To keep things from being confusing (especially if you follow our real-time adventures on Instagram) – I’m about a month behind in blogging, here are some of our adventures from the week of July 26, 2015. Hopefully I’ll get caught up again!

After spending nearly a week in Spearfish, we were ready to head East toward Minneapolis, Minnesota – so we could get our fresh water tank repaired. We had been waiting for storms to clear up in the middle part of South Dakota and when they did – we bolted across the state.

We made a stop at Wall Drug – which we knew absolutely nothing about – but we figured we should stop since it was famous.  I honestly thought it was going to be a large gas station off the freeway – I had no idea how massive it would be.

I parallel parked our trailer in the motorhome lot. Booyah. And then I made sandwiches in the trailer before we headed into Wall Drug to explore. We do this often – we’ll park somewhere along the highway and eat lunch in the trailer – a luxury when you travel with your kitchen and food supplies.

Wall Drug has been around since 1931. It was crazy crowded and had lots of novelty stores. We walked through and took some photos and then headed on our way. Here are some of the photos. . . .

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While we stayed up in Spearfish, South Dakota, we took a day trip down into the Black Hills to check out Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorial. The drive from Spearfish to Mount Rushmore is about 70 miles (through Rapid City) and took us a little more than an hour to drive.

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial does not have an admission cost – but you do have to pay for parking, which was about $11 for a car, motorcycle or RV (more for commercial vehicles). We went on a Thursday in late July and was shocked at how easy it was to park our big truck and after a very short walk, we were there!

The entrance in the Mount Rushmore Memorial area is impressive – with flags from all 50 states, displayed alphabetically, while the presidents line the horizon.

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As I mentioned in my post about the Spearfish KOA, we had the pleasure of being in Spearfish, South Dakota for nearly five days, which is a long time for us to stay in one particular spot. Spearfish has a small town feel but was still large enough to offer us interesting things to explore without venturing too far.

Here are a few of the family-friendly things we did near Spearfish:

We spent a full afternoon at the Spearfish Rec & Aquatics Center, less than a 5-minute drive from the Spearfish KOA. We found admission into the water park to be super affordable – just $32 for our whole family for the entire day!

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