So we took off Friday and drove straight to Mt Rushmore. As we were getting out of the car, Ty struck up a conversation with a family that had also just arrived. He informed them that he knew the presidents on Mt Rushmore. “I know the presidents, there are 4. Well I know one, his name is Abraham Lincoln. His face is the 4th one. Oh, and another one is President Thomas S. Monson.” The father of the family was nice enough to listen to Ty and then told him to have fun. Ty proceeded to call after them, “Have fun, be safe.”
Kylan was a little funky for the first 5 minutes, but as we proceeded around the walking area at the base of the Mt, he became his independent self and had to complete the stairs on his own without any help.
Here is Ty giving directions of where the faces are.
Ty enjoyed posing for the camera -
If we had known how wired the kids were going to be, we would have stayed for the night lighting at 9 PM, but we decided they probably would not last that late. However, neither of them probably fell asleep until after 10 that night.
The next day was Saturday, we headed for the Alpine Slide first. Kylan fell asleep right before we got there, so Chris and I took turns going up with Ty. I went with Ty first. Ty did well getting on the lift, but was pretty tentative and held my hand the entire way up.
About half way up, he informed me he was done and ready to get off. So we looked around at the view and those who were sliding below us. Then we saw a view of Mt Rushmore from our chair.
I tried to check out the view from the top when we got there, but Ty was ready to go try the slide. So we went down to the slide area and received our slide car.
Ty laughed almost the entire ride down. When we arrived at the bottom, he exclaimed, “Let’s do it again!”
I let him know that Dad would take him down for one more ride.
Of course, at the end of his ride with Dad, he exclaimed again, “Let’s go again!” We told him we were going to go on a train ride instead, he quickly became excited about the train.
Unfortunately, seats for the train were all sold out in Keystone. So we drove over to Hill City to have lunch. We decided that one of us would ride with Ty from Hill City back to Keystone and the other would drive over with Kylan. We asked Ty who he wanted to ride with him. He pondered for a moment, then asked, "Well who got to ride Thomas with me? Mom did, so I guess Dad gets his turn to ride with me this time." So that was how it was decided.
While we waited for the train to arrive, Ty and Kylan enjoyed wandering around the train station. Kylan found some Thomas books and enjoyed looking through them. It was hard to get him to leave the books. He has become quite obsessed with Thomas and trains.
This is Kylan in the play train saying “All Aboard” which from him sounds like, “Go Gooo”.
Finally the train arrived….
Kylan was a little sad that Dad and Ty got on the train without him. But we didn’t know how well Kylan would do on the train for an hour.
“All Aboard!” and the train is off…
Kylan didn’t care for the loud train whistle and cried every time it went off. After the train left, we walked back to the car to drive over to Keystone to pick up Dad and Ty when they arrived.
Here is a picture of Dad and Ty after they arrived in Keystone.
After dinner, we changed into our swimsuits to play in the hotel pool which had 180 foot water slide. Ty loved it. After playing in the water for about 20 minutes, Kylan asked to go down the slide too. He loved it! As soon as he would go down, he would ask to go again, “Slide”. So we spent at least 45 minutes going up and down the slide, me with Ty and Chris with Kylan.
Sunday, our last day, we asked Ty what he would like to do. He replied, the mountain slide and the train. Well, we told him we didn’t have time for the train again, but we could do the slide. This time, we took Kylan with. Kylan sat still in Chris’s lap for the entire ride up the mountain on the chair lift.
Ty rode down with me and Kylan with Chris.
As we got in the car, Ty put his hands on the control and informed me that he would steer. I let him know that I would help him. Once we got going – Ty put the handle down all the way so we cruised down. I had to pull up to brake a few times so we didn’t fly off. And of course, when we arrived at the bottom, Ty announced, “Let’s do it again!”
We waited for Chris and Kylan to come down behind us.
Kylan also asked to slide again, but we had decided we would go to the Rushmore Cave next.
In the Rushmore Cave gift shop while we waited for our tour to begin, Ty chatted with the employees about how old he was, that he was going to go to Kindergarten and that he was moving to NC. He then found different items in the store and one at a time would go and ask them how much it cost. When they would tell him the price, Ty would respond, “Oh, I’ll put it back”. Displaying his skills of negotiation: One item, he walked up to the counter and exclaimed, “I’ll give you $3.50 for this one.” The item was $12.99. They got a good laugh out of that. Then Ty found a play train set. He walked up to the counter and informed the employee that they needed to give it to Santa and be sure to put the name “Ty Clark” on it so that it would get to Ty at Christmas.
Both Ty and Kylan did very well in the cave. Ty asked our tour guide tons of questions – we had to remind him not to interrupt her when she was talking, although he would always proceed his questions with “Excuse me”. Kylan did great, but disliked when we would stop for the tour guide to tell us about the area of the cave, he just wanted to keep moving through the “tunnel” as he called it.
As we headed back toward Keystone, we had seen a buffalo on the side of the road with a saddle and Chris thought we could get a picture with the boys. Well the saddle wasn’t attached, so we decided it probably wouldn’t be safe.
We stopped at Mt Rushmore once more as we headed home. We were able to get a few more family pictures, although not perfect – hard to trust other people to take just the right picture:)
We went there last summer and loved it! There is so much to do for little kids.
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