Traveling Outside and Within: Church Ladies on the Loose--Day two continued...

I maligned Lusk Wyoming yesterday when I reported the town had only one stoplight--they actually have a second one down by the gas station--

Lusk is a sweet town, pleasant and clean, out on the prairie. It was lovely.

Our motel office and breakfast room was decorated with antiques, including this crazy quilt from 1913. Very nicely done, though somewhat faded as one would expect.

A truck trailer in Lusk was full and waiting to haul away these HUGE bales of hay, and here's one later on by the side of the road:

You lose the sense of scale when one is alone.

Driving north toward Devil's Tower, I revelled in the wide open spaces (Do you hear a chorus of the Dixie Chicks here?) Stunning land!! Miles of snow fences snaking across the hills, more windmills, surrounded by beauty. Just feast your eyes:

I started to calculate how long it might have been since I first saw Devil's Tower peeking over the horizon, but the number was incredibly and depressingly large, so I won't include it; just know that I've been wanting to see it 'in person' for a very long time, more than fifty years! Can you even imagine that?

When I couldn't get the blog program to work last night, I wrote a little about Devil's Tower--how I had imagined the land around it was flat and instead found a mountain! We walked around it, uphill and down, gazing as often toward the forest as the monolith. I loved being in its presence! We saw several prayer cloths tied onto branches, supposedly by Native Americans who feel the site sacred--I agree.

See how it rises up? You ain't seen nothin' yet!

See the prayer cloth in the trees?

You can see how Devil's Tower is the core of this mountain, with that mountain eroding around it. Someday it may well be sitting on the flat land I'd imagined. What a precious and beautiful place!!!

I was so pleased to finally see it--in person!!!

On we drove toward Mount Rushmore, though it was some distance away. Meals just hadn't worked out where and when we'd planned because of the great distances. So we stopped in Spearfish to replenish our potassium following the exertion of our walk:

Just a clarifying note: the banana was split and surrounded by--actually buried in--ice cream!!! DQ really knows how to come through in a pinch!

Spearfish Canyon was spectacular with golden leaves among the green on the tall hillsides. Unfortunately we couldn't stop and take pictures--few turn-outs--and the color was so dispersed among the green hillsides. Here's a glimpse though: