Mount Rushmore

We spent the night before our visit to Mount Rushmore at a motel in Rapid City. There are two roads near Mount Rushmore (Iron Mountain Road and the Needles Highway) that were architected to showcase the scenery. Their paths included turns and tunnels that were not compatible with our Forester motorhome, so we rented a car in Rapid City for the day. My prior visit to Mount Rushmore was about 30 years ago, but I still have fond memories of the pigtail bridges on the Iron Mountain Road, thus this is the road we selected for our approach to the monument. The road twists and turns as you get closer to the mountain and the presidents are framed by two of the tunnels.


Honestly, once we arrived at Mount Rushmore I found it to be hot and crowded. The National Park Service has been running an ad campaign the last few years telling Americans to "find your park". This is definitely not mine, but it is a landmark that all Americans should visit. The movie and the visitors center were informative and air-conditioned. There is a trail that leads closer to the mountain but it was partially closed and too hot for me this day. We concluded our visit with some of Thomas Jefferson's vanilla ice cream which was big enough to share (We didn't). I hope that we can return later in the trip, perhaps at a cooler and less busy time of day.


On the way back to Rapid City, we stopped at the Presidential Wax Museum in Keystone. It was a cheesy attraction (or perhaps cheesier than one would expect) and some of the statues were more realistic than others. Returning the rental car to the airport was more frustrating that we had hoped. The airport doesn't have regular ground transportation, like taxis, so we spent half an hour waiting for a shuttle to take us back to our parked RV. Also, the airport is almost 20 minutes out of town which is surprising given how much available space is closer to the city. When we later learned that the unfortunate radio call sign for the Rapid City airport is KRAP, we were somewhat mollified.