Road Trip - Day 5

After a real breakfast in the Grand Hotel dining room and a morning stroll through the deserted town, we got serious about road miles and headed for Rapid City.  Avoiding I-90, we took a more direct route through reservation land.  The Black Hills are a welcome landscape to the dry prairies.  After checking into a Ramada in with clean everything, we stopped at a Mexican grill downtown and headed for Mt.Rushmore for the first evening.  A feeling of patriotism felt appropriate for the Fourth of July, and as the crowds gathered for the evening ‘light show’ we hiked the loop under the country fathers a couple times.  The show was anticlimactic with no sound for a video and a disaster of a sing along.  The only redeeming portion was all the veterans coming out of the stands to help in the flag retirement for the day.