Welcome to Mt. Rushmore!

Yup. That's really it. Mt. Rushmore is actually behind those clouds. What a great view, huh?

We've run into some terrible weather at the start of this trip. It rained our entire way through Minnesota and South Dakota, but we got a break once we reached the badlands. But as you can tell, the bad weather continued to follow us. We started our next day through the badlands, but because of all the rain all the trails were really muddy. So we really just drove around looking at the scenery. We saw some bighorn sheep (look like rams) on the top of rocky cliffs. We then continued on to Custer State Park, because we were told it was a great drive. What a drive it was! We saw almost every animal that park said we would - buffalo, buffalo calves, elk, deer, pronghorn antelope, burros (similar to donkey's) and a baby burro. And we got to see them up close too. A great start to playing with my new fancy camera!

Then we headed to Mt. Rushmore. At this point it started to snow on us and man, was it cold! We drove through the mountains and ran into super foggy conditions. When we got to the gates of Mt. Rushmore we asked if we could even see it. She said, yeah sometimes the clouds let up. So we went in, because neither of us intend to be back in this area again anytime soon. After about 20 minutes the clouds did let up and we did see it, although still a little foggy. It was pretty cool, although I had always envisioned being closer to eye level with the four presidents. The one nice thing, was that since the weather was so terrible we only shared the park with another 20 people or so. And because we were all able to laugh at not being able to see it, we all sparked up some conversations. We met one older gentleman who is road tripping from Myrtle Beach, SC to Anchorage, Alaska. It was interesting to talk with him for awhile.

All that day, we kept hearing on the radio about the weather - 2-6 inches of snow from night to next day afternoon. So after Mt. Rushmore we tried to drive as quickly as we could, as far as we could to try to avoid the snow. Wyoming, by the way, there's nothing there except a cool welcome sign. Wyoming roads are so flat and so straight, and there's nothing to see off the side of the road. We made it to Buffalo, WY. We had planned to stop there because there were three different routes we could take to get to Yellowstone National Park, from there. It was a good thing that was our plan, because about 10 miles before Buffalo, it started snowing - hard - almost white out conditions. So we got to a hotel, who's computers were down but that helped us get a cheaper rate and some free snacks. :) We woke up the next morning to find not that much snow on the ground, but to find that two of our 3 road options to get to Yellowstone were closed because of the snow in the mountains. After a few hours of research, we decided to take the north route through Montana and into the north entrance of Yellowstone. We made it Wednesday night and found a place to stay. Montana is just gorgeous! Such beautiful scenery and animals are everywhere! Turns out, Yellowstone tourist season doesn't really open until Saturday, so half of the hotels are closed still. Luckily we found a small, couple-owned hotel. They offered us a stellar deal on their "honeymoon suite" because they don't start serving breakfast until Saturday and the suite has a kitchen. This actually worked quite well for us, because we brought a ton of food with us for camping, but it's been so cold we haven't camped at all.

Anyways, it's time to start our day today. I will write more on Yellowstone later. :) But so far, it's been AWESOME! If you have never visited before, I highly recommend you plan a trip now!