The Black Hills

From Washington, we continued east across Montana and the corner of Wyoming to the Black Hills, where we based ourselves in Stugis, SD, for a long weekend.  This marked the first time since leaving Florida where it was actually hot in the morning!  

We missed the famous Harley-Davidson rally by a few weeks, but Stugis seems to live on gas fumes, and we toured the motorcycle hall of fame and museum, and Hans and I even managed to get to the end of the Camaro rally!

We drove through the Black Hills and visited Spearfish and Rapid City, both of which are very cute towns, Rapid City calling itself the "City of Presidents" and featuring statues of all the U.S. presidents (through Obama, as of this month) scattered throughout the downtown and even a presidential museum!

The tour at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs was interesting...the dig site is full of skeletons of male mammoths, mostly juveniles.  Female mammoths, of course, were too intelligent to fall into the pit, but the boys apparently raced right up to the edge of the spring and fell in.  The skeletons are huge, and it's neat to see a working dig site!

One of my favorite parts of the Black Hills is always the prairie dog towns, and they didn't disappoint this trip, either -- so adorable, and so happy to pose for pictures!

And a highlight for the kids was the mountain coasters...little cars that you can drive on tracks down a course in the hills.  I don't have the same need for speed that the rest of my family does, so I always go last, but these little karts are probably my favorite kind of "roller coaster".

I also ran a 50K in the Black Hills, the reason we were in Sturgis in the first place.  My fourth race of the month, and the 35th state in which I've run a marathon or longer!