We also stopped at Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore, since they were right along the way. Sadly we drove within spitting distance of Yellowstone.... saw the signs to turn off, but we didn't go. Yellowstone deserves a real visit, not just a drive-through, so we'll hit that another time.
We also drove through Badlands National Park, which was about a 20 min. detour from our normal route. We did get out of the car for about 5 minutes in one spot, but mostly just saw what we could see driving through. Obviously not the ones we appear in, but a bunch of these pictures I took while driving, so I couldn't even look to see if the camera was pointed in the correct direction. I guess that goes to show how scenic it was.... it didn't matter much which direction you pointed the camera, you were bound to capture something cool!
No more pictures from here on out. Altogether it took us about 5 days of driving all day long to get home. One day we drove 800 miles--nearly 13 hrs in the car. There were a lot of things we could have stopped to see, but I would ask the girls, "OK, do you want to stop and see the Corn Palace?" and they would say, "If we stop, will we still get home on the night you said we would?" I would always reply that we would likely get home the following day (my "best-case scenario arrival time" was fairly optimistic, and didn't hold up against many tourist stops). They always voted to keep plowing on so that we could get home "on time." I think they were pretty tripped out by that point.
We got home on schedule, having listened to Story of the World complete volumes 1 & 2, plus the audio book "The Tale of Desperaux," a daily hearing of ABBA Gold, plus various and sundry movies that were viewed in the back seat. The only mishap of the trip home was that the very last night in the hotel near Chicago, I left my Kindle. After keeping track of it for the whole trip, I managed to lose it on the last day! Thankfully when I called, they had it in their lost and found and mailed it to me right away. Here's a shout-out to honest house-keeping staff, and on-the-ball hotel clerks!
Good to be home!
Edit: Sometime after we arrived back home from this trip, I finished editing the video collage which I had been making along the way. Here it is at long last! Road Trip 2015 Video Collage
