Sunday, July 24, 2011 – Badlands National Park, South Dakota – 12:59 PM
Mood: 30% Whatever, 20% Pain, 50% Some random positive emotion
Listening To: Various Songs on the Radio (Sirius XM 20 on 20)
Rawr. I’m in pain. :P We are here at the Badlands National Park and I climbed up a small ridge/mountain thing and small plants attacked me and poisoned me. DON’T FREAK OUT. I’M FINE. It didn’t kill me – obviously – it just hurt a bit. Some water and quite a bit of Cortizone later, and I’m writing this blog as we are heading to Mount Rushmore. This wasn’t the only thing we did today. We also went to the Wall Drugstore that was probably the most interesting drug store/mall that I’ve ever seen! It had an old western theme and it was really cool~ They had every kind of store you could think of! There was even a small Traveler’s chapel! D: My favorite store (other than the bookstore) was this small art shop where I got this adorable statue! It’s gold in the form of a large heart with a smaller heart on the side, an arrow going through the both and a smaller, red crystal in both. Oh yeah, it was only seven bucks and fake gold. :3 A steal, if I do say so myself. We got a bunch of pictures~ But my least favorite to take was inside an annex of the drugstore there was this fake T-Rex. o.o Scared me half to death, it did. It freaked poor Mattie out too, especially because he had to be on the sign attached to the T-Rex’s cage. Good thing we missed his attempt at feeding (happens every 12 minutes) otherwise I might have freaked out epicly along side Mattie who may have passed out from fear. DX
- Wall, South Dakota – 1:32 PM
Just a little update. We saw the Minuteman Missile National Historical Site. Apparently it was one of the missiles aimed at Ivan during the Cold War. Oh yeah, non-Hetalia fans: Ivan is Russia. :3 So anyways, it was kind of boring. :P As of now, we’re heading to the main HQ, so maybe that will be just a bit cooler. :/
- Elsworth Airforce Base, 15 miles south of Wall, South Dakota – 1:48 PM
Let. Down. That’s all I’m going to say. It wasn’t even the HQ, it was the missile itself. I guess it was cool and all, but it wasn’t really worth it for me. :/ My parents are happy though, saying it was a good stop, but I think it would have been cooler if you could have gone inside/underground. :P That’s all I’m saying. But hey, I’ve never seen a (dead) nuclear missile before, so in a roundabout way, it was cool.
- Mount Rushmore, South Dakota – 5:34 PM
One word: AWESOME. Mount Rushmore is definitely my favorite site so far. I was disappointed by almost all of the other sites, but this lived up to my expectations. Maybe learning about America triggered my Hetalia subconscious or something like that, but who knows? I think what I loved most about it was learning about it. I mean, what’s cooler than learning that out of the exactly 400 workers, not one person died! And that apparently, Roosevelt and Jefferson were not part of the actual design. I bet you didn’t know that! Along the entire tour, I had to fill out this small booklet to become a “Rushmore Ranger” and that was funnnn~ I have an official badge and a certificate! Okay, the official badge is a gold-painted plastic pin, but hey. It’s cool! :3
Next stop: Jewel Cave and Wind Cave. :3 Gotta love giant holes in a rockface.
- Hell’s Canyon, Black Forest National Park, South Dakota – 7:52 PM
Correction: Next Stop: Hell’s Canyon
Well, that was fun/painful. Turns out, Hell’s Canyon is a trail that leads you through a burned down forest. It was actually really, really cool. I liked it. :3 Despite the fact that I now have a rash and my knee got stabbed by this random concrete box that I went to explore, it was fun. :3 Yeah, my favorite part was exploring the concrete box. It was just sitting there, in the middle of this canyon, doing its own derpy thing. It must have been around 6 feet on each edge and it must have been around 10-12 feet deep. There was like 3 planks of wood, bunches of rocks, and a Diet Coke can in the bottom and this pointless and rusty pipe pointing out of it. My brother says that he saw bullet holes on the outside, but I didn’t see any. I think the coolest part was that on the opposite wall, there was an engraved arrow pointing to two fallen trees that pointed to a cliff that had a giant carving of a freaking blue heron in it. National Treasure 3, anyone? If anyone knows the producer/director/someone affiliated with NT, would you mind telling them about that place? Thankyas~
- Devil’s Tower, Wyoming – 9:57 PM
COOLEST PLACE EVER. Even cooler than Mount Rushmore. Not because I like giant stone towers that sick up out of the ground, but because my brother and I had a race to this one rock in this huge boulder field. It was amazing. :3 I touched the finish rock first~ It was great! XD He and I also had a race down the hill and to the car. (He may try and claim that he won that one, but truth be told, it was a draw). We decided that when we are in college, we are going to have a rematch. :3 Complete with spectators (our friends) and judges (also our friends). XD
- Buffalo, Wyoming – 1:34 AM
So we finally got to our hotel. It’s blah. :P Nice, but blah. Dinner was great, though. FANTASTIC, actually. We went to Prime Rib Restaurant. 5/5 stars. I had the Petite Filet and it practically melted in my mouth! :D Nothing much after that, just a really long drive while dealing with a dead computer that I couldn’t update on. XP
That's about it. See ya later!
~Alazne Chan and Matthieu Williams
