Road Trip - Day 5

Day 5 of our trip was Sunday, and we had found an LDS church that was only about 45 minutes away, so that's where we went. The missionaries there were REALLY excited when we walked in because they thought we were investigators. They soon found out we were already members and were still nice, but you could tell they were wishing we were investigators they could teach. It was actually pretty cute to see them so excited about teaching the gospel. The sacrament meeting was really good. The couple that spoke was a young married couple with kids who were in the same phase of medical school as my brother, so it was fun to hear about them going through the same kind of thing as he is right now. 

After church we headed back to Keystone because we had seen a Presidential Wax Museum that looked kind of fun, and we had a bit of extra time. I learned some things about our presidents that I didn't know before, like that Grover Cleveland had a daughter named Ruth and that's where the Baby Ruth candy bar name came from. It was interesting for sure.

On our way out of Keystone we drove past Mt. Rushmore once more (you can't really get enough of it), and we stopped for lunch at the Flintstone's Drive In. It was part of a Flintstones theme park that we were excited to check out. We kind of grew up watching the Flintstones because my parents really liked it. The actual park was a little bit of a disappointment - it was run down and kind of gross, but we still got a few good pictures.

Our next stop was Sylvan Lake, which our helicopter pilot had told us we needed to check out. He said it was a really beautiful lake and totally worth the stop. And he was right for sure. I think it is the prettiest lake I've ever seen. It was totally peaceful, beautiful, and relaxing. It was the best part of the day for me. We rented a paddle boat and a hydro-bike (see the pictures below) and just paddled around the lake and enjoyed the scenery for a while.

The hydro-bike! Pretty fun looking, huh??

We took turns riding the hydro bike, and I found out it was much harder to maneuver than it looks. See that group of people behind me? That was a wedding party. I kept trying to turn the hydro-bike and I just kept heading straight for the wedding party. I was so panicked that I was going to crash into their party and ruin it. I finally did figure out how to turn it, and then I stayed far, far away from them.

Don't mind my ridiculous outfit. I was totally rocking the skirt/orange lifejacket that doesn't fit over my stomach/pink cowboy hat so I didn't get sunburned look. I'm sure the wedding party was annoyed that such a weird looking girl was in the background of their pictures.

The most embarrassing thing of the trip happened to me at Sylvan Lake too. I had just gotten off the hydro bike and was trying to get back into the paddle boat so that Stephanie could have a turn riding the bike. Well, as you may know, I'm not the most graceful person to begin with and ESPECIALLY not graceful now that I have a pregnant belly that gets in the way and throws me off balance all the time. So, I had one foot on the dock and one foot on the paddle boat and the boat just started drifting out towards the middle of the lake and my other leg was still on the dock. So yep - you guessed it - I did a lovely version of the splits that actually really hurt my legs and my belly and I'm sure the entire beach saw my underwear as my skirt rode up. I finally flopped (very gracefully, I'm sure) into the boat, landing on top of my mom and almost tipping us over. Once I got myself situated, I looked around (as anybody else would) to see if anybody saw that. To my great dismay, almost everyone around had seen and they were all laughing at me. My face was burning bright red, and I took a few seconds to be really embarrassed, and then I just let it go and laughed at myself. Because seriously, if I was one of the onlookers, I would have totally laughed at me too. Leave it to me to make a spectacle like that. :)

One of the other things our helicopter pilot told us to do was to drive along the needles highway because it was so scenic. He said there was a really cool place along the highway called "The Eye of the Needle", which is a rock formation that naturally split right down the middle just like the eye of a needle. We couldn't drive along the whole highway because Steph and I get pretty carsick and it was the windiest road I have ever, ever been on. But, we drove for a little bit and it really was so beautiful. I honestly had no idea that South Dakota would be so pretty! I definitely underestimated it.

The eye of the needle

The needles highway was the last thing we were going to see in South Dakota, so after we finished there we started our long trek back to Colorado - again, going the scenic ways and taking the roads less traveled. One of the roads less traveled took us to a town called Wall, and a place called Wall Drug. Wall Drug has got to be the most advertised drug store in the history of the world. We counted all of the signs along the freeway advertising the place and we counted 68. 68!! 68 signs in about a 40-50 mile stretch. You can do the math there about how many signs that is per mile - a LOT. So naturally, we thought it would be a pretty cool place. ...It wasn't. It was really just an ENORMOUS drug store with tons of tacky little souvenirs inside. I wanted to buy something just to say that I actually did visit Wall Drug, but I couldn't even find anything I liked. It was too overwhelming - too many things to look at. So, we bought one of their homemade donuts (that was also really well advertised), Stephanie got a free bumper sticker and then we were on our way. The donut was really delicious though, so I guess the whole stop wasn't a waste. :)

All the hype for this!

After Wall Drug, we drove through Badlands National Park on our way to Valentine, Nebraska - our stop for the night (more on that cute city to come). I didn't know anything about the park, and I thought it would be another foresty-type park like the Black Hills. I was totally wrong. It was full of these crazy cool looking rock formations. We got there right about sunset, so we got to drive through the park as the sun was setting which was really really awesome. We got some amazing pictures that still don't do the place justice at all. It was just so so cool!

Isn't it BEAUTIFUL??

Don't mind my huffing and puffing in the video. I forgot to take a video while we were down closer to the formations, and the hike up was kind of a doozy for the likes of a mom-to-be.

By the time we finished driving through the Badlands, it was pitch black and we hadn't stopped for dinner anywhere. This was actually pretty bad news because there were no real towns until Valentine, but we weren't going to get to Valentine for a few more hours, by which time we were sure everything would be closed. We had kind of resigned ourselves to eating a dinner of snacks that were in the car, but as we were driving we found a TINY town that had a few lights on that we could see from the freeway. So - we decided to take a chance and see if there was any place to eat. What we found was a truck stop diner that was connected to a gas station and it closed at 9:00. We pulled in at 8:55 and LUCKILY the nice servers there let us in. We had come on a bad day though, because earlier that afternoon they had had a bus load of 60+ people come and eat at their place and those people had eaten almost all the food. So - there was pretty much nothing to order, but we didn't even care because we were so grateful that they even let us in. We figured there would at least be some soup left to order, so mom asked what kind of soup they had that day, and the server just looked at mom and said, "We don't got no soup." Mom tried a few more options, all to which the response was, "We don't got no __________". That group of people really had eaten all the food! So, mom and I ordered some salad (which luckily they did "got"), and Steph ordered a grilled cheese sandwich. My salad was actually really, really, really yummy. Like, one of the tastiest meals of the whole trip. I was perfectly content. We were grateful to have some food in our stomachs as we finished the rest of the drive to Valentine, listening to the Chronicles of Narnia. It was a pretty packed day, but it was so fun!!