Wednesday 8.7. (Wind Cave, Crazy Horse, Mt. Rushmore, Badlands)

At night it was pretty pleasant, even if in the morning, for the tradition not to be broken, few raindrops fell on us. We depart from the Wind Cave park and meet a herd of bizons along the way, there are also American antelopes. Crossing the Custer State Park we came to the Crazy Horse Monument, which is already for more than 50 years still beeing build memorial to the Indian battle strategist at the Little Big Horn. The statue carved into the rock will be larger than the Egyptian pyramids and is a counterpart to the American presidents at the Mt. Rushmore, where we arrived a little while afterwards. Everywhere around are big crowds of people, contrary to the Wind Cave, where was only a little number of visitors. We do not stay too long and only walk by the monument, to reach the target of the day -- Badlands National Park. On the way, we made a stop at Taco Bell (and we agreed that we had tacos for the last time), and in the afternoon we passed the ghost town (as from the horror movie) on the borders of the national park. Badlands is a beautiful country; as from the other planet, deserted and practically without the tourists. Incidentally, we decided for a drive through the field path and came to the fantastic view on the Sheep Mountain. The temperature was increasing rapidly and soon it was close to 100 F (37 Celsius degrees). 2 days ago it snowed! In the evening we arrived into the campground. It is crazy hot, no trees around, in the shade of which we can put the tents. We set forth with the ranger on the walk with a short commentaries; in the meantime, the clouds are getting on size and a sound Dakota storm begins (for the first time in my life I saw a horizontal lightning); we hardly managed to put up the tents in time. It stopped raining and after a half an hour the rainbow appeared on the sky; now, Peter tries to cook something and me, I am trying to write something before we go to the evening program prepared by the rangers.