September - Our Vacation to Mt. Rushmore Part 1

In September we decided to take a road trip to Mt. Rushmore. It was kind of a spur of the moment thing, But Kev had been wanting to plan a vacation there for a couple years now so we just decided to get to it and go! We left early, EARLY morning on Monday September 5 Our plan was to travel to Martin's Cove, get out let the kids stretch their legs for a couple hours then head straight way to South Dakota. We are sure glad we did! Martin's Cove was Awesome! It is so amazing to think of all the sacrifice those early saints made to come here! The kids loved every second we spent there too. They had hand carts we could pull and try. Then in the river there was an actual baptism going on. An 8 year old boy from Colorado came there with his family to get baptized in the Sweet water river, I guess it is a family tradition, that was where his older brothers were baptized and his dad. It was actually really neat to see! I loved it! Here are the kids pulling the carts they LOVED it! They especially loved sitting in the bigger carts being pulled by daddy and mommy!I had to post a picture of this because this is what we watched every second we were in the car! By the end of the trip I wanted to break this DVD, Although I LOVE this movie Rio I was done with it by the end! LOL Ethan took this picture because it was Ethan and Kiley's most favorite part of the movie "I poop on people then I blame it on Seagulls... Shhhh it was him" hahaha I must admit that movie is pretty Hilarious!We stayed in a pretty decent hotel I thought it was pretty nice, until we spotted a huge tarantula under our bed! Yeah we were pretty grossed out and it was pretty much hard to fall asleep the rest of our trip!
Here we are taking a dip in the pool at our Hotel the night we got there! They had a pretty awesome water-slide!We had a pretty full schedule the next couple of days! The next morning we went on an awesome train ride on the 1880 Train! Ethan freaking loved it! Kiley was excited too, but I think she was still pretty exhausted from the drive the day before cause she fell right asleep once the train started going. It was a lot of fun! Ethan was so super excited to give his ticket to the conductor! He loved every second on the train!After our ride on the 1880 Train we took a trip to Bear Country! Bear Country is a drive through park where they have all sorts of wildlife! From elk, mountain goats, big horn sheep, wolves, mountain lion and of course the Bears! After you drive through to see all those animals, you can park you car and get out to a place called baby land where you can see more wildlife out of you car including the baby cubs. It was awesome, the kids loved that as well!Our last stop, Reptile Gardens! I think by the end of the kids were ready to be done for the day. We had been going and going all day long. Reptile Garden had some pretty awesome stuff to see. First was the Snake show. The kids were a little uneasy about the snakes but still at the end of the show they went up and touched the snakes, it was pretty gross actually. The Alligator show was next. The man demonstrated how to wrestle an alligator, it was pretty cool. I think my most favorite had to be the Giant Turtles we were able to get close to and touch. It is really crazy how slow these things actually move. It was really fun!We had a lovely way to end our day Day 2 on our trip! After returning back to our hotel after a long fun filled day, a little piece of Reptile Gardens must have came along with us. Kev lifted up the blanket and looked under the bed and there stood this huge nasty tarantula! I seriously thought it was fake! Like the people who had the room before us must have left their toy spider behind! So after getting management, it was removed and needless to say we had a hard time sleeping the rest of the trip! Ewwwwwww