After last night, no one found it easy to wake up this morning. All the boys were laughing at Dan trying to take his tent down because he was still drunk.
Dan still in his half taken down tent
We started driving and it didn't take that long to reach the Crazy Horse memorial. It is still being made, it was started in 1948, over 60 years ago, and will not be completed for ages, like 200 years or something like that. It is all being done by one family, they won't accept any help or money from the govornment, to do it quicker, because they want to do it themselves. The only way they can continue is through donations by visitors.
This is what Crazy Horse Memorial will look like when it's finished
And this is what it looks like now
The way they make it is by making explosions to blow out rock from the mountains. It was such a weird feeling to see it, knowing that it will not be completed in our lifetime. I hope that our grandchildren or eve our great grandchildren get to see it completed, and think that its cool that me and Gary saw it while it was being built. They had lots of Native American artefacts there and also a gift shop which I bought quite a lot of stuff from.
We then went to Mount Rushmore, which was so small compared to Crazy Horse, it only took 50 years to make. This was something that I was really excited to see because it's so famous. For some reason I expected it to be in the middle of a forest, it wasn't. It was a big area with gift shops and stuff.
We had already done loads today, and it was only the morning still. We drove for a couple of hours and stopped at McDonalds for lunch. Gary didn't eat anything because he was trying to be healthy, but I was starving so ate some but wished I didn't because it made me feel sick.
A little while later we stopped at an old western town called Wall. We had a little walk around, it was a really weird place, it was all old fashioned, but it was a cool random place to go. They have a huge drugstore there called Walldrug that sells all sorts of stuff.
When we left Wall, we then went to Badlands National Park. We didn't spend that long here compared to the other National Parks, only about 2 hours. We stopped at a place or 2 to take some photos and then did a really small walk that was only about half an hour. It was very different from the National Parks we were used to, no trees or mountains, lots of desert and weirdly shaped rocks.
Me and Kirsty in our matching Saloon no.10 shirts that we had drukenly bought the night before
Gary lost his sunglasses in Glacier, so he wore a pair of mine
Because we were moving further towards the east coast we skipped another time zone so we lost an hour of the day. Considering we had done so much today, losing the hour meant that it was 8pm by the time we got to camp. We were so exhausted after such a long day, and my group had to cook dinner. Luckily, Art had bought some pasta for us to cook that was really easy and nice, so it wasn't too hard
After dinner, I went to have a shower, and as I was on my way back to the tent, my evening got a lot worse. It was of course dark by now so the only light I had was my head torch. I unzipped the tent and as I was stepping in, I looked down and saw a massive SPIDER running into the tent. I would call it a taratula really, no one else would, but I will. In a way I'm so glad I saw it, my torch shined on it at just the right moment or I wouldn't have seen it run in there!! I of course ran away screaming for Gary that there was a taratula in our tent, he went to check it out and even he said it was so big that he was scared to get it.
Everyone heard me scream and they were all laughing at me until they realised I was crying. Gary had to get some of the other boys to get the spider out, and I just couldn't stop crying for ages, it had scared me so much. Before we could go to bed I made Gary do a full tent check with me which involved taking everything out of the tent, checking it, and putting it back in again. Needless to say he was not impressed with me.
I thought I would be too scared to sleep, but thankfully I was just so tired that I fell asleep straight away.
