South Dakota Vacation - Day 3

 We woke up on our third day to dreary skies with cold, wind & rain!  Yuck!  We left Pierre and started to head south to I-90.  We stopped at the this train diner to grab a picture of Matt with his Coke sign for our photo scavenger hunt.

Back on I-90, we enjoyed watching for all the tourist signs - especially all of the Wall Drug signs.  The kids were so excited since that was one of our stops for the day.

We stopped just off I-90 at the eastern point entrance to the Badlands National Park.  You will find the Ranch Store with a prairie dog village.  You can purchase bags of peanuts to feed the prairie dogs.  We stayed her for over an hour watching the dogs scurry around and feeding them.  Definitely a highlight for the family.

 We headed a bit southwest at this point and entered the Badlands.  The thing that we loved about this stop was the fact that we could all climb to our hearts delight!  And the kids did just that!!

Can you find us?  All 4 kids are "hiding"

 We were starting to get hungry!  So, we finished driving through the Badlands and headed north to Wall...home of the world famous Wall Drug!  Yes, it is tacky and definitely a tourist trap...but we can now say that we stopped and played and drank our free water!!

Getting wet from the fountains!

Mining for Gems

Free Ice Cold Water

Wall Drug Sign & Dinosaur off the interstate

 Leaving Wall, we continued to Rapid City, where we would stay for the remainder of our trip.  We spent a couple of hours hunting down all of the US Presidents in the City of Presidents.  Here are two of our favorites...

President Rutherford Hayes

President Lincoln reading to one of his sons

 Our last stop for the day was at Storybook Island.  Five years ago, Matt & I stopped here with Katie & Alex.  We were on our way to Oregon to visit Matt's family.  The girls LOVED this place (free!) and we could've spent hours there if we'd had time!  All 4 kids enjoyed it again, even if we only had time to play for a short while.

We finished our day with a drive to Hill City, were our hotel was located.  We ate dinner and played in the hotel pool...YES, it was open!  The kids had a blast!