Paulette and Rick's TripJournals Paulette & Rick - RV Summer 2007

Needles Highway & Custer, SD Jul 27, 2007

Today got off to a great start with a pancake breakfast here at the Palmer Gulch KOA. It's an 'all you can eat' deal for just $2.50 and they hold it in an outside tent every morning from 7am to 11am. It was really good so I think we'll be visiting there again before we leave - can't beat the price!

The weather has continued to be very pleasant here at Mt. Rushmore. We are at a very comfortable 24C with a high cloud cover. This is much more like home and a welcome relief from the scorching highs we've had ever since we left Victoria.

After breakfast, we headed out to tour a bit of the 'Black Hills'. We took a route called the 'Needles Highway' as it came highly recommended for scenery. I loved it - Paulette for the most part was frightened out of her wits. The road winds up a mountain and is extremely narrow, with lots of hairpins and switchbacks with 5mph limits - and they mean it. I seldom went over 20mph for the entire route - about a 1 hour drive.

The most interesting feature of the highway, besides some of the spectacular viewpoints and lookouts, are a series of 'one-way' tunnels cut through the mountain. Some of these tunnels were only 8 ft. wide and 10 ft. high - so with my truck mirrors there were only inches of clearance from solid rock walls on each side. We took a lot of pictures on the drive as the scenery was as good as anything we've seen yet on our trip.

From the "Needles" we descended to a more normal highway and drove through both Custer State Park and the Wind Caves National Park. Again, lots of great scenery and quite a bit of wildlife too - deer, mountain goats, buffalo and hundreds of prairie dogs! We didn't go into the actual Wind Caves as we had Mo and Molly with us.

We also visited the town of Custer, SD - a very old town with quite a history. Today, the main street features a lot of old buildings including the town Court House where no doubt a lot of very interesting trials took place. Now, most of the old stores are modern restaurants, bars, coffee shops and dozens of souvenir joints.

After about 4 hours of checking out the sites, we headed back to the KOA for lunch, and to take it easy for a while. The campsite is pretty much full by the looks of things with a lot of RV's leaving and new ones arriving all day long. It's pretty interesting looking at some of the rigs as they pull in. My favourite so far is a huge 45 ft plus motorhome pulling a Hummer! Lot of money tied up in there - our truck and 5th wheel pale in comparison to some of these units.

After dinner, we decided to take a run into Rapid City as we hadn't been there yet. It's about 20 minutes from our campsite. Sure enough, we managed to find the biggest shopping center in the city - The Rushmore Mall. I stayed in the truck with Mo and Molly and read a book, Mo slept and Molly had her head out the window the whole time watching and listening to everything that was going on in the parking lot! Paulette said it was a great mall but she didn't find any particular bargains there to bring home.

We managed to get back to the campsite just as night was falling. Tomorrow is going to be another interesting touring day as we are going to take the 'Badlands Loop'!