Today we leave for Rapid City. We drive through beautiful prairies and after a few stops we reach Fort Laramie. We are almost the only ones and enjoy our visit of the fort. Often we hear through the speakers the sound of trumpets which gives us the feeling of being in between the soldiers. We both fall in love with the colonel’s house which has a beautiful wooden porch and stairs to the first floor all completely painted in white and very nicely maintained.
After our visit we drive further and stop very quickly at the Flintstones park in Custer. As we are a little bit too old for this and as we prefer to enjoy the nature, we decide to drive further ahead. We drive to the Crazy Horse Memorial. This is the only disappointment of the whole trip. An Indian on his horse carved in the mountainside and for this you have to pay 20 $ entrance.
We continue our trip and reach the Black Hills National Forest. Patrick saw this on google earth and wanted to show me this as a surprise… we drive through the mountain on a road full of curves and reach the Needle Eye Formation (Custer State Park). Just along the road is this huge rock formation, breathtaking! We stop and go for a walk. One of the rocks hangs over the road but a tunnel was cut out of it which is very narrow for certain cars. We decide to walk through this tunnel. Then we drive ahead to Sylvan Lake where we stop for some pictures and a short walk. It is again a beautiful weather!

Afterwards we drive towards Rapid City. This is just a stop to spend the night as there is nothing to do in this city. We check in at the hotel, the oldest of our entire trip and go for a walk. It seems that on every corner of the main street there is a statue of one of the presidents.
In the evening we have dinner at the hotel where I decide to take a full rack of ribs, this is great but too much!
We go to bed early to enjoy a good night’s sleep but first we switch on the TV to check the weather for the next day… apparently Rapid City has an alert for a thunderstorm with hailstones as big as ping pong balls… we look through the window and it is just like in a movie… empty streets, bushes blowing over the streets and in a far distance you see like a black wall (the storm) heading towards us.
The next day it seems that at the last moment the storm changed its course and did not pass Rapid City… luckily!

Daytrip approx. 590 km