Surprises

 Hi everyone,
Time keeps a moving on, hard to believe July 4th is next week.
 We are counting down to when our daughters and families visit us July 22.
 We had a couple nice surprise visits this past week. Paul and Peggy, a couple Texans that we met in Louisiana stopped by. They are staying just outside the park and we are going to try and meet for lunch one day.
 Fellow bloggers Phil and Rudee http://workinrvers.blogspot.com/ also popped in. They are working at Crazy Horse. As we were talking we realized we both had spent New Years at Summerdale Escapee Park. It is great hearing other tales from the road. Hopefully we can do a lunch or dinner with them.
 We keep trying to get good use of the VIP passes and this week we visited The Mammoth Site in Hot Springs.

This is still an ongoing dig, but they only dig like twice a year. It takes the rest of the time just to document the findings.

 We also got the kayak out a couple times this week. We paddled around Center Lake one day and Stockade Lake another. Stockade is my favorite, it is a little bigger and fishing there has been great. All the lakes here are man made reservoirs and all are clear and beautiful.

 Tuesday night we had a staff picnic.  They were holding it at a group site across the road from us. Wendy and I thought we would just walk over. Now that is not exciting but let me tell ya, just as we were getting to the gate entrance we saw a few buffalo. They headed out and we commenced to head down the road. Soon other buffalo started to come down from the hill and follow the trail of the others. We thought we had enough time to cross the street but the buffalo had different ideas. They started running and closed us off from the picnic area and from the road to the campground. We were left huddling by a car begging for a guy to let us in. He was looking at one buffalo in front and not the 10 behind. He was nice enough to give us a short safe ride to the picnic.

Earlier in the day

 Wednesday we really got going. Wendy had wanted to do a drive thru Spearfish Canyon Scenic byway.We planned a loop route that took us through Sturgis where we used our VIP passes and toured the Motorcycle Museum. Better to so see this before the mass hordes come in during the rally.

               Then on to Spearfish Canyon, a nice drive and a couple nice waterfalls.

We then hit Deadwood and had time to visit the Days of 76 Museum, also using our free passes. This is a nice museum spotlighting four collections. One is 19th century wagons and vehicles, many still being used in the Days of 76 parades.To keep things brief a lot of cowboy and Indian artifacts.

 Our last stop was Crazy Horse where they were doing a night blast and celebrating the 87 birthday of Ruth Ziolkowski- the wife of Korzak who began the sculpting. Ruth is still very active in the operation of Crazy Horse. The night blast was a awesome spectacle and wish my phone cam would have worked to capture it. Finally home after 11 and beat, but a great day.