Today was Day 13 of our vacation. At the end of Day 14, we expect to be home and sleeping in our own beds. This is almost the end.
Today consisted mostly of driving, with three stops of note. The first was at Ten Sleep, Wyoming.
Ten Sleep, Wyoming has a posted population of 260. We stopped there for lunch because Susan, at the age of 10, visited the town during her stay at a Girl Scout Camp. We visited the same gift shop she had visited almost 30 years prior and had a round of ice cream shakes there. We had lunch at the Ten Sleep Saloon, only because the first place we picked was closed on Thursdays. That gave the saloon a distinct advantage.
The next stop five hours later was Devil’s Tower.
If you’ve never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind then Devil’s Tower may not mean much to you. It meant a lot to me just to see it, even though I know the top of the tower is not a landing strip for UFOs. Probably.
A couple of hours later we made our third stop of the day.
We did not pay to enter the Mt. Rushmore park. In fact, we simply drove close enough to take pictures of it, admire it for five minutes, and left. We would like to take another trip there in the future but … man, we’re pooped.
We crashed tonight about two hours south of Rapid City, SD — somewhere in Nebraska; where, I’m not sure. With no destinations left on our map, all we have left to do tomorrow is drive, drive, drive.
Just around the other side of Devils tower you would find the detritus of the government operation that communicated for the first time with aliens. I can’t believe you didn’t carve out some time to climb it and see it!