Sunday, July 9, 2006
Day 14
Custer State Park/Mount Rushmore National Monument

Happy Anniversary to us! 12 years today. We celebrated by going to Mount Rushmore today and actually eating in the restaurant there. Mount Rushmore was awe-inspiring. It was amazing to see those faces in the mountain and also to learn how it was sculpted. The drive to Rushmore was also beautiful, and we went through 3 small tunnels that can only fit one car at a time. That was neat. Upon exiting two of them, you can see the faces from a distance, framed in the tunnel exit. Very cool. We even encountered a bunch of burrows (donkeys) in the middle of one of the roads to Rushmore. I now understand the phase “stubborn as a mule” even though these were asses. I guess I understand the term “pain in the ass” too. They would NOT move for anything and we had to kind of sneak by them. We really thought that one of them was going to kick our car. Wouldn’t that have been fun!?

While at Rushmore, the kids earned their Junior Ranger Badge by completing a booklet of questions and puzzles and things. It was really neat and they learned a lot, and so did mom and dad! They also got their passports stamped and bought stickers to put in them.

On the way back from Mount Rushmore the navigator told the driver to turn the wrong way, even though the driver thought it was wrong he followed the directions given and away we went. But, it was OK, because I realized my mistake immediately and we just continued in that direction, because it’s all kind of a big circle around here anyway. So as we were driving we saw the sign for Crazy Horse and decided that would be cool too, so we went.

Crazy Horse was not as awesome as Mount Rushmore, at least not to me. It was $25.00 to get in and it is not even completed yet. They have been working on it for over 50 years and all that is done is his head. It was massive, but the view was very far away. If you wanted to get closer you had to pay to ride a school bus down the road to the front. Sorry, not for me. The concept of it is incredible, but Rodney and I could not figure out why, if these American Indians hired or asked Korczak (the sculptor) to do this work, they did not give him any assistance or tools. He worked on it ALONE for many years with poor equipment he had to buy himself. Eventually he married and had 10 children, 5 of them boys, who almost all began and are still working on the monument. The sculptor is now dead, yet his family continues to work on it and now there are many other workers, and it is progressing. They won’t take government money, which is fine, but the whole thing just seemed weird, like why aren’t the Indians funding the project or helping out. Especially in the beginning… Plus there were way too many fees and gift shops for me.

Mount Rushmore was done in 14 years and had over 400 people working on it…

After that we came home and were excited to find that our refrigerator is fixed and working again. We had played with a few things the day before, and when we woke up it seemed fine, and is still fine now… Knock on wood… Of course we started having problems with the water pressure not being high enough at all. The problem actually started when we were at the KOA on the 5th. Even hooked up to “city water” there we had crummy pressure, and it has been getting worse and worse. The pump seemed like it was not running correctly at all these past few days, and got real bad today. We worked on it for HOURS. Everyone reading may not understand my next comment, but my family will… Rodney is now becoming an expert at fixing things the Casey way. It took a while, but he took each component of the water system apart and tested all different ways of reconnecting the hoses to determine where there might be some type of clog or blockage. Well, it turned out to be the filter! Good Grief. That was what he had originally thought, but brilliant me looked at the filter and said it looked fine and it didn’t look clogged or even dirty, so I put it right back in. Well, in the end, like 4 hours later, it turned out to be the entire cause of the problem. It is now out and we are (heaven forfend) using unfiltered water until we can buy a new one. So, Caseys everywhere, please note that we now have duct tape on part of the outside of our trailer, we are missing a light cover, we have messed around with a refrigerator temperature sensor thingy and got it to work even though we don’t really know why or how, and we have taken apart an entire water system after figuring the whole thing out and put it back together in all sorts of configurations to figure out the problem, and it is all working great! So, now that Rod and I both understand the finer points of RV water systems and refrigeration systems, let nothing else go wrong! After all, we are traveling to several more campgrounds where there is no “modern” convenience of electricity and running water at your site.

Tomorrow we’re off to Jewel Cave National Monument!