Wind Caves, Crazy Horse, Mt. Rushmore, and Deadwood

We drove through a lot of South Dakota and arrived after dark at Wind Caves National Forest to camp.  It's a cool campground; we saw bison, elk (and we could hear their trumpeting in the middle of the night), plenty of deer, and quail (Anne has never seen one but it seems to be the go to "Q" word).  We woke up and did the first tour of the caves in the morning.  It was amazing!  We did the only tour that was offered, the Natural Entrance Tour.  We assumed that it meant we would just see a little bit into the cave, but we were very wrong.  We spent over an hour inside the cave and everything was amazing and beautiful.  Most of the tour was downhill (the floor is surprisingly concrete paths with stairs) and we ended up taking the elevator back.  It was awesome!

Next, we drove to Crazy Horse.  My research online told me that dogs were just not allowed in the buildings, but they could walk around.  Same at Mt. Rushmore.  My source was wrong.  Dogs were not allowed.  It was a hot day so we just did a quick tour of Crazy Horse.  We opted not to go on the bus ride to the base.  Anne had just as much fun, if not more playing on the stage where they do dance shows and playing in the tee-pees.

Then, on to Mt. Rushmore.  We did the Presidential Trail.  We had to leave Lady in the car, which we felt bad about, but my car was able to go in the covered parking garage (much cooler) so we moved her to my car.  We did the tour counter clockwise, which I saw recommended on some review and we had a view of all 4 presidents as opposed to two for the majority of the walk.  Anne was pretty tired on the walk and tried to fall asleep everywhere (except for when we got ice cream).

We ended our day at a place that I thought was going to be an wild-west town, Deadwood, but it turns out that it is a casino town.  Every store front (restaurant, store, even regular hotels) had a casino in it.  We ate at the only place that didn't have a casino.  On top of that, the scheduled staged shootouts that were late in the evening were cancelled.  Bummer.  At least dinner was good. We stayed the night at an independent campground with wifi and laundry.