South Dakota
We slept in our tent for the second time this trip in a place near the badlands national park. It was suppose to have rain and thunderstorms where we were staying but I prayed that it wouldn’t and we only got a few drops of rain to our surprise. Waking up in South Dakota there were a ton of motorcyclists around heading to Sturgis, the biggest motorcycle rally in the world. We got on the road early so we could try to avoid the biker crowds but they were everywhere.
Badlands National Park
We first went to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota, it was like a mini Grand Canyon with lots of sedimentary rocks as well as lots of small plateaus with grasses on them. There were some wild life but mostly just cows. While Alyssa wanted to spend some more time in the National Park I was more eager to beat the crowds at Mount Rushmore.
Mount Rushmore
We hurried our way to Mount Rushmore only to find loads of bikers lining the streets. It was awesome to see so many bikers but they were quite a large crowd and took up many of the streets. It was awesome to see Mount Rushmore in person, we took lots of photos and walked the presidents trail. It is a trail that you walk to see different angles of the faces and it gave some historical facts about each one. After walking the trail more people showed up so we left and continued our journey to Billings Montana.
Montana
Billings Montana
The drive to Billings was about 5 hours and Alyssa drove all the way there. We were quite hungry on the way there but had trouble finding any good places to eat. We ended up grabbing some food at a gas station to hold us until we reached Billings. Once in Billing we ate at a new place called The Fieldhouse which was a modern restaurant that was had good food but the prices seemed to be quite steep for how little portions you get. We decided to go look for dessert away from the restaraunt at a famous ice cream parlor called The Big Dipper. It was amazing! Alyssa had white mint chocolate chip ice cream and I had the huckleberry favored ice cream, they were both really good. We had a couple more hours of driving to get to the East entrance of Yellowstone National Park and found a campground right side to stay for the night. A lot of the campsites were full but we found one that was for an RV that was open and parked our car and got out the tent again.
