The End Of South Dakota

Rushmore was a bust so we go off to Custer State Park.  We get there by the Iron Mountain Road....Absolutely Fantastic....Double Black Diamonds though.  We went straight down a mountain twisting and turning over and under these crazy bridges.  It pops out right at the entrance of Custer.  We tell the ranger that we are staying at Slyvan Lake.  She maps it out for us and tells us it's on the other side of the park.  It's about 5:30 pm.  Ho far can this be?   Well by 9:30 we finally hit a site!!

We take this road called the Needle Highway, suppose to be very very cool......At first it was nothing new, just a lot of trees and curvy roads....up hill of course.  Then we have to go through a few tunnels.  Now these are not tunnels like you may think.  They are chiseled out of the granite.  The first one was OK...seemed small at first, but I drove right through it.  Next one  9 feet 2 inches wide...OK....you may think, go back and go another way....Can't, only way to Slyvan Lake. So Denise gets out and guides me through.  We clear the tunnel by 2-4 inches!  We keep going up...time is going by...now we have need going fr 2-2 1/2 hours or so...we are about 1 mile from the camp.  It was only 13-15 miles from the ranger station!  Of course there is another tunnel....8 feet 4 inches wide.  There is no way that this pig is getting through that hole.  

We have almost everybody out of the HOW and help turn this rig around on a very narrow road.  Then we have to traverse the entire mountain down again.  We finally pulled over...cooked up some hot dogs.  Then we continued on and found an empty site in the valley of the park.

BTW...it was raining the whole time

I have not even told you about the donkeys that attacked us!....next post