20060827 - South Dakota (cont)

On Wednesday we went to see the Crazy Horse Monument (World‘s Largest Mountain Carving - Now in Progress).



This is the current model 1/34 the size of the final project.



And this is the model with the monument behind.

After Crazy Horse we drove the Needles loop which includes the Needles Hwy, the Wildlife Loop (in Custer State Park) and Iron Mountain Rd. The original vision of Mount Rushmore did not include Mount Rushmore. The vision was to carve famous people on the spires along the Needles Hwy. When the sculptor came out to South Dakota, he felt that the needles were too fragile to sculpt and recommended the Mount Rushmore design instead. The Needles Hwy and Iron Mountain Rd are narrow roads with no shoulder and a 3-9 inch drop off on the side. Both roads included switch backs and hairpin turns. The road seemed just wide enough for two cars, not two trucks. The only oncoming traffic I was comfortable with was motorcycles. It was even too narrow for me when I was the passenger. As the passenger I felt like I was hanging out over the edge of the road. Both roads included one way tunnels, very, very narrow tunnels. The Iron Mountain Rd had two horseshoe turn bridges where you drove over the bridge, around, and then under it. Two out of three tunnels on Iron Mountain Rd had Mount Rushmore peeking out through the center of the tunnel.

On Thursday I went on a Quilt Shop Hop. My Quilters' Travel Companion lists three shops in the area so I decided to visit all three. At the second shop they had a current edition of the book. It listed seven shops in the area but three were plenty for me. The closest shop to our campground was associated with a Christmas Shop. I had seen the shop but was not going to visit it as I thought the Quilt Shop was going to be an after thought. Since it was listed in the book I decided to visit it. It was a great shop. Lots of Asian inspired and ultra bright fabrics (my favorites). I spent over three hours in just this one shop. Then I drove to the other two. Neither of them had the fabric selection of the first although one of them had a very nice selection of patterns, some locally designed.

We pretty much took the rest of the week off.