Today was very much a big surprise for me, I didn't expect much more then to view the Crazy Horse monument from a parking lot location, seeing as they aren't finished with it, and probably a lot of driving through what I thought was almost all prairie land.
Well like I said I was surprised, first off the Crazy Horse monument was very well put together even though it's not finished and they're not exactly in a hurry to get it completed. The thing that impressed me the most / drew me in was the telling of the story of the beginnings of the monument with the Lakota Indian tribe and sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. There's also much more to the exhibit then just the monument; upon completion there's suppose to be an University and Medical Training Center for the North American Indian and the Indian Museum of North America along with the existing guest cultural center and different art exhibits from Korczak and the Native Americans. (Thanks Fuzzy for suggesting it)
My experience of driving through South Dakota was that it seemed to be a lot more interesting then the scenery passing through Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Illinois when you weren't in a big city. It also changed from where it boarders Minnesota where it's starting to have some curves and rolling hills and becomes more and more curvy as you enter into it. Then you arrive in the Badlands and it's a dramatic change of scenery and there's no other place in South Dakota quite like it. Then once you leave it changes dramatically again as you enter into the Black Hills part of South Dakota where Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse are.
As far as the scenery today I wasn't expecting to see much besides a good chunk of prairie land as from what I envisioned Wyoming to be, but I was very much mistaken. Wyoming is known for it's many buttes, which I learned today as well as it is for it's prairie land and there was a good mix of the two.
I need to take a break here and talk about lunch time in Gillette, Wyoming. Chip had been through the town before on a business trip and recalled a good steak place that he had visited then. The name of the place was 'The Chophouse' that sat just off the main drag of the town. Well they didn't serve straight up steak on their lunch menu so I decided to order the Prime Rib sandwich. I couldn't believe my eyes when this sucker came out...it was huge and juice was running all over the place and I wasn't quite sure how to 1. Make it fit inside the sub roll it came on or 2. How I was going to manage to wrap my face around this thing. Well I stopped dilly dallying and got to work and managed to solve both of my problems in no time and man was it tasty.
After lunch I spotted a gleaming light shining forth on a store across the way from the Chophouse that read "Wisconsin Cheese". Well goofy me didn't get any cheese while I was in Wisconsin so I figured I needed to check this place out and see if it had the potential to help me right my wrong. We walk in and there is this kind fellow in his early 70s that comes up to greet us and after finding out we're from the DC area begins to start in that we need to as quickly as possible uproot and get the heck out of there and move to Wyoming. He then says we'd be fools if we didn't try some of the free samples of cheese and sausage he was selling. He didn't have to tell me twice and as I was muling over what cheese I liked the best (the cheese's were either "imported" from Wisconsin or made in South Dakota) he started talking about how he came out to Wyoming to retire after making cheese in Wisconsin for some 33 years. Combining how good the cheese tasted with this guys personality and apparent knowledge of it made me feel comfortable with labeling this place as legit. (Even if it was 912 miles away from Madison, WI)
After our pit stop in Gillette we continued onward toward Cody, which I thought would be an easy 4-5 hour drive especially if we're just cruising through prairie land. Well we followed I-90 west, but as it get's about 1/3 into the state it starts bending up towards Montana and so if you want to head towards Cody, which is our stop before Yellowstone, then you need to get off on one of the smaller state roads and do a lot of random bends connecting different ranching towns. Well when we approached the big bend in I-90 I wasn't expecting to see the Big Horn mountain range...I thought that was just in Montana (it doesn't show up labeled on Google Maps in Wyoming) and if I looked hard enough I could see it. However, there it was right in front of me and realized that we were going to be driving through that sucker. I was totally charmed by it and it totally made my day getting to cruse up and down the mountain and vear around all the sharp bends. It was another one of those in awe at God's creation moments and probably on the same level as the Badlands.
We got into Cody around 730 and we checked into our hotel before heading out for dinner. Chip didn't get to have a steak earlier so we needed to quickly remedy the situation, so we picked Wyoming's Rib & Chop House and sat down in front of two very large and very juicy steaks on par with the steak I had back in Texas at Chez Embree. We're now just finally getting situated for bed and trying to figure out what we want to get done tomorrow in Yellowstone.
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