Day 4: Mount Rushmore, SD to Greybull, WY

Miles traveled: 329 miles
Total miles driven: 860 miles
States traversed: South Dakota, Wyoming

After waking up, we headed over to see the Crazy Horse monument a few miles away. Wow, what an impressive feat! The monument was started in 1948 and all you can make out is Crazy Horse’s head. His nose is about the size of one of the heads on Mount Rushmore. I wonder if they’ll ever finish it… if they do, it will be the largest sculpture in the world, and it will be truly awesome.

From Crazy Horse, we planned to head out to Yellowstone National Park, but we didn’t quite make it there. We drove across Wyoming: cowboy country. We passed ranches and spotted people wearing cowboy hats. We passed sagebrush, plateau plains, and mountains. We met friendly people. I felt sorry that I’ve never read books to Desmond about cowboys or Native Americans. He’s such a book lover, and gives him a foundational understanding of much of what we talk about. The cowboy stuff out here means little to him. Oh well, we will work on that.

Desi and Tommy  working on breakfast

As we were driving through Wyoming, we had to decide if we were going to follow the route on the billboards advertised as the “shortest route to Yellowstone” or the route suggested by Dad’s Garmin GPS, two different routes. My phone (Siri) agreed with the billboards, but we decided on the Garmin’s route, since it would take us through Sheridan, WY, a larger town, which would provide shopping opportunities, since we needed to replenish some of our groceries (most importantly, our Diet Pepsi, since the Holmes’ tend to be addicted to the stuff). The route took us over a huge mountain (Cutler Mountain in the Big Horn Mountains and Granite Pass), which reached up to 9000 feet in elevation. The weather was bad: rainy and foggy. Perhaps the view was nice on a clear day. But since it wasn’t a nice day, we had some more white-knuckle driving. At least it wasn’t windy. The highlight of the drive was spotting four moose along the road. I’m pretty sure only Dad and I were able to see them, since we were sitting up front.

Terrible visibility on Cutler Mountain

We didn’t make it to Yellowstone or Cody, WY, which was our backup location. Because of the slowdown in the mountains, we had to stop about an hour outside Cody in Greybull, WY. We stayed at yet another KOA. We have come to find they do have a standard of cleanliness and family-friendliness we were starting to enjoy. This one was owned by an older Dutch couple. They were very friendly, and their boxer Bonnie liked Desmond. Desi liked her, except when she tried to lick his face. They had a nice playground, but we could really only walk around it because everything was wet from the drizzle we were experiencing. We cooked some frozen pizzas for dinner, I did a couple loads of laundry, and we called it a night. I went to bed wondering if dad’s promise of using the air conditioner sometime on this trip would come to fruition. If not, I really overpacked.