Summer Vacation

Daddy had a meeting to go to out in Rapid City last week, so we packed up Grandma with us and headed out there with him. Grandma helped Mommy out so much those first two days while Daddy was gone and then he came back and PaPa drove out too and we enjoyed a really nice (but really HOT) weekend of being tourists....

The first order of business was riding the train through the black hills. PaPa and Harrison have been talking about this for weeks. They wanted to be conductors! All the excitement leading up to the excursion must have worn Harrison out though, because he ended up falling asleep halfway through the ride! The rumble of the train tracks had that effect on the babies too. Everyone got in a nice nap that day!
Our last day, I played "social director" and while we ate breakfast I looked through all the little brochures from the little display of attractions. I decided on a full day. Starting with Dinosaur Park (it's not really a park, just a bunch of gigantic dinosaur statues to climb on and walk around and it's way up on a hill so you can see all of Rapid City....)
Since it was so hot, we found a place to stop and let everyone cool off. It was an indoor, black light mini golf place....the babies really liked that place! Outside they had a little maze we tried out and we also got to go panning for jewels. This was one of my favorite parts! Someday we'll get the video uploaded where you can hear me gasp every time I pulled my pan out of the water and found more colorful stones....and gold nuggets!!!!


Next up was Bear Country USA! It's a drive through wildlife park and we really lucked out because as we were driving through the bears, they all started running which concerned us just for a second until we saw the food truck come barreling through. It was pretty neat to watch those bears get fed! And we had lots of time to watch because one of the bears walked over and sat down right in front of our car. We didn't have any choice but to wait until he was ready to let us go!

Our last stop that day was Reptile Gardens. We watched a Crocodile show and even each touched a baby alligator and we visited with some tortoises , enjoyed a run through some misting fans (did we mention it was hot!?!), peeked in on some prairie dogs. The last show of the day was a snake show and you'll never guess which of us kiddos enjoyed petting the big snake the most........Madison!
Needless to say, we were exhausted after all that! But it sure was a fun way to spend the last week of our summer vacation!