including, but not limited to: carhenge, flintstones village, crazy horse monument, and mount rushmore.

what did i do today? see above.

also, i will take a moment to complain. last night around midnight, a baseball team moved into the hotel i was staying in, and partied loudly until 4am.

ok, end of complaint.

carhenge was surprising. it's hard to believe that something i've been contemplating for years could be surprising, but it was. maybe that's one of the dividing lines between art and a bunch of cars in a field.

i was crabby, i hadn't had breakfast, i was impatient to start a new day. driving down a flat road flanked by fields, wondering if alliance was going to leave me in the lurch yet again, would i somehow get lost again looking for carhenge?

then i could see it. i was taken aback by how.. spooky it was. this very strange thing in the middle of the most normal of american environments.

there really is something very powerful about a big hunk of detroit metal being half-buried vertically in the ground. old chevies aren't supposed to be vertical; they're not supposed to be partially buried. somehow the fact that the windows have metal riveted over them and the entire thing is painted flat gray makes it even more strange.

i took a lot of pictures, but i don't think any of them can really capture the strangeness of carhenge.

the flintstone's village (jonathan laughed at me when i said it was "life-sized"... so i changed that to "human-sized") was a kick. i don't know what the current state of hanna-barbera is today, but it was a big deal when i was a kid, and the flintstones have been with me ever since i can remember.

as i came out of the gift shop, i noticed two women seriously checking out the spacepod. "i see my car has gathered a crowd..." they turned to me and one of them said, "we're from germany!" they were a bit shy, but one of them was very interested-- "very fast, right? turbodiesel?" how much did it cost, any problems, did i like it... i asked her if she owned a volkswagen, and she said "golf" as if it were a lower species of being. finally she pronounced the SP "very smart. very smart."

i wondered about her enthusiastic reaction. i've had a couple of germans encounter the spacepod in north carolina, and i've never had this reaction before. maybe i was just watching a case of nbad happening before my eyes.

there's a lot of american cars in the midwest. there are no japanese cars, and european cars are extremely rare. would i flip out over a '57 ford galaxie 500 if i were travelling in germany? maybe. i think it could be different for europeans in america, however.

after the flintstones village i continued north toward rapid city. Along the way i found the Crazy Horse Memorial, which is a small profile of Crazy Horse carved into a cliff, a large parking lot, and a very large, very new visitor's center. I didn't mind the steep "parking" cost, but I hope they use it for contiuing with the memorial rather than adding to the visitor's center.

i wasn't sorry that the visitor's center was there, however, as it was fairly informative, with halls full of photos and text to tell the story of Crazy Horse and his life. The text didn't seem to pull any punches; his land was taken duplicitously and forcibly and he was murdered by the white government.

Looking out over the stunning Black Forest mountains, it made me sad to think of settlers coming in and taking this from the people who lived there for so long.

there were indians selling jewelry in the visitors center. i overheard a conversation between an old indian man and a gray haired white guy. "It makes me ANGRY." said the indian, "It makes me angry, too" said the white guy. The indian shook his hand. "We think alike then."

Mostly, it just made me sad.

Onward then, with every other tourist in South Dakota, to Mount Rushmore. I saw people with american flag shirts on, sort of like when I went to Graceland years ago and saw women with amazingly big hair. I have to admit to rankling a bit at the steep "parking" cost here... but whatever.

So pushing through a throng of tourists, i could see the four of them up ahead, and it was kind of surprising how small they were. I'd always imagined Rushmore as this vast thing, but it's not. I'm not sure if the pictures captured that. Maybe that's why I was surprised at the smallness; pictures always make it look bigger.

Then finally to Rapid City, where i found a grilled cheese sandwich at Denny's (much to my surprise, i found they also had Boca burgers (vegetarian burgers for those not in the know)), buried my nose in a book and then went to sleep.