Today we ventured to Mount Rushmore. Got up and fixed some breakfast, packed a picnic, drove a lovely drive through Custer State Park and headed to Mount Rushmore. John and I had been here before and while it is really something to see, it isn’t a place that we felt we needed to spend a ton of time exploring. We parked in the garage and the kids asked for lunch… Having “just” finished breakfast, we decided to leave the lunch in the car… Bad idea, keep reading.
We were a little bit nervous about going to Mount Rushmore – the political climate and rumblings about tearing it down and the fact that Trump had recently held a rally there, left us uncertain of what we could encounter on our visit. Fortunately, it was a lot of families, veterans, patriots and the only protests we saw were a whole bunch of people trying to smuggle their dogs past the ‘No Pets Beyond this Post’ signs.
We made our way over to the Ranger tents and got our Junior Ranger books. John helped Trista and I helped Levi. Levi did a good job with most of it, I would ask him questions and record his answers and he even eagerly did some of the activities meant for older kids. However, one of his activities was to draw a picture of his visit. He tried to draw something, didn’t like it, asked me to erase it and then set off to work on it again. I will never stop laughing about this as long as I live, but to Levi I kept encouraging him to draw a picture.
In the end, he won and left it this way, the ranger felt his efforts were sufficient and he earned his badge. After they signed off, he discovered that they had a stamp of Mount Rushmore and he stamped it over the word, ‘No’ and said, “There. That’s perfect!”
As we worked the books and climbed down what felt like a thousand steps down to the sculptor’s studio and almost all of the seating had been removed, so we stood through a Ranger talk and it was hot and we were hungry and thirsty and even though we had a backpack, we had no water and no snacks (and now had to climb those thousand steps back UP). I will just abbreviate the next part of the story and say that we were ‘Hangry’, but quickly agreed that we were going to go straight to the car, do not pass go, do not turn in Jr. Ranger books, STRAIGHT to the car before anyone said anything they might later regret (I *might* have expressed a few sentiments to John on the journey back and not gonna lie, I was so ‘hangry’ that I even turned my nose up at the heart that I had drawn on John’s sandwich bag earlier in the day)! Letting ourselves get that hungry could have had dire consequences, but we are getting better at recognizing and rectifying our mistakes.
Once we had enough food to not take hostages, we planned the rest of our visit. 1) Ice Cream 2) Junior Ranger books 3) Gift shop and hopefully squished pennies.
Ice cream was delicious, the introverts in our party took a sweet, minty selfie, while the other two were making friends and influencing people – or whatever it is they do when people are around.
Junior Ranger badges were a success!
The gift shop had limited entry, so we waited briefly to be let in. The kids had some money to spend and were looking for treasures. We found the squished penny machine in the gift shop. My kids got theirs and it was a strange machine that almost felt like you hadn’t done something right, but if you kept spinning the wheel, it was fine. There was another family getting their pennies and the mom had spray hand sanitizer in her hand at the ready… I said something about the machine being weird and she aimed that spray bottle right at me like bear spray at a grizzly and I was appropriately socially distanced! As soon as they got their pennies, she was spritzing everyone, everywhere!
As we headed back toward the other side of the store, we crossed this family with two kids who had TONS of Junior Ranger badges… we stopped to chat with them and ask about their badges. Our daughters were the same age and they are kind of doing what we are doing and I would have loved to chat some more with them, but we didn’t have any of our blog cards with us, so eventually we went our own way.
After visiting with the family, we realized that we had lost Levi. Could not find him. This is a pretty big gift shop, they were carefully monitoring the entrance and exits, so we knew they wouldn’t have let a 5 year old out by himself and Levi isn’t a runner, so we calmly started to look around. Finally I see John stop and knew he had Levi. They were showing a DVD about the history and creation of the park and Levi was entranced. Guess what DVD is now part of our private collection?
Once we arrived back at the RV, things were back to normal…
