Day 5 of the Great Storm Chase!

Wow, another LOONG day! We started out in Rapid City, SD at a little after 9:30 am MDT and we just got to our hotel in Cheyenne, WY at around 10:40 pm MDT. We hit up a lot of sites today and didn't do any chasing at all because there was absolutely nothing to chase anywhere near us. It was a beautiful but somewhat cold day to catch in all these sites that were truly amazing!

We hit up a geology museum first in Rapid City and then we moved on to see Mt. Rushmore! I was amazed at how small it looked from the ground but it was so awesome actually seeing it in person and learning about how it was carved and all that. They used dynamite!! I guess you could say the sculpture was a dynamite idea....haha, sorry but the whole theme of our trip has been a pun war! We have daily competitions and the more you can do and the more creative the better!







After Mt. Rushmore, we drove higher into the Black Hills of South Dakota and we saw such amazing beauty! The site on top of the hills was just STUNNING! You could see from miles around, nothing like I've truly experienced before. It was really sweet to see Mt. Rushmore at about eye level miles away surrounded by beautiful trees and an amazing skyline. There was also a lot of wildlife roaming around like buffalo, deer, elk, donkeys, and antelopes. A lot of donkeys were even in the middle of the road just hanging out!





We also saw the Crazy Horse monument that's being built. It's such an amazing story that I didn't even know existed until I came out here! It's been in progress since 1943 and is taking such a long time because one man worked on it completely alone for a long time and they aren't and will not take any government funding! It's so cool and I can't wait to see it when it's finished!





We moved on after all the sites to head to our final destination for the day, our hotel in Cheyenne, WY. Wyoming was just as plain but beautiful as Iowa and South Dakota. We even drove through a town that had a sign that said, "Population 1." Haha! I didn't know that existed!!





I have to say, after spending all this time in the van with no one but guys is a little exhausting in and of itself! It's nothing but raunchy jokes, sports, and puns 24/7. I have to say, the names of some of these towns and gas stations truly aren't helping....I won't go into detail about the names because the innuendo is so strong that it wouldn't quite even be PG-13. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing that Heather and I are always in separate vans (the only two girls out of the 12 on our trip). We can't having the men perculating their ideas and jokes all in one place I guess...of course they use the walkie talkies for that.

Tonight was interesting because the hotel/motel we chose to stay in was EXTREMELY sketchy...Andrew was our trip planner for the day so he had to try to find a decent hotel under or at our nightly room rate budget and I had the computer with the internet in our other van so I helped to look at some of that stuff online. Well, Cheyenne is apparently extremely expensive so we only had a few options. One of which was the Rodeway Inn and we were able to book 4 rooms at $58 each...that should've been our first clue, haha. The ammenities on the websites I found included disco, toilet, and an AM/FM radio! Like I said, we didn't have many options! We decided to go for the hotel for this price instead of La Quinta because it was just a few dollars over our limit per room so we could save for something great in Denver. The jokes poured in when we came into the parking lot...the motel doubled as a bus station and there were some less-than safe appearing people hanging out and they all looked very angry. The place looked very rough and broken down and not very well lit...a few of the guys that were the most apprehensive took a look in a room before we actually checked in and found some questionable things under the pillow on the bed so we decided to move on to La Quinta. It was actually one of the funniest experiences of the whole trip though...VERY shady.

Tomorrow we're headed to Denver, CO to catch a Dodgers vs. Rockies baseball game because it's another non-stormm chase day. I'm really excited to finally be in Colorado with amazing sites and breathtaking beauty to take in! It should be great and it's only an hour and a half from where we're staying tonight.

Let's hope that what the Storm Prediction Center and we are predicting about some possibility of storms worth chasing coming into the Great Plains by June 3 is accurate. There's still hope! Hope for the best!

Good night!