Deadly breakfasts, giant monuments, and the police 07/20

What an eventful day. I woke up and decided to eat at the 50’s style diner next to the hotel I was at. I had the breakfast of death, consisting of chicken fried steak smothered in gravy, greasy hashbrowns, biscuits and gravy, and toast. I ate everything but the last 30 percent of my chicken fried steak, which was the biggest one I’d ever seen. I felt like my blood had turned into gravy by the time I finally stopped eating.

I noticed during my meal that my right fender on my trailer had come off. My first instinct was that someone stole it, since I didn’t remember it being loose. On top of that, the other fender wasn’t loose at all, making it curious that only one of them would rattle loose from driving and come off. I did find it weird that someone would only steal one fender though. Come to find out the next day that my right side tail light was bent a bit, as if something hit it with tremendous force. Something like a trailer fender going 55 miles an hour, for instance. So that solved that mystery.

Anyway, after my nearly heart stopping breakfast, I finally made it to Mt. Rushmore. For all of the hype surrounding it, I thought it would be more impressive. That seems to be a recurring theme on this trip. So many national monuments that have been so hyped up by years of hearing about them, there wasn’t any way that the actual monuments could ever be as great as I built them up to be in my head. That being said, Mt. Rushmore was still quite a site. I thought the busts would take up more of the mountain, but a 60 foot head is nothing to go unnoticed, especially not 4 of them in a row. I read about 60 pages of “The Holographic Universe” in the amphitheater at the bottom of the mountain before deciding to move on to Crazy Horse down the road.

Crazy Horse as of my viewing wasn’t too impressive. It was basically a giant face and a whole lot of rubble. I thought it would be more complete, seeing as how they’ve been working on it since the mid 30’s. I was unaware that it was all privately funded though, to keep with the idea of free enterprise and the idea of Native American independence from the US government. So with that in mind, it was very impressive. I’m sure carving a mountain isn’t cheap. Whenever it is complete though, it’s going to kick Mt. Rushmore’s ass as far as overall size and intensity goes. Whenever it’s complete it’ll be taller than the Washington Monument in DC. They had a picture of what it’ll look like when it’s done, and I was more excited just at the thought of seeing the complete thing than I was seeing Mt. Rushmore already being complete.

After Crazy Horse I started making my way to the Devils Tower in Wyoming. I stopped in a small town about 40 minutes from the tower to hijack an internet connection and upload about 150 pictures. To give you an idea of how small this town was, the Best Western I stopped at was right next to a double wide trailer, and the only other thing in sight was a gas station and “home style cookin” restaurant. In fact, a deer wandered out of the woods next to the parking lot I was in at one point.

Anyway, I lost track of time, thinking I had only been hanging out for about 30 minutes, when it was really more like 2 hours and 30 minutes. I guess the owners got spooked and called the cops, saying something like a greasy bearded guy had been sitting in the parking lot for a few hours. The cop hassled me about using the internet without asking and tried to give me some bullshit about not parking within the yellow stripes, whenever I obviously have a trailer on the back of my car and would poke out into the middle isle if I were to park that way. He tried to scare me by being the “badass” cop, and asked me why he shouldn’t charge me with theft for using the internet without permission. I played the scared, stupid, and innocent teenager to play into his hands. He settled on just telling me to get off the property and that he didn’t want to see me “using that damn computer” anywhere else around town.

So I left and drove the rest of the way to the Devils Tower. I happened to get the last available spot, so that was lucky. All of the sites were primitive, so I couldn’t charge my battery more or even take a shower, so I decided I wasn’t going to pay in the morning.