"Joni gets into my brain" Mount Rushmore National Memorial Favorite Tip by richiecdisc

Favorite thing: There's surely more to this park than the carvings of the presidents that make if famous but I have not spent enough time here to discover it. Maybe one day I will but my guess is there are a lot of other parks of more interest to me. If I ever return it will be for the evening lighting ceremony but even that will be clouded by the history of how it all came to be.

Fondest memory: I couldn't stop singing Joni Mitchel while circling around trying to avoid the parking lot the park had put up. I sure couldn't remember a pay-parking lot being here in 1994 when I last visited but then again I didn't remember it being a paradise either. In fact, there was no plan to re-visit Mount Rushmore National Memorial on this 2008 trip. Despite it being impressive, one time had been more than enough for me and my wife, who is from Germany, was not pressed to see it. We had seen so many US National Parks in the past six months and this one was not going to compare favorably to even our least memorable. We were in Colorado and we needed to get to Philadelphia in the relative near future. A great long trip was coming to an end and a straight line would take us through Nebraska, Iowa and still leave me a few brewery-tinged stops in Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh en route. There was just one problem: I really wanted to go to New Glarus Brewing and that was in Wisconsin. I had a few of their amazing fruit beers in 1998 but never made it to the brewery. As chance would have it, we had a friend from Florida who had moved to Orient, South Dakota and wouldn't you know it, that was on the way to New Glarus. That would take us through Badlands and though that was not on our list of National Parks to visit either, my wife was vaguely interested in that. You can't very well go to Badlands and not stop in to see the famous four, now can you? So, we were figuring on doing just that. A very brief stop to snap a shot of the presidents etched on a cliff that has become Mount Rushmore National Memorial. The only problem was, they seemed to be charging $10 to park and I was not about to pay $10 to take a picture of something I had already a perfectly good shot of from 1994. (concluded below in Fondest Memory)