Well, what a day it has been. We left Minnesota about 8 AM, having had a good night's sleep in a cabin instead of the tent. The loading up was easier too. You see, I bought a Coleman camp stove. Not one of those dinky, rectangular jobs with the tilt-up sides, but the bright red, roller and handle ones: $169 at Dick's. The smaller ones cannot hold a pot large enough to cook ragout or stew for six people. Anyway, this monstrosity of a cooktop avoids packing away like a cat in heat. Whether I put in the Sky Box, or the spacious trunk of the van, it takes up more room than one could imagine. In the box, I could get nothing to fit well around it resulting in Megan and Gabby having various parts of camp chairs poking them in the back of the head, sometimes drawing blood.
Eventually, Amy suggested I swallow my considerable pride and pack the behemoth at the bottom of the space in the back of the Conestoga Wagon for the trek across the praries, which I did. The cooler--one Tim Allen would be proud of--sat upon the gargantuan cooking implement, with some additional padding provided by two sleeping bags, a sleepy child, and an under-utilized bottle of tequila. It worked out relatively well, with the tolerable exception of the smell of last night's pork chops wafting through the cabin of the van for five hundred miles. It kept us hungry.
This hunger, however, was rapidly set aside by the smell of a 300 or so pound man who ate in the diner with us. The ladies in our group avoid vomiting by facing firmly away, enjoying, instead, the air condition, blowing smells from the nearby outhouse. The food was passable, my sole exception being a Reuben on wheat bread instead of the usual Canadian rye. There being nothing but wheat around us for six hundred miles, I took little exception to this. Fortunately, my allergies kept the stench at bay.
Once we crossed the almost imperceptible border into South Dakota, Amy who had consented to drive the horses a bit, let me know we were running low on gasoline, and that she was getting sleepy. We pulled off the highway, crossing the old US route that used to traverse the area prior to the interstate, and wandered up a dissolving road following signs that nearly yelled "Gasoline this way." We pulled up outside of a gas station with only one of four functioning pumps. The roof of the nearby gas station, also doubling as the local rock-hound shop, was held up by several scrawny, anemic tree trunks that had died some time shortly after the last ice age. As the pumps dated from the late sixties, I went inside to pay the proprietor, hoping he was still breathing. This gentleman, kindly as I later learned, swept his ponytail off his glasses and looked up from his book long enough to say, "Go ahead n pump. Pay after."
I thanked him for this courtesy, and walked outside to pump the gas. Such rattling at a station, I had not heard since filling the tank of my mini-pick up truck in 1978. This was somehow a reassuring sound.
When I went back in to pay, the gentleman explained that a nearby house was quite haunted, and the kids would surely love it. To my perplexed expression, he offered that a woman had intentionally starved herself in the home about thirty years ago, and that visitors to the house had never failed to capture omens and unexplainable "phenomenon" on film there. Well, all our cameras are digital, and having reviewed the images, I see nothing untoward, other than Gabby's frightened expression. This gentleman was unique, though, and my sole regret remains not having captured his image on film (or digital CCD for that matter) though several white blobs do appear where he was standing at the time.
After this jaunt, we continued on to Mount Rushmore. Amy and I had a mind to pleasantly surprise the kids by arriving at this illustrious monument a full day ahead of schedule. We plowed through the hilly drive intentionally evading questions about when we would arrive at the campsite. We turned a corner in the Black Hills, revealing the face of George Washington on the mountain directly in front of us and heard the rewarding sound of appreciation in the back seats. We spent 2 hours there, appreciating the history, and human sacrifice required to scrape away the unneeded stone covering the images of the four great presidents captured there in granite. It was quite an experience for all of us. I personally have been there three times now, and each time, have felt tears well up inside me. My only remaining question about this, and I would appreciate any assistance available in divining an understanding of this great mystery, is why does a 13 year old girl who posts picture after picture of herself on Facebook, in all sorts of strange and discolored poses, absolutely and adamantly refuse to be photographed by someone who loves her, and wants to show her in the best possible light.
After leaving the grounds of the palatial monument, we headed the local KOA, expecting the usual yellow-shirted staff, and sand boxes. We arrived at our destination to find a veritable resort for RVs. There are horses, pools, hot-tubs, restaurants, laundromats, water parks, hiking trails, and a lobby fit for the Ritz-Carlton here. I bid you goodnight from the confines of a snug cabin.
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