Friday, September 28, 2007

Day 2 - Trek to the Hills

Friday morning ,it was decided that we would take off up route 16A from Keystone to meet highway 44 East out of Rapid City. Do you know where we were headed? Yeah, off to the BadlandsBadland Visitors Center and a trip to Wounded Knee.Entrance Arch Took off through the hills down to PineRidge over to Hot Springs up to Custer State Park ,then back to Keystone. We went 249 miles around the hills to see what we could see. I needed to get over to the Wounded Knee Memorial because of a movie I have. It came out in 1992 and is called "Thunderheart". Had to checkout the arch to the entrance of the cemetery to see if it was the same. By the way, it was. Hot Springs was a very nice little town to see from the road. A place I had visited as a teenager and will put it on my list to get back to for a longer stay in the future. Magnificent old architecture. ;) Custer State Park, what a scenic,restful drive...if you aren't behind the steering wheel that is!We paid an entrance fee that would have lasted us for a week if we would have been in the area that long. The roads get kind'a curvey here and there. We found some stately creatures of interest during our brief venture.Buffalo in the MeadowBuffalo Herd Had we been there starting Sept. 29th - October 1st we could have witnessed the annual Custer State Park Buffalo Round-Up. After traveling the Needles Highway back to Keystone we headed to a local eating establishment "The Ruby House". Discovered it had been relocated from one side of street to the other when their previous building burnt down. We found the food very good and the coffee had just the right flavor for me...one of the few places that I can say the coffee was "Good". Although, I only bought coffee once a day when we had our large meal of the day. After "The Ruby House" we headed back to Super 8 to lax out for the rest of the day. Checked e-mail and did some internet searches thanks to Hubby's new lap top computer. One more full day in the hills. Check in to see where it took us....