Last week my brother, Mike, his wife Bonnie and I went on a road trip to some places that I've always wanted to visit. We flew from San Antonio to Denver and rented a car. From there we drove to South Dakota, and to get there, we had to drive through a portion of Wyoming and ran across some passing thunderstorms...
I thought it was cool the way the sun, peeking through the clouds lit up the falling rain as well as producing a small rainbow.
While in SD, we took a bus tour that visited several places in the Black Hills. Here we are at the first stop...the
Mount Rushmore National Memoria...
Me, Mike and Bonnie.
Then we toured through
Custer State Park hoping to see some buffalo. Much to our disappointment, we didn't catch glimpse of any bison, but we did see a few deer and a few of these guys...
While in the park, we also visited Sylvan Lake. It's a beautiful place and also where part of the film National Treasure: Book of Secrets was filmed. This is a panorama of the lake stitched together from four separate shots...
We also visited the Crazy Horse Memorial, but by that time the weather was starting to turn bad, so I don't have any pics.
The next day we stopped in at the
Bear Country USA drive through wildlife park. They have variety of animals in several enclosures in the drive through portion including elk, reindeer, wolves, buffalo, mountain lions, big horn sheep and bears.
Lots of black and brown bears...
The only two grizzly bears they had were in the walk around portion of the park. Here's a pic of one of them...
The next day, we visited Deadwood, an old gold rush town that is now a gambling destination of sorts. It's also the place where Wild Bill Hickock was killed whilst holding the "deadman's hand"... aces and eights. We also hit Sturgis, home of the world's largest biker rally, that day.
The following day, we began our trek further west, stopping in at the
Devil's Tower National Monument. It is quite a site to behold. It's monolithic appearance is unique in the somewhat hilly terrain surrounding it. I can see why Spielberg chose this area as a setting in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Very picturesque!
While in the park we came across a prairie dog town and I snapped off this shot...
Heading further west we passed through the Bighorn Mountains. I took this picture from a scenic overlook off the highway that winds through them...
Our next destination was the one I was most excited about... Yellowstone National Park!