Day 69-71: Custer State Park, South Dakota

We finally said goodbye to Montana after 2 weeks. We passed through Wyoming on the way to our next destination Custer State Park in South Dakota. Other RVers we had met suggested we stop by Custer on our way to Mt. Rushmore. They said we would enjoy the wildlife there.

Leaving sunny Billings, Theresa enjoyed cruising at 70 MPH on the straight roads that seem to go on forever. The skies were clear and blue. We were surrounded by flat grassy plains with tons of cattle ranches. After 3 hours we stopped for gas. While Clint was pumping, he noticed that one of the back tires was flat and discovered a huge screw stuck in it. This morning Ariadne stated that she thought the tire looked flat and, unfortunately for us, we kind of shrugged her statement off. Next time, we will listen to our very observant 4.5 year old! 

We researched and called a few tire places. Luckily our back tires are duallies which means there are 2 tires for each back tire. So according to the mechanics, we could drive on one flat tire for a while. We found a mechanic 7 miles outside of Custer so on his suggestion we would continue to our destination and bring him the RV in the morning. 

We only had about 2 more hours to go and we would be at Custer by 5PM.  We wanted to make sure we had plenty of daylight left since we read there were lots of curvy roads and how animals like to stand on the roads too. Clint took the wheel for the remainder of the trip. As we pulled out of the gas station, we noticed the huge dark rain clouds and lightning way ahead of us. That should of been our sign to turn around. Instead we drove into a massive rain storm which turned into a hail storm. The road was covered with pebbles of ice! We finally found a gas station with a cover to pull under. The storm raged on and the wind picked up with fury! After 2 hours and many severe thunder/hailstorm warnings on Weather Channel, the storm let up. We left the gas station and made it to Custer State Park around 9PM.

The next morning we took the RV to the tire place to have a 3 to 4 inch screw removed. Luckily, the mechanic was able to patch up the tire and it was as good as new!

We went to Wind Cave National Park which was a cave with lots of tunnels. It got its name from the wind blowing through the cave. We took a tour of the cave.

After Wind Cave we drove the Wildlife Loop Road to see some animals. After seeing so many bison in Yellowstone, we were excited to see prairie dogs and donkeys!

The next day we went canoeing around Legion Lake.