We spent most of our third day of vacation driving across Wyoming to get closer to Yellowstone. It was a long time in the bus, but the scenery was breathtaking – and we did stop at several overlooks. It was just so different from our scenery here. I’m sure I’ve seen this very view in any number of cowboy movies. Absolutely beautiful.

Clara has a golf tournament tomorrow, so I thought I’d better get pix from the one last Thursday posted before I have more. It was at Rock Hill Country Club – the annual Lady Trojan Invitational – and the weather was awful – raining and windy and cold. It never lightninged, though, so they just kept playing. Clara did a great job – shot only one point higher than her best 18 hole score ever, even with the terrible weather and on a much harder course. We were so proud. I got this picture while it was just drizzling.

After the match – standing under the awning out of the rain. She was really glad Mallory hadn’t taken her rain jacket with her to school this fall 🙂

The second day of our tour out west was spent at Mount Rushmore – seeing it in the daylight hours. Like so many things I would see on this trip, I could only think, it was worth the seventy years I’ve been waiting to see this. If you look really closely on top of George Washington’s head you can see a little black spot – there were a couple of men up on top of it that day, checking for cracks, erosion, etc – something that is done periodically, we learned. We looked through one of those viewfinders that you could feed quarters into, and you could see them pointing and spreading out rolls of papers and everything. That was pretty cool.

One thing I absolutely loved at Mount Rushmore, and I’ve come to find out that these areas are at many other National Parks, was the First Amendment areas. Our guide told us that anyone could come and share anything they wanted with the public. They did have to register ahead of time so there would be enough room, but he said they had people come to teach yoga to the public, preach, give political speeches – just the whole gamut. How American is that?

From there we went to Crazy Horse Memorial. We were with a tour guide, so were able to go up pretty close to the monument itself. We learned that this summer they had mostly been working on his knuckles, so I was trying to zoom in to get a picture of those. What a great, great day.

Our first night of our trip out west we spent at Mount Rushmore, where we were able to see the ceremony where they light up the monument. It was just a beautiful, moving ceremony.

The day we left for our vacation was Meg’s birthday, so I made a black walnut pound cake – one of her favorites that I make – & lugged it in my carry-on across the country so we could celebrate that night when we got back to the hotel. It was just a fun evening to kick off our trip.

We – Meg & I stayed in one room, & my friends Evie & Pam stayed in another – got back a few days ago from our trip with the Gate 1 Tour Group to see some of the national parks and other sights in the western states. We flew into Rapid City. I had never been to South Dakota before, so that was very exciting for me. We’d left early in the morning, so with the time change we had a while to walk around downtown and explore the city before supper time. It was a very cool place. In keeping with nearby Mount Rushmore, they had statues of every president on the street corners around town. We didn’t have time to see them all, but we had fun guessing who was who as we were approaching. The sculptors did a really good job – we knew this was George H W Bush from a ways away :-).

And of course knew Harry S Truman from the famous photo…

There was the prettiest little park near out hotel that we spent some time exploring. The weather was perfect for standing on the bridge and listening to the creek run under the road.

This past Thursday we were in Chester to see Clara and her Lady Blue Eagle teammates in action. So proud of all of our girls. They lost the match by 3 shots, but I think everyone was pleased with how they played – Clara said it was the best score the team had shot since she’d been on the team, so that was exciting. I got these pictures afterwards – Sherri came up to see her in action.

And reviewing the match with her dad…

This afternoon Jeff & I headed to Chesnee – about an hour down the road – to their Labor Day Festival, to hear the Piedmont Boys – a SC band that Jeff has loved for years, and that I like a lot, too. They only played maybe an hour & a half, but they were so good it was well worth the drive to get there.

Last night we were in Rock Hill to see Adam and his Bearcats teammates take on legendary powerhouse South Pointe in his first JV game ever. He plays middle linebacker and on special teams – and that is a direct quote from my son. I don’t even know what all of that means. Anyway, he was in the game a good bit of the time, so that was exciting. That’s him in the white, going nose to nose with one of the South Pointe players.

After a fabulous, and frankly unexpected, 41-20 win. It was so much fun and so exciting. So proud of this kid and all of his teammates.

Wednesday afternoon my friend Flo and I went to Rock Hill to see the movie The Forge – so, so good – and then made a Krispy Kreme run before stopping by Andrew & Jenny’s house to drop off this treat for our football player, whose was having both his birthday and his first JV game the next day.

Andrew brought him in from practice while we were there, so I got this one final picture of him as a 15-year-old before we headed home. What a special afternoon.