Final Day in Chicago and Mount Rushmore

So its been two days since we updated this and my god has a lot happened since then. We stayed in Chicago one more to take in the sights of the Art Museum. It was rather interesting, there was actually quite a few artists we'd heard of before and some famous paintings like Monet's Water lilies, Suerat's Lake picture thing, the big one with lots of dots, and Van Gogh's self portrait. We then headed to a bar to watch the football, oh joy (for me and Oskar), we had lunch there and me and Oskar had a few games of pool, I won, 3-2. It was a nice Blues bar on the corner of Wabash and Eighth Street, you should check it out, we went back later for a few more games of pool and a couple of drinks. We met up with Julie and Soyoung again and had a wonder round the Navy Pier, there wasn't much to do really, a couple of games, a ferris wheel and a fair few boat tours. After that we parted our ways and that was the end of the Chicago Saga.

Wednesday morning, 6:30 am, we decide to make our way to Mount Rushmore, a late addition to our road trip. Kev's at the wheel of the bus and me and Joe are asleep in the back, me in the fantastic cocoon we created with the rear bench seat. First stop and it Joe's turn to take over, its at this point that we get an instruction from the Sat Nav not many people will ever get, "Continue 622 miles"!!!!!! Oh... My.... God... It was the straightest, longest and quietest road I have ever been on, I bet we saw about fifty cars in the 622 miles on Highway 90, it was unreal. The van loved it making great progress at some astonishing speeds, thanks to Kev. So you may be thinking that this part was boring, o'contraire, we had Tuna draining out of the window, Kev made friends with, I'm guessing, the owner of a very desolate gas station. Kev hit a bird, so we had shit and guts on the windscreen for God knows how many miles until we stopped again. I managed to run a red light again, bugger, and we drove a total of 973 miles in one day, thats further than the length of Great Britain! So we actually made it to Mount Rushmore in one day, well done us. We stayed the night in Keystone, and the next day headed to see those faces in the rocks. A bit over commercialised if you ask us, however the rest of the National Park was fantastic. We decided to walk along one of the trials, a red route which ran to the top of the highest peak in the National Park, Hearney Peak. It was a lovely trail, and the views at the top were well worth the hike, they were some of the best views we have ever seen, utterly amazing. We decided to checkout an other attraction in the Black Hills area, Crazy Horse, oh my god, what a rip, $27 to see something that isn't even finished. So we didn't bother and decided to head off to Yellowstone and cover as much distance as possible. The best thing ever happened in this part of the trip. We made the best discovery ever. I had always been very curious about this button on the indicator stalk, so I finally succumbed to the pressure and had a play, next think I know the accelerator pedal is moving under my foot, we have cruise control!!!!!! What a van. What else happened, oh yeah, we went down a dirt track to turn round when did we couldn't see a bloody think for the Sun, so Kev being Kev decided to open the passengers door and lean out to dictate to me where to go, after this we were on our way to Yellowstone on our favorite highway I90.