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August rv trip

We just pulled in to Dickinson nd. Tomorrow we move on to mount Rushmore KOA for 4 nights. We stopped at the Louis and Clark museum.
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Still haven't seen any buffalo. Lol. Since we're around mt Rushmore for 5 days, I want to take a few hours to drive through the badlands without the camper. Of course we are going to see the mountain. As well as crazy horse. If we feel adventurous, we may go looking for the city of gold behind the heads. Some of the kids want to go horseback riding. I may try to find a side by side to rent for a few hours to go exploring.

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We left the campground around 8:30am to avoid the wind on the prairies. It was alright. Barely any wind. It was a beautiful drive. Flat farm land followed by rolling hills with outcrops of rock formations rising from the ground. Then you hit rapid city. As soon as you leave it starts climbing,and climbing, and climbing. Up to 1600 feet. Then it twists and goes down and down and down then back up again. We drove right past the monument going to the campground with the trailer in tow. We plan on going back to get a better look.
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After crazy horse we tackled the needles highway. I let my wife drive so I could focus on not crapping my pants.
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From there, we took the old mountain highway back to mount Rushmore. Big mistake nothing but a series of sharp switchbacks going up topping out at 1960ft elevation. The trail back down was called the pigtail bridges. Picture going round and round all the way down over wooden bridges and a trail carved into the side of a mountain. By this time, I was turning 3 shades of green and looking for new fresh undies.
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We finally got to mount Rushmore but couldn't stay long as the skies opened up with a heavy rain and thunderstorm.
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Because the camera guy was turning green, I had to find a picture of the pigtail bridges. There was about 4 of them on the way down I'm guessing as I fought symptoms of vertigo.
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No problem. That's the last time I was here too. Early 90s. But back then we camped a ways away and only came up to see the heads.

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One thing we didn't plan for was the change in barometric pressure at higher altitudes. The air inside all of our bags of chips expanded to the point of almost popping. My watch didn't survive the change in elevation either. Apparently the air inside expanded and cracked the glass.
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Times have sure changed. I remember growing up traveling with my parents in the motorhome and always having and looking at at huge atlas of north America. We would all sit down together in the evening either outside around a campfire or inside and look at the atlas to plan the following day travel.

Along comes the GPS. We just punch in the destination and follow the directions on a screen. One thing that is handy for traveling using a GPS is when you need to account for frequent fuel stops hauling a camper, you punch in nearest fuel and it shows you how far the closest place is. Set that as a waypoint and take it. We've encountered a few places where fuel is scarce. Because we're hauling 36 feet of trailer behind us, we have to consider that along with the fact that the expedition has a smaller fuel tank than the truck. So yes, I have a can of extra fuel strapped to the back of the camper just in case. We were 18 miles from needing it once. That's too close for me.

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You didn't go to Wall Drug store??
Gosh, that was a regular stop for us kids when we'd go up that way on vacation.
 
Thanks. We're going right through there on Tuesday on our way to fort pierre for a night. If we can find parking close enough we may check it out.

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Someone else didn't have such a great time. This one was out at the same time as us. They slipped off the trail on a switchback and went 30 feet down a bank where they slammed into a big boulder.
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Today's our last day here. We went and did tourist stuff. First we checked out and illusion place. The building is actually sloped at about a 35 degree angle to give the illusion that everything is on an angle. After that, we checked out rush mountain. It's a cave system/ theme park. Expensive but impressive. Tomorrow we head out for fort pierre south Dakota.
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Well. During the big outage, we drove, and drove, then drove some more. We're now in Duluth Minnesota only 4 hours from home. Here for a 2 day outdoor concert at the waterfront. We did stop at wall drug. What can I say about wal drug? Humm. Meh comes to mind. Oh well. Kids were happy.

We stayed in pierre sd that night. Then moved on to a little place on the Minnesota border. Today we moved to Duluth.
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Last night we attended the city on the hill music festival. Zach Williams and skillet were headlining along with a couple of local bands. It was great. Evan, our oldest, likes skillet. Someone from the road crew came up to him and gave him a free pass to meet the band before they went on. He was excited. What an experience. His first big concert. I estimate that there were about 3000 people there. Only 30 bracelets were given to meet them.
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We made it home today after being on the road since July 17th. It's about 4 hours from Duluth to here. What better sign that we're back in Canada than a flock of Canadian geese waiting for us at the border.

We made it home relatively in one piece. I hit a bad pothole outside of Duluth that nearly tore the rear bumper off the camper. I had the scooter lift attached to it. Camper bumpers are very thin and brittle apparently. I had to use about 4 heavy duty ratchet straps to hold it from completely tearing off. The welds holding it on were broken 3/4s of the way around when I inspected it. Oh well. We made it.
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Too bad our trip dates didn't align better but other than the major pothole it sounds like you all survived reasonably well. Glad you made it back home.
 
Looks like a great trip Brian. :tiphat:
We visited Mt Rushmore last year and after driving by all the Wall drug advertisements for 50+ miles we had to stop. Wife liked it, I had the same reaction as you. meh. It appeared everyone and their brother stopped there.
 
I agree with you. I was actually wanting to do the badlands route going by there but since we had the camper attached we opted to bypass it. The badlands, from memory anyways, is nothing like the needles highway or the old mountain highway near Rushmore. I had never even heard about them so I had zero expectations. I always thought I was ok with heights until I got there. I was almost in tears and hyperventilating.

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