Life on the "Res": Rapid city day 1

What do you think of when you hear "South Dakota"?
....Mt. Rushmore?
....Crazy Horse?
....The Badlands?
....Black Hills?
....Custer State Park?
....Wall Drug?
....Spelunking?
....Dinosaur Park?
....Wineries?
....Helicopter Tour?
....Wild West gun draw/shoot off?

.... Us too. :) and we did it all!
(okay, the last two fell through, but we did the rest)

After a short week with the holiday, we took off on Friday morning towards Rapid City. We had big plans for the weekend and no place to stay. I am getting nervous that we're turning into gypsies...

We wanted to accomplish tons of things without paying for most of them, so we did a lot of "drive bys". First up, the Badlands. We took the scenic route up to Rapid City and drove right through the Badlands National Park. It was definitely a change of scenery. Here are some photos:

Check that of the list....

We had a dilemma with the hotels, so that was the next thing on our list of things to do. We found a motel online that said $39 dollars for the night, which was a solid $60-70 cheaper than anywhere else. It had nothing but great reviews, but we we made this mistake before in New Orleans, so this time we decided to drive past the place before actually booking it. We stopped in to check it out, and turns out, the website was wrong and it was the same price as anywhere else. We bailed and decided we'd look for a Holiday Inn instead. Katelyn was on hotel duty, calling every number on every billboard we passed for hotels. Must have been a busy weekend there because 98% of the hotels were booked.
We drove on to the next stop - Mt. Rushmore. They have a little museum or something at the base of it, but you have to pay to even park in the parking lot, so we did another drive by. We saw the front, then as we continued towards Crazy Horse, we got the bonus profile view as well. I'd say we got our money's worth ;).

Next!

We drove another 20 miles or so to Crazy Horse. We tuned our radio into the informational station for it, which turned out to be a measly 30 second loop of some guy telling us when they started working on it again. LAME. We got close and as I was following signs, I realized I had gotten sucked into the line to pay and go in... And there was a median and a "No U turn" sign- shoot! Determined not to pay for a not-finished monument, I talked the guy into letting me drive through without paying so I could turn around. Whew. Bullet dodged, Money saved. :)
Katelyn was still calling places to stay with no luck, so we decided to stop and eat. We both felt touristy, so we ordered the buffalo burgers and a couple of local beers. Before we left, we decided we needed to get the hotel situation figured out. We called a hotel that previously had one room available, and of course, they had it all booked up when we called back. Wah. The lady from that hotel gave us a recommendation on another place to stay in Hill City. We called, they had a room, so we went for it. We didn't think twice about it being called the "lantern inn", because someone specifically recommended it....logical, right? Wrong. I'll get to that.

We had some time to kill, saw some billboards for a winery, so we pulled on in. We went through the wine tasting, which happened to be free (woo!), and continued on our day long road trip. Turned the corner, saw another winery, pulled in that one too. Partook in another free tasting (double woo!) and continued on. Here are some of the touristy wines we tasted!

Rhubarb Wine

Rushmore Red Wine

Buck Naked Wine

We were on a roll with these billboard festivities, so when we saw "helicopter tours", we got really excited. The sign also said $50, which we were more that willing to split, so we headed up a huge hill and got out to check it out. They got us with the fine print, apparently, because it was $50 per person... for 6 minutes. SIX MINUTES?! WHAT?! We bailed on that idea and found another billboard - Cave Tours. Specifically, Mt. Rushmore Cave. It was must cheaper and much more worth it. The pictures are terrible and you can't really tell what anything is, but it was pretty neat inside!

Chimney in the cave

Stalagmite/tite together

"Hallway" in the cave

Another Chimney

Outside looking over the Black Hills

We drove back through keystone and stopped to look at all of the shops. When we finally decided to leave, We saw two men dressed like old time cowboys who had whips/guns/chaps etc walking down the middle of the road. I saw later that they put on a show at certain times of the day but we missed the good part.
We were pretty worn out from the day and stuffed from lunch, so we headed back to the motel. As we pulled up, we realized that it was a nasty junky motel with a super-creep at the front desk. It looked like it came straight out of a scary movie, but we didn't really have many options at that point. We crashed early in preparation of the next day!!!