself "I'm camping, and I'm in Wyoming.  I just went camping in freaking Wyoming."  I dunno, I thought it was cool.

Moving on to Day 4...