Rushmore and buffalo

Tuesday 5/22 Day 32
Today was a car day, with the goal of seeing mount Rushmore, some scenic byways, and capture different views of Custer state park. I still can't believe we have so many things named Custer.

Big fellow

We all got up and went down for a German breakfast, cheese, meat, and rolls. Very good. Dad brought his French Vanilla cream from home so that was nice for our coffee. After breakfast we hit the scenic byway that led up to Mount Rushmore. On it there were three tunnels carved out of the mountain. One of them was perfectly alined so when you came out of the tunnel mount Rushmore was right in front of your car.
Now most the stories I heard of mount Rushmore have not been that good, because people have said you don't get that close to the heads. But my experience was a bit better. There was a trail right underneath the heads and there was an overlook of all the heads pretty close. Mom and dad said a lot of the additions were new. They also had a pretty in depth museum of how it was built. The builders actually intended to do more but they ran out of money and they ran into bad rock and WW2. What I mean by more is, they wanted to to the upper halves of the presidents bodies. They had a sculpture of it in the museum.
After that we took a scenic byway through some spires and went through a couple more rock tunnels. It would have been fun riding my bike on all these roads but it would have taken a while. One of our main goals in Custer state park was to see the wildlife loop, to catch a glimpse of the buffalo herd. They have about 1400 buffalo in the herd during the spring. On the route we found donkeys, buffalo, deer, and antelope. A couple of the donkeys would just stick their heads into the car. I got a message during this time from Garrette saying she got placed for the jet program. I got super nervous and worried. This was the last step that we needed to work out to guarantee we would be in the same area of Japan, and we had been waiting almost two months to find out. Only problem was I was about an hour from being able to check what city I was from.

Dads new friend

To say the least I was not to talkative until I found out it when I got home and I discovered we both were in the same city. Sapporo city in Hokkaido. Snow, outdoors, and a decent size city to explore Japanese culture.
We finished our night off watching some American idol and hockey :). I miss tv, it has been such a long time since I have owned one and just sat down and watched it.