Mount Rushmore

We arrived at Mount Rushmore on Wednesday afternoon, with only 2 days left of school (woooooohoooo).  Our campground, the KOA Palmer Gulch, was a massive city of a campground.  It's the second largest KOA in the country, only behind a KOA in southern Florida.  I think I used the term "crawling with kids" to describe an earlier campground, but this place put that place to shame.... kids EVERYWHERE!  There was so much to do-  pool, big waterslide, mini-golf, playground, gaga pit, basketball, volleyball, bike rentals, and a whole calendar of kids activities all day long.    The biggest problem was deciding what to do (and biggest problem for me was constantly losing the kids, haha)

Thursday was the second to last day of school for Zach, and Kindergarten Luau Liftoff (aka- kinder grad) for Sarah.  The Kindergarten celebration was so cute, and I was so thankful to Sarah's teacher for dragging her computer outside so Sarah could participate with her class.  She's officially done with Kindergarten!

Sarah's Teacher holding up Sarah to say goodbye to her friends for the summer 

Unfortunately, the campground wifi was terrible at our campsite, and while we had enough to get by for Sarah's call, Zach was not having as much luck.  He was supposed to be doing a fun end of year activity with his class, but as the campground started waking up, he kept getting disconnected and unable to get back on.  He was getting frustrated, so I made the call and told him he was officially done with 4th grade.  A little anticlimactic, but much less stressful than trying to connect for "just fun" stuff.  

That afternoon, we had thought about going to see one of the national parks nearby, but the kids asked to just have a day hanging at the campground.  We played at the pool and went down the water slide a ton of times (mommy too!) 

That night, we went on a Chuckwagon Dinner ride.  It was so much fun!  There were stables at the front of our campground, and we met there to load up the covered wagons.  The 5 wagons brought us through the back of the campground, down a trail and to a big open meadow.  There were 2 cowboys providing some musical entertainment while our meal was being cooked on a big open fire.  They had big cast irons pots making baked beans and fire roasted potatoes, and a guy cooking South Dakotan steaks on a huge grate over the fire.  After dinner was peach and strawberry cobbler in cast iron.  It was so yummy.  The wagons then took us back to the campground.

The next day (no school since I declared it over, ha) we played in the campground in the morning while daddy did a little work.  After lunch we headed to Mount Rushmore.  We spent about an hour walking around and listened to a ranger presentation on the building of Mount Rushmore.  I never realized that the sculptor had envisioned it to be more (bodies too, not just heads) but the money ran out.  It was also going to be famous western figures, but they changed it to presidents because they thought it would bring in more tourists (ha, I guess that worked).  

That night we went into the town of Custer for pizza and then visited the Crazy Horse Monument.  The monument is still being built, with only the face and the beginnings of an outstretched arm.  There is a Native American Museum located on the grounds, and it was so well done.  We spent probably an hour and a half walking around the museum, and I would have stayed even longer if not for the kids.  There was a great information movie about the monument, the history of the black hills area, and about the man Crazy Horse.  Honestly, between Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, I liked Crazy Horse so much better.  I wanted to stay for the laser light show, but it wasn't going to start until 10pm and we were just done by 7:30.  No way we would have made it up that late.  

Saturday we left the Black Hills and headed down towards Colorado.  We wanted to get all the way to Estes Park on Saturday but everything was booked up, so we did an overnight in Fort Collins.  On the way, we saw a sign for ruts still visible from the Oregon Trail.  The 80's child in me and Pat immediately turned off the highway in search of the ruts, haha.  Such a random little side stop.

Here are some last day of school pics we took:

All smiles for summer!