THE NEWTON'S

  Jewel Cave- Is aptly named... it really is beautiful inside.  Again my photo skills can't capture the beauty.      We had a wonderful tour group and tour guide.  It was filled with kids- probably a third of the group was kids and they all enjoyed it and kept it funny for everyone.      There is another tour you can take to explore, but you have to be able to fit through this concrete block to go on the tour- the girls wouldn't have any problem! The Badlands Anyone that is into western novels or movies has to have heard of the Badlands.  When we realized that we were driving right past Badlands National Park, we had to revise our itenerary to include driving through it.  The layers of rock and sandstone and the formations that have been made- I just loved it.   One thing I thought was so neat was how we would be driving and one one side of the road it was meadowland and flat and basically...

Archaeology is something all of our family thinks is neat so it was great to be able to stop in and see a live archaeological site.  The Mammoth Site is an archeological site that was found when a developer began to break ground to build a subdivision.  Luckily when they dug up a mamoth tusk they stopped and were able to make this amazing discovery.  It is an old sink hole that is literally filled with hundreds of bones of creatures that got stuck and died in the sink hole crater and later were filled over with through years and years...   We took the tour and it was really neat to learn more about the history that they have uncovered and what they can tell from it.    Out of the hundreds of Mammoth bones discovered- all of them are Male! After that we drove past Crazy Horse (we weren't "crazy" enough to pay the entrance fee to see it up close) and on to Mt Rushmore.   A great view as you walk towards it... ...

  The original plan was to take a leasurely drive from our Hotel in Cody Wyoming the day after Yellowstone, and just drive straight to the hotel in South Dakota where the next day we would continue on our sightseeing... But that would be too easy- We realized Devils Tower was just a short detour from the route we were driving, so we took the detour! :)  This is a tower of stone that is just on it's own... no mountains nearby for it to have formed as part of.   The view from the loop trail at the base of it was neat, and we could watch the climbers going up the side of it while we walked around the base.  I'm so glad we stopped and made the detour to add this to our list of sights.  It really is an amazing little piece of nature.   The next day we went searching for gold! We went to a mining museum where we panned for gold, and learned how they did tunnel mining for a hundred plus years. After that we headed to Wind Cave.  It...