---
title: 'Day 10: Horse in the Hills'
date: 2010-05-04T11:46:04+02:00
Tags: []
Categories: []
---

{{< image src="/img/map-day10.png" width="300px" float="right" >}}

## The horse in the hills

After leaving the cramped plane and doing some exercises to get blood flowing again, we find ourselves in Rapid City Airport. A tiny place, compared to the ones we've seen on our trip so far (SFO (for Pim), JFK, DFW, DEN). It's about 5pm mountain time when we land, so we're worried car rental agencies may have already closed their offices for the day so we quickly head in their general direction. Thankfully, they're still open so we approach the first guy who looks like he's got nothing else to do. Sadly, no cars. Second company - same story. We start fearing for the worst: how are we going to get to Mt Rushmore without a car!?

We give Hertz a try and are glad to learn that they still have a few cars available. For 80$ a day we can drive around in another SUV. However, the alternative is a 5$ upgrade to a Ford Mustang. "Yes!" we exclaim in unison, that is exactly the car we need. We had already decided that we wanted to rent an American Muscle car and either the 'stang or the Camaro would be the perfect choice. Even better: this one was a convertible. Beautiful icing.

We head out to the parking lot and inspect our car. It is awesome. We love it. A photoshoot is called for, so check it out on Picasa. Then we start driving around. Rapid City turns out to be quite small (at roughly 67K inhabitants) so we quickly head out in the direction of the Black Hills. Inevitably ending up at Mt Rushmore National Memorial, we pay our respects to Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Roosevelt and walk around the memorial (again shooting lots of pictures). Pim wanted to make some night time pictures (which turned out very nice) so we ended up leaving the memorial after 9pm. A quick McD's for dinner and some shopping at Walmart later we check into Motel 6. Quickly off to sleep since we want to get up early next morning for more sight seeing.

Our 7am alarm wakes us to an overcast Rapid City. With this weather, there's no hope we'll be making better photos at the Mt Rushmore Memorial, so we head of to Crazy Horse. It's SUPER BIG. Amazing. Still not finished, but very impressive already. A bit sad we couldn't get very close to it. Another downside was the temperature, at 35 degrees Fahrenheit we were freezing! There even was a thin layer of snow. But we're now able to say we were there.

We drove around the beautiful Black Hills in our Mustang and headed to Wyoming. On our way there, we passed by the Jewel Cave. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity, we stopped here and signed up for a tour. Quite the disappointment: we got on an elevator that went down some 300 feet. After entering a pretty big cave and listening to the guide tell us about its origins we had to get back to the elevator to go upstairs again. The cave looked very impressive and Pim and I were excited to explore further but the platform was all we were going to get. Major bummer, so we left disappointed.

We continued on the 16 to Wyoming and visited Newcastle. After Newcastle, we went down south and drove back into South Dakota via Edgemont and Hot Springs. The temperature was rising so we opened the top again. Cruise mode engaged. We drove to Custer State Park and did the 18 mile Wildlife loop. The Black Hills themselves are quite stunning already but this part was truly breathtaking. We encountered lots of deer, buffalo, burros and pronghorns. Cruising at 20 mph with the top down and the sun shining this was some quality nature time.

When we got back to Rapid City, it was around 6:30pm - a perfect time to get some dinner in a diner. Luckily, there is a diner about 100ft away from our Motel6 spot, so we went to Arnold's diner for burgers and fries. We're turning in early tonight, we've had quite a bit of travel behind us, and we'd like to be all fresh tomorrow morning, so we can get our 2pm flight back to DFW.

Galleries: Rapid City and Black Hills (and Wyoming, too) and Our Mustang

Location: [620 Latrobe Ave, Rapid City, SD](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=620%20Latrobe%20Ave,%20Rapid%20City,%20SD)

**Posted by Paul de Weerd at 8:26 PM**


