Trip - Mt Rushmore (July 2007)

In the few months that I am here, I have travelled to a few places with my family and my hubby's colleagues' families.

We went to Mount Rushmore in July for a few days. It was the first time that I had such a long ride in a car, my legs went numb and everytime I got out of the car during the stops we made, it took me a while before I could feel my legs and start walking. It's really that bad and I didn't exaggerate. It was fun though, 'cos I never experienced this before. Haha. But the guys had it bad 'cos they are the ones driving. We went with another family who also had a kid so both ladies had to take care of the kids while the men drive. Hee hee, lucky us.

On the way to Mt Rushmore, we saw a lot of farms with a lot of cows, horses and sheep. The scenery is nice, very different from Spore where all you see most of the time is buildings after buildings. As it was summer, the sun is really hot and we were lucky that we are in the car as it's really hot outside, over 40 degree celsius.. I wonder how people can stand that heat.

The car ride took us over 17 hours which includes pit stops and meals. Can you imagine that? We started driving around 5 past in the morning and we reached the hotel only around 11past at night. Haha, really quite an experience. The hotel wasn't like those nice hotels that you will stay during guided tours but it's cheap so we make do with it. As long as it's clean, it's okay and breakfast is provided even though it's not fanastic. What we had is basically, waffles, bread, cereals, coffee, tea, muffins and some juices. Very simple but at least it's "free". If you eat at Mcdonalds, the meal will easily cost us over USD 10 for the three of us.

After the meal, we went to Crazy horse memorial. This is really amazing, there is a guy who set out to carve the crazy horse face in the stone on top of a mountain. It took him several years just to carve a bit of the face and they are not getting public funding for this. They showed a video on him and how he used to climb over 700 steps to reach the top to do the carving everyday.

When he died, his wife and children took over the task of carving, it has been over 30 years and it's still not completed. They have little people working on the carving so I guess it will take many more years before they complete the whole project. Perhaps when I am old, I will go back and take a look at it again and hope that it will be completed. When this project is completed, it will be much bigger than the 4 presidents' faces in Mt Rushmore.

After visiting the memorial, we went to Mt Rushmore and we saw the 4 presidents' faces. There we took a stroll and it was really tiring with all the steps and up and down the slopes. But seeing it really amazes me on how could people do it back in the those days.

The next day was spent on travelling and we checked in to a hotel near to Precious moments park. At the hotel and even the room, we saw a lot of precious moments protraits and they are really nice. On the following day, we went to Precious Moments park and it was really nice. All the figurines are so nice, makes you want to buy up all of them but they ain't cheap. Ha.

After the park visit, we proceeded to go home but we stopped by Branson to do shopping. Initially, we agreed to stop for 2 hours before we drive home but in the end, we stayed there for more than 4 hours as there are so much to see.

It was my first real shopping experience and I was really excited because a lot of things are cheap. Clothes especially, fantastic. Just Disney store alone took up a lot of our time, things are really cheap there. We bought a lot of stuff and the car was stuffed full. After that was home sweet home.