Jardons: Mt. Rushmore: Sight Seeing

We love camping so much. It is such a great way for our family to more inexpensively explore the beautiful world around us. And now that we've discovered KOAs we feel like a whole new world has opened up to us! We decided on the summers where we don't travel to Oregon we will start exploring various places within a half day - day's drive away from us that has a KOA we can stay at and explore. Well, Summer 2019 already took us back to Gunnison and we decided to venture out to South Dakota and visit Mt. Rushmore! Little did we know how amazing the KOA was and how many things there are to see in the Black Hills. This area is so rich with history we could've spent another 3 full days at least just exploring. We left with a long list to make sure we return to when we go back another summer.

National Monument!

You could actually see the side of good ol George's head as you drove the beautiful windy road over

Another view from the drive

This one looks like a postcard

Any future presidents in this family?

Love this smile!

Thomas Jefferson's vanilla ice cream recipe. It says he is the reason we have vanilla ice cream here in the United States. He brought the recipe back from France and it became a big hit and has stuck around since!

This is a GREAT thing for this ice cream loving family!!

Any time there's a rocky area to climb the kids are all about it... how neat to have such a view in the background!

After the views and buying some fun things at the gift shop we went on a little picnic lunch before we headed to the presidential wax museum.

Some more rock and tree climbing!

Cheese!

With our stay at the KOA we got free admission into the presidential wax museum. It was sooooo cool! I remember going to a wax museum when I was a kid visiting family in Texas and loving it. This one was particularly special just being centered around the presidents. You walked through the building and it was basically a large timeline of the history of presidents. Some more influential/famous presidents had full presentations like the one below and others just had their head in a glass case with the time they served. Did you know the 9th president only served for 31 days?!?! Ever heard of William Henry Harrison? He was elected president and caught pneumonia shortly after and died only 31 days after becoming president!

Not sure I'd want her to become president some day... so much stress! But she looks good and confident in front of the podium!

Watching a video of how the wax figures are made

Yours truly ...

Good ol' Abe

Haha!

This is a display of George and Martha Washington being presented the flag. How cool is this!

You got little audio boxes and would push the number for each display and it would tell you a little about what you're seeing and about that president. The kids sure loved pushing the buttons and listening.

Calvin Coolidge during the dedication of Mt. Rushmore with the sculptors.

George Bush with a firefighter in front of a 9/11 diorama. They had a clip on repeat in the background from the live coverage this scene represented.

Theodore Roosevelt... we loved this display because of the bison head on the wall... Josh's favorite! A week or so after we returned from our trip we were sitting around the dinner table and decided we really like the name Theodore! So... if baby #7 turns out to be a boy then Theodore it'll be ; )

Not sure who this guy is but he is at the main entrance to the museum for photo opportunities such as these!

That wrapped up the first day and the next day we decided to check out the Crazy Horse Memorial. This is something I had never even heard of before this trip. What a neat memorial!

Here's a little blurb about the memorial from wikipedia:

The Crazy Horse Memorial is a mountain monument under construction on privately held land in the Black Hills, in Custer County, South Dakota, United States. It will depict the Oglala Lakota warrior, Crazy Horse, riding a horse and pointing into the distance. The memorial was commissioned by Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, to be sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski.

Here's the future carving plans

This will be the finished carving but most likely our grandchildren's grandchildren will be the ones to see it!

They had a lot of different museums to learn about some of the indian history as well as the history of the construction site and family. I had no idea that South Dakota was such a bison loving part of the world!

Bison selfie... smile!

We drove in to Custer to get some lunch before we headed out on our next adventure.

We decided on eating at The Pounding Fathers! ; )

Next stop... Custer State Park! Again, we had not clue how amazing this place is!!! We should've spent a whole day there but only had a couple of hours. When we first entered the park we weren't sure if we'd see anything. They had said the best time to see the herd was in the early morning and we were there towards the end of the day. We drove around a bit, stopped at one of the little gift shop/convenience stores near the camp sites and restaurant and decided to start the main loop for short drive before turning around and heading out. Before we hit the gift shop all the cars in front of us were slowing down... we knew this was it! One lone Bison!!!