MINI MoBlog

Day 3: Wall Drug and more!

Backdated: Friday, May 26, 2006


No trip through South Dakota would be complete without a trip to Wall Drug, of course!

Anyway...

We finaly made it to Rapid City, SD just oustide of Mount Rushmore around 10am - right on schedule (despite getting out of Chicago about 4 hours late the day before!).

We had a good solid breakfast/brunch at a Perkins in Rapid City and asked our (obviously new) waiter about Mount Rushmore and specifically about "extra twisty roads" in the area. He was very excited about the MINI and asked if he could go along for the ride :-)

When we came out there was a Dodge Challenger Daytona parked next to the MINI. A pretty stark contrast between the two. That's a lot of yellow!

We put in a good tip for our waiter, hopped in the car, and headed south on 16 towards Mount Rushmore.

The weather was perfectly hot and sunny - although a bit humid (more on that later...)

We stopped in at Mount Rushmore, a "free" National Monument with $8 parking and then realized afterwards that there was a great turn-off view (for free) about 300 yards up the road from the visitor's center. Oh well. We learned our lesson and when they wanted to charge us $20 to see Crazy Horse we just snapped a shot and drove off.

We then made our way down to the Jewel Caves National Monument and went for a tour. Remember the warm and sunny (and humid) part? When we came out of the cave tour an hour later it was hailing / pouring rain and lightning was lighting up the sky. Again! Crazy!! We plowed through the torrential downpour and up into the hills around Mount Rushmore.

This was where the REAL twisties started happening. Thankfully, the rain subsided and we were left with damp twisty roads - so much fun. The road was 16 alternate (apparently around this area "alternate" means twisty and fun!) and contained the "pigtail bridges" along with carefully crafted tunnels with perfect views of the four presidents. An amazing road!

This was the first time I really started to get into what this car could do. At one point there was an empty parking lot shaped like a big circle with sort of an upper and lower half. I pulled off on to that and, even in the extremely wet conditions, no matter how hard I pulled through the corners even through the off-camber elevation drop I couldn't get the MINI to pull loose (even with DSC off)! It just stuck to the road like glue. It was amazing!

posted by o-ron @ 4:39 PM