Custer, SD

We finally arrived back in our home state on Thursday. It is a first for our little car with South Dakota plates, which has 13,000 miles on it by now. We are parked at a nice campground recommended by Mike and Pat McFalls and have been checking out the area. Friday was laundry and grocery shopping day. We have not been in a town big enough for a decent supermarket and were hoping to find it in Custer; we will keep hoping. Pat suggested for us to go to Rapid City, that is were she does her big shopping. On Saturday we started scouting out the area by car, since Doug's foot is still not 100% and you actually can see Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore from the highway. It was a nice drive through some of the Black Hill country and we ended the day with a really nice potluck dinner at the campground organized by Pat. We met four new couples that also travel full time and a lot of good stories were told while we had a ton of food. It is good to mingle with some new people again.

I still have not given up my quest to go panning for gold. So today, we went to Lead and Deadwood, which is supposed to be a "Old Western" town. Lead was somewhat interesting with a mine that was just shut down about 10 years ago.


We went on to Deadwood to be very much surprised. There was supposed to be an original "Shootout" every day and we just thought it would be somewhat like Tombstone, AZ. Well, the streets are paved and just about every store has a gambling establishment. There was a lot of people and a lot of casinos. We did not even bother to stay for the shootout in the afternoon. It was just not the kind of town we had expected. Again, I did not find a place to do my gold panning. Oh well, I will find it yet.