Bullock Express Motel Deadwood

... the limestone cliffs of the canyon, on both sides of the road, and it's spectacularly beautiful. I scoped out the canyon Saturday evening, then went back Sunday morning to get the best shots I could. I went to the Roughlock Falls area this time, for the first time. Roughlock Falls is really a triple falls and I was impressed with how beautiful that canyon is. I'm going to go back ...

... in. Other than that this town in mostly filled with slot machines, and lots of em. Which again we also took in :(

We started out with a 40.00 dollar limit, and Jess rocked the Wheel of Fortune slot machine for probably 3 straight hours off the same 40 bucks. She more than doubled our 40 at one point, and I think we both knew we should have cashed ...

... famous people in front of the doors, and then see their obituary and picture in the middle of the room. Yeah, I actually got freaked out after seeing that for the first time. But I ended up not thinking about the scary stuff since I was hungry and wanted to check the town out.

When we went out of the hotel to go around town, we saw how gambling became a necessity in this city by checking out every store that had slot machines and what not! Furthermore, we ended up ...

... They are such beautiful creatures. How could people have killed off thousands and thousands of them in, what, 3 years? I can’t comprehend that. They say it was partly for sport and partly as a way to get rid of the Native American Indians by killing off their food source.

During the last part of our bison gazing David had to do a phone job interview. Brady and I amused ourselves ...

... the car, I noticed the car next to us had ice under its wheel arches. A bit odd. It was 60 degrees outside. Hmm. A bit curious. Continued on toward Buffalo and the first interstate we had seen in ages. The lure of the multi-lane tarmac was foremost in our mind - it means more speed and open spaces. It also means we can get to where we are going quicker. A bit further on, a snow plow came the other way. Then a second ...

... the monument, with only the face being completed and it still cost $10 to go in. I think I was there for about 10 mins!! Mt Rushmore was $10 to get into as well.

I stopped for lunch in Keystone and then through the Black Hills area to Deadwood. Once I got to Deadwood I went for a quick drive around town to see what it was like before going back to the hotel to drop the car off and walk into town (in case I had a few beers!). Dropping the car off was a great ...

... to Emma and Rob who booked me on to the next available flight here from London and I arrived 30 hours later! By the time I got here Dad had had major surgery, which went very well. He's now in intensive care, conscious but on morphine etc so very drowsy. He's not out of the woods yet though - the next 3 days are really important. If the infection does not come up again then we have good reason to be hopeful and at the moment, touch wood, its looking like that, but ...

... ice-water and suddenly they had customers all the time (though the completion of Mount Rushmore had something to do with this!). They still offer free ice-water, 5c coffee, cheap drugstore stuff but...it is basically a big tat shop. It fills a block and has a backyard for the kids full of rides and dinosaur statues. After lunch here we headed on and entered the Badlands National Park - so called by Indians and Trappers because it was such a bad land to cross. It was roasting ...

I'd been living and working in Deadwood for a couple of years before I found out about Saint Ambrose's. It turns out that there are even a few residents who don't know about this place. Mount Moriah Cemetery is the city's most famous burial ground. That's where all the famous people are buried: Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Seth Bullock and the like. But Mount Moriah was the city's Protestant graveyard. A second cemetery was constructed by the ...

... had finished working on the van I washed and shampooed in the creek. Then I started on the second painting of the trip. One of the little creek that ran behind the campground. Later as dark came on I started a campfire and had plenty of firewood because of all that was leftover by the weekenders. With dark night coming on I enjoyed the sound of the fire crackling and the ...