Reptile Gardens and Moving Day

Following Bear Country USA we went just up the road to Reptile Gardens. This is another heavily advertised attraction in the Black Hills area. I was a little suspicious that it might be just a bunch of algae covered tanks with some snakes and frogs stashed in them, but was pleasantly surprised. It was a very nice place. The “Gardens” part of Reptile Garden was very appropriate. There were flower beds and hanging flowers everywhere and somehow they were all in bloom even in mid-August. The three popular shows are scheduled so you can easily do the park in 2-2 ½ hours. The shows are Birds of Prey, Snakes and Alligators and Crocodiles. They were cute shows and very informative. John liked the Birds of Prey, especially the vultures, best. Maddie, of course, loved the snakes because she's such an expert from all her time spent with Tom at Sarett and Curious Kids. I liked the gator show. I'm sure the presenter was just very good at what he did, but I was really nervous for him that one of those gators was going to get him. He was in there with more than 40 of them and several would walk around, looking very sneaky. The sea turtles were neat too. The one Maddie is petting is 129 years old and named Methusela. I bet he wasn't born with that name. This ended up being a very nice place and thus far, the highlight of Maddie's trip.

Next - Off to find our new hotel. We are planning on staying 3 nights at The Lodge at Palmer Gulch. The lodge is affiliated with a KOA campground and I booked it because it looked like it was centrally located to the places we are planning on visiting and the amenities looked very family friendly.

*Just a note on booking places to stay out here. It's really tough. Few places have great websites and even those that have them are really uninformative. I used tripadvisor.com a lot to try to get a feel of how good or bad they would be, but we never really knew until we walked in the door. Plus lodging is not cheap out here. Our average was about $150 a night. Camping is probably much cheaper, but that is not my specialty. Also they all had strict cancellation policies – many were 15 day cancellations or you were charged the full fee. Not good when you aren't really sure how long you would like to stay at each place. There were cheaper places to stay and I do like comfortable hotel rooms, but be very careful booking the cheap ones, because some were really cheap – like bring your own bedding cheap. Not this girl – but enough of that -

Palmer Gulch turned out to be great. The room was spartan but large with a king sized bed, roll-away bed and a balcony. The amenities were awesome, especially for Maddie. 2 pools, an enormous jumping pillow, water fountain splash pad, water slide, putt-putt golf, evening movies, (Madagscar and Ernest Goes to Camp while we were there), riding stables, giant chess and checkers, etc. For grown-ups there was an adult pool, indoor sauna and whirlpool, coffee shop with wine tastings at night a couple restaurants and camp stores. A very nice place to spend the national park heavy portion of our trip.

They also offer all you can eat pancake breakfasts, (which we did a couple days – yum!), chuckwagon dinners and a trail ride to a chuckwagon breakfast too. The trail ride would have been fun if we had had a little more time. Fees were associated with each of these activities but were reasonable.

For dinner we went into Hill City to poke around and try a restaurant heartily recommended by the Clapp's. The Alpine Inn serves your choice of a 9oz. or 6oz. bacon-wrapped filet mignon. That is all. Each meal comes with a wedge of iceburg letuce with homemade ranch dressing and a baked potato. It was delicious and very reasonable, ($10.95 for the 9 oz.). This was John's happiest meal of the trip. The Inn also had a huge selection of homemade desserts that are worth trying too. John, Maddie and I split the crème brulee and apple and cream cheese strudel – we didn't send anything back.

So, to re-cap, we are in a nice hotel, we have swum and hot-tubbed and had a great meal. We are ready and looking forward to Mount Rushmore tomorrow.