June 18th - Day 6
Today was a good day. Becca and I celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary. To show how much we love each other (and our family), we decided to cram really close in an RV and go on a road trip… While we have our moments and don’t always see eye to eye, I do think we make pretty good partners. If we didn’t, we certainly wouldn’t be sitting in Rapid City South Dakota right now, putting our kids to bed in the RV, and making plans for how we are going to spend tomorrow together.
Today was also going to be the day on our schedule where we were going to drive the northern loop at Yellowstone National Park. That obviously didn’t happen and will probably not happen for years now. We are thankful though that we were not in the park during the rains and floods, and that we had a few days to adjust our schedule and plans. At one of our stops today, we ran into a couple who was working in Yellowstone and had to leave. Their summer plans are now completely decimated and they are slowing making their way back to Florida were they reside in the winter. Again, we are thankful we had the ability to adjust and it was just a small bump in the road on our trip.
So, how did we adjust our plans? We started the morning at Keyhole State Park in northeast Wyoming. From there we spent a few hours at Devil’s Towner, followed by a walk through the town of Deadwood, and ending the day in Rapid City, SD.
A few highlights of the day:
Once again, we are still adjusting to being on the go an in RV. This time, a mug of coffee was sitting on the counter when I started to drive. It did not stay on the counter long and there was soon coffee all over the floor. At some point, we’ll figure out how to function properly in a RV.
We visited Devil’s Tower National Monument and did a short hike around the base of the tower. While at a relatively slow pace, Ilena and Obadiah made the entire hike on their own, taking many stops to work on becoming a junior ranger (again).
We were excited to visit the town of Deadwood as it has a historic western downtown. However, we were disappointed to see that much of it is centered around gambling and drinking. I guess not a hole lot has changed in a 150 years (although, there probably hasn’t been anyone shot in the back during a card game in a while). The most exciting thing on our visit to Deadwood was the shaved ice.
We finished the day at a KOA in Rapid City, SD. The kids were excited to finally be able to swim as there is a pool here and we have reached a point in our trip where it is now warm enough to swim at 8pm.
A few pictures from the day:
