Saturday, 22 July 2006
cross-country trip day 4: cody, wy to rapid city, sd
We left Cody at around 9 this morning, expecting that today’s drive would be somewhat tedious. We were totally unprepared for how astoundingly beautiful the Shell Basin in the Bighorn National Forest would be. The road winds through gorgeous rock formations, with lots of places to pull off and gaze wonderingly at the creek rushing through the gorge below, or the incredible layers of rock visible on the sheer cliff faces. I took a ton of photos, but Lane is currently using my Powerbook and I don’t (yet) have an easy way to get the pictures off my camera and onto this PC laptop.
Now we’re settled into the Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites in Rapid City, SD, where we’ll stay for two whole nights. (Point of information: it’s very hard to find a room in a decent hotel in Rapid City on a Saturday night in July. Happily, even though the Holiday Inn site and Expedia both claimed this hotel was fully booked, Priceline managed to find a us a room.) Tomorrow is tourist day…we’ll be visiting Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park, and Wind Cave National Park, returning to Rapid City via the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway. On our way out of Rapid City on Tuesday, we’ll stop at Badlands National Park, on our way to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD.
