Day 6: More Big Squarish States (SD, Wyoming, and Montana)

Today we finished our lovely stay in South Dakota (read: SD kind of sucks).  While the scenery is fantastic and the horizons seem impossibly far away, it is a bit disconcerting to see a warning placard on every window in the room strongly urging guests to leave the windows closed due to frequent, severe weather.  It was loads of fun carrying our luggage in and walking the dogs in pretty strong winds and often sideways rain.  That what we experienced was not an anomaly is evidenced by the design of the front door.

If you look closely at this stock photo of our hotel,
you can see that our hotel is attached to an indoor waterpark.
None of us brought bathing suits.

There is a large glass wall that provides entry approximately 15 feet to the right of the double sliding doors so that the wind and rain won't actually enter the lobby along with guests.  It wasn't until we experienced that little storm on one of our two days in the state (it is May, right?) that we understood the popularity and sheer number of indoor waterparks - they are everywhere around here!

Before leaving South Dakota, we had to go see Mt. Rushmore.  We knew that we would not be able to take the dogs into the park nor did we want to pay for parking so we just drove toward it until we found a good vantage point.  This was Molly's view of Mt. Rushmore.

 The rest of us got a slightly better view, though it was a bit underwhelming.  I thought that it would be a lot bigger (yes, it would have been bigger if we got closer, but still).  We got lucky that the rain stopped before we arrived so we had a pretty good view.

There are four presidents on my head!

 After we left Mt. Rushmore, we went to Kohl's to get Lisa some new shoes.  Said earlier storm left her shoes caked with mud and pebbles after walking the dogs next to the hotel, and the bathtub could only do so much to clean them. (Her shoes should be named the Reebok RealTrapEveryPebbleandMudParticle instead of RealFlex, but they didn't ask me.) The highlight of the Kohl's trip was that Molly saw a pair of shoes that she absolutely had to have, having gotten the bug from trying on mommy's new shoes.  Yes, we gave in to that tantrum so quickly that we only realized much later that we had been had by toddler manipulation.  Molly is tricky.

Don't you think Molly's new shoes go well with
the new theme of my car decor? I call it
"Molly's sticky, crumb-filled bouncy castle"

The views on the drive through Wyoming almost made up for the dangerously high winds and constant rain.  The lunch at the Chophouse in Gillette was a wonderful respite and repast.  It kind of looked like a place we had seen on Kitchen Nightmares from the outside, but inside the food was awesome.