Being unemployed and having a LOT of time on my hands (actually, not so much anymore, but I’ll talk about that next time) – I made a quick trip up to South Dakota to join my family on their camping trip. My goal had been to video blog the whole thing, but the drive was about as mind-numbingly boring as you can get. So after the fifth video of me singing sea chanteys, I had had enough.
I left on Monday at 2 PM from Fort Collins, Colorado and arrived at 7:30 PM at a campsite about 5 miles away from Mount Rushmore. The only thing to do when I got there was to enjoy the raging campfire and time with my family.
The next morning I was up early and headed to Mount Rushmore with my dad. He’d already been there several times, so for him it was a chance to take his service dog around. It was my first time there, though – so I did all the touristy things like set off the video dynamite and take pictures of all the carvings and models.
The Mount Rushmore museum is really cool, a lot of fun tools and information, so I was taking lots of pictures. Dad keep telling me, “You’re getting lots of pictures of stuff but not a lot of pictures of people… you’ll look back and wonder where all the people are. Stuff is just stuff.” It’s a great point, except that I was the only one with the camera and dad just wanted pictures of him and Baxter (the service dog) and wasn’t all that interested in taking pictures of me by or in anything unless I specifically asked him to. I didn’t really feel like asking over and over, since he had stared at me incredulously each time I tried to do the hold-out-your-arm-and-try-to-frame-yourself with the SLR-sized digital dinosaur. But hey, what’s family for, right?
Toward the end of the trip to the monument, I wandered over to the gift shop and there was one of the workers signing autographs and taking pictures. A woman with her two young children came up to the man and the mother asked, “So what was the most significant thing you saw or learned while you were working on the monument?”
The man looked at her stone-faced and said, “Lady, a lot of people have asked me a lot of questions like that over the years, you gotta have a better question than that.” The woman was stunned into silence, but her husband was quick to follow up, “What did you do besides the monument? Where did you live, grow up, how did you earn your living?”
This seemed to make the guy plenty happy, and he went into a story about his army days and living at home. I was standing back taking some Flip video of the conversation, just in case he had any other jems, but the family walked away satisfied and I went up to ask if I could take a picture with him.
He says, “I thought that’s what you were doing?”
I told him it was Flip video and promised I wouldn’t put it on the Internet, I just wanted to have it as a keepsake. His wife snapped the picture and as I walked off he muttered something to the effect of, “F*ckin’ kids and their g*ddamn cameras the size of cellphones now.” I imagine I would be grumpy too, if my life were reduced to performing as a museum artifact.
After Mount Rushmore we hit up a little diner place called the Ponderosa Restaurant. The Ponderosa restaurant, by the way, is not the Ponderosa Steak House, which they made a point of mentioning on every page of the menu. You might also be interested to know that temporal mechanics do not apply in the Ponderosa Restaurant. Time has no meaning there.
It was a nice enough place, but when you order a chicken sandwich in Fort Collins, you generally get the chicken sandwich in the next 15-20 minutes.
Inside the Ponderosa Restaurant, and most places in South Dakota, you can order your meal, go take a hike around Mount Rushmore, and by the time you get back, your food will be ready. Some would call this quaint. I call it torture for fat kids.
After the Ponderosa Restaurant, we made the trek to Bear Country USA. This was by far my favorite part of the whole trip – it was the one and only thing I wanted to do while I was in South Dakota. It’s sort of like Jurassic Park – you drive your car in, around a path, and through huge fenced off areas with different groupings of animals.
It was a hot day, so I was worried we wouldn’t get to see much – but the only ones who didn’t show were the arctic foxes. Bummer for me, since I really wanted to see those, but what I got to see down the road made up for it. Bears and wolves came so close to the car that if you rolled down your window, you stood a fair chance of having your nuts chewed off.
What was amazing was how adapted the animals were to the traffic. It’s almost like they knew you were taking pictures and so they’d see just how lewd or cute or oddly-timed they could be before you stopped snapping pictures. You’d take a picture of one cute moment, completely miss a moment that was 10x cuter than the one you just got, and then wait to see if they’d do it again while sitting through a group of bears cleaning themselves.
Once you get to the end of the line, there’s another section of the park where they raise the baby animals – wolf cubs, brown bear cubs, river otters and red foxes were my favorites. The bear cubs were having a lot of fun playing in the water and climbing up a pine tree (which looked like it was new – and already needing replacing). I’m not joking when I say it was the most amazing thing I’ve seen watching just how content those baby bears were with that tree.
They could run at a full sprint and jump up, tackle the tree, and climb to the top as fast as you could blink your eye. Once they were at the top (or whatever branch they could get to since it was their favorite game and a crowded tree), they’d sit there, swaying in the tree, hanging on, dangle off, stretch, or thwap their friends below as more baby bears jumped up.
The wolf cubs were great to watch, but the most interactive were the red foxes and the river otters, who both were very interested to see Baxter. They kept angling around to get a better look at him, stared, rolled around, and tried to get his attention any way they could.
On Wednesday afternoon, I headed into Custer – grabbed a pie from the Purple Pie Place and some ice cream, lunch with the family (which also took a gratuitous amount of time by way of the restaurant) and headed back to Fort Collins.
A fun trip, but I definitely want to go back and see more of the stuff I missed.
My trip to South Dakota – Bear Country USA and Mount Rushmore!
Being unemployed and having a LOT of time on my hands (actually, not so much anymore, but I’ll talk about that next time) – I made a quick trip up to South Dakota to join my family on their camping trip. My goal had been to video blog the whole thing, but the drive was about as mind-numbingly boring as you can get. So after the fifth video of me singing sea chanteys, I had had enough.
I left on Monday at 2 PM from Fort Collins, Colorado and arrived at 7:30 PM at a campsite about 5 miles away from Mount Rushmore. The only thing to do when I got there was to enjoy the raging campfire and time with my family.
The next morning I was up early and headed to Mount Rushmore with my dad. He’d already been there several times, so for him it was a chance to take his service dog around. It was my first time there, though – so I did all the touristy things like set off the video dynamite and take pictures of all the carvings and models.
The Mount Rushmore museum is really cool, a lot of fun tools and information, so I was taking lots of pictures. Dad keep telling me, “You’re getting lots of pictures of stuff but not a lot of pictures of people… you’ll look back and wonder where all the people are. Stuff is just stuff.” It’s a great point, except that I was the only one with the camera and dad just wanted pictures of him and Baxter (the service dog) and wasn’t all that interested in taking pictures of me by or in anything unless I specifically asked him to. I didn’t really feel like asking over and over, since he had stared at me incredulously each time I tried to do the hold-out-your-arm-and-try-to-frame-yourself with the SLR-sized digital dinosaur. But hey, what’s family for, right?
Toward the end of the trip to the monument, I wandered over to the gift shop and there was one of the workers signing autographs and taking pictures. A woman with her two young children came up to the man and the mother asked, “So what was the most significant thing you saw or learned while you were working on the monument?”
The man looked at her stone-faced and said, “Lady, a lot of people have asked me a lot of questions like that over the years, you gotta have a better question than that.” The woman was stunned into silence, but her husband was quick to follow up, “What did you do besides the monument? Where did you live, grow up, how did you earn your living?”
This seemed to make the guy plenty happy, and he went into a story about his army days and living at home. I was standing back taking some Flip video of the conversation, just in case he had any other jems, but the family walked away satisfied and I went up to ask if I could take a picture with him.
He says, “I thought that’s what you were doing?”
I told him it was Flip video and promised I wouldn’t put it on the Internet, I just wanted to have it as a keepsake. His wife snapped the picture and as I walked off he muttered something to the effect of, “F*ckin’ kids and their g*ddamn cameras the size of cellphones now.” I imagine I would be grumpy too, if my life were reduced to performing as a museum artifact.
httpvp://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EF50B6043BD37697
After Mount Rushmore we hit up a little diner place called the Ponderosa Restaurant. The Ponderosa restaurant, by the way, is not the Ponderosa Steak House, which they made a point of mentioning on every page of the menu. You might also be interested to know that temporal mechanics do not apply in the Ponderosa Restaurant. Time has no meaning there.
It was a nice enough place, but when you order a chicken sandwich in Fort Collins, you generally get the chicken sandwich in the next 15-20 minutes.
Inside the Ponderosa Restaurant, and most places in South Dakota, you can order your meal, go take a hike around Mount Rushmore, and by the time you get back, your food will be ready. Some would call this quaint. I call it torture for fat kids.
After the Ponderosa Restaurant, we made the trek to Bear Country USA. This was by far my favorite part of the whole trip – it was the one and only thing I wanted to do while I was in South Dakota. It’s sort of like Jurassic Park – you drive your car in, around a path, and through huge fenced off areas with different groupings of animals.
It was a hot day, so I was worried we wouldn’t get to see much – but the only ones who didn’t show were the arctic foxes. Bummer for me, since I really wanted to see those, but what I got to see down the road made up for it. Bears and wolves came so close to the car that if you rolled down your window, you stood a fair chance of having your nuts chewed off.
What was amazing was how adapted the animals were to the traffic. It’s almost like they knew you were taking pictures and so they’d see just how lewd or cute or oddly-timed they could be before you stopped snapping pictures. You’d take a picture of one cute moment, completely miss a moment that was 10x cuter than the one you just got, and then wait to see if they’d do it again while sitting through a group of bears cleaning themselves.
Once you get to the end of the line, there’s another section of the park where they raise the baby animals – wolf cubs, brown bear cubs, river otters and red foxes were my favorites. The bear cubs were having a lot of fun playing in the water and climbing up a pine tree (which looked like it was new – and already needing replacing). I’m not joking when I say it was the most amazing thing I’ve seen watching just how content those baby bears were with that tree.
They could run at a full sprint and jump up, tackle the tree, and climb to the top as fast as you could blink your eye. Once they were at the top (or whatever branch they could get to since it was their favorite game and a crowded tree), they’d sit there, swaying in the tree, hanging on, dangle off, stretch, or thwap their friends below as more baby bears jumped up.
The wolf cubs were great to watch, but the most interactive were the red foxes and the river otters, who both were very interested to see Baxter. They kept angling around to get a better look at him, stared, rolled around, and tried to get his attention any way they could.
On Wednesday afternoon, I headed into Custer – grabbed a pie from the Purple Pie Place and some ice cream, lunch with the family (which also took a gratuitous amount of time by way of the restaurant) and headed back to Fort Collins.
A fun trip, but I definitely want to go back and see more of the stuff I missed.