Rapid City, South Dakota represents bed number nine since we left Kaohsiung two and a half weeks ago. The good side of that is the fabulous people we've visited and the beautiful places we've been. The most recent on that list has been the Black Hills and Wind Cave National Park. I was here in 1980 when I spent a semester with the National Outdoor Leadership School and we spent two weeks caving at Wind Cave. That was a long time ago and not much looked familiar but I remember falling in love with the area and I still feel that way.

The day started out completely overcast but the clouds disappeared while we took the cave tour. Given my dislike of small spaces it's hard to believe that I spent any time in a cave but I have a lot of good memories of that experience and going on the tour this morning was a lot of fun. Wind Cave is known for a rare cave formation called box work, which we saw a lot of.

But the best parts of our day were spent outside. We took a hike a little ways away from the visitor's center and we had the meadows and the stream and the ravines and the woods and the wildflowers all to ourselves. We did see two other people but it was a quick "hi" as we went by and then we were alone again.

We stopped for lunch on a lovely rock along the way.

After that hike we drove to another trail but got waylaid by the coolest animal ever: bison.

We stopped for some pictures of the dozen or so that we saw and then drove a short way only to find the rest of the herd, about 150 altogether. So cool. I can't get my photo program to upload any videos so if you want to see them you'll have to come visit sometime and we can really bore you with our vacation photos. In the meantime I'll show you some more bison. (Bison and buffalo are the same thing but the "proper" name is bison so that's what I'll call them. They were misnamed "buffalo" by the same people who slaughtered millions of these majestic beasts. The least I can do is call them by the right name.)

We did finally pull ourselves away long enough to take our second hike. This one gave us breathtaking views of the Black Hills.

On our drive back to Rapid City we drove by Mount Rushmore but the traffic was awful. No wonder the Wind Cave trails were so empty. Everyone was waiting in line at Rushmore for a parking space. We drove by and looked out the window instead. On the way past the visitor's center there was a place to pull over and take a photo of George's profile. Done.