I took this as a car trip from Denver with my 9 and 10 year old sons. Itnerary:

Day 1-2 - Devil’s Tower WY – I stayed at the Devil’s Tower Lodge(more like a B&B than a hotel proper) – drive through the park and it’s on a private road about ¾ mi from the visitor’s center. There is a hot tub that overlooks the Tower. We paid $150/night for two adjoining bedrooms. Food is $12.50/day and is served family style. It was delicious, filling, and simple….the alternative is drive 20 miles into town. Frank charges $225/Day for guided climbing. A “Day” is however long you want it to be – some groups went out at 5:00 AM to beat the heat, climbed until lunch, then climbed again from 4:00 to 9:30 or later. My sons had never climbed before; the guides did a fantastic job. They can handle anything from newbs like us to very serious climbers (one of the other guests has a daughter who is a Bouldering national champion). The boys absolutely LOVED this. We arrived the afternoon before and walked the 1.3 mile trail around the Tower. There is a visitor’s center that has a nice selection of local guidebooks. After the short hike, we went to the local sundry shop – there is one at the gate and one across the street at the KOA – for ice cream…cash only, $3.00 for a scoop. We’d have been willing to pay $7.00/scoop.

Day 3-4 – drive into Rapid City. We stopped at Spearfish to buy pint glasses (I’ve been collecting for 20 years). We continued East on I-90 to the Minuteman ICBM museum – Exit 131. It’s the same exit as the Badlands National Park and the facility shares a parking lot with a Conoco gas station. We got there after the last set of tickets had been distributed - **THIS IS A CRUCIAL TIP** - the tickets are first come/first served and free of charge. DO get there early…we arrived the next day at 8:10 and the first tickets we could get were 11:00. We continued into the Badlands, which is interesting, but you get enough of the scenery fairly quickly. I’d recommend driving thorough and maybe stopping at a couple of the overlooks. 3 hours tops. It is geologically very boring – eroded mud in Wile E. Coyote shapes. It kind of reminds me of Monument Valley or parts of Canyonlands, but in miniature. If you DO go hiking, wear jeans or snake guards – there is a real rattlesnake problem there.

After the Badlands, we went to Exit 127 for the ICBM HQ – 45 min tour – then to Exit 116, which is a decommissioned missile silo. The HQ is ranger-guided, and the silo has a cell phone tour that you call. It has the blast door open and a greenhouse on top so you can see the missile. Definitely a VERY interesting tour. Everything is the way the crew left it when decommissioned in 1993, including a Time magazine with a young Hillary Clinton on the cover and a copy of Byte magazine with the new Intel Pentium’s featured prominently.

The boys had been good sports the whole day, so after the silo, we went to the WaTiKi indoor water park - $20 each. Don’t waste your money…though I’m sure it’s very nice during the middle of the winter. They have a short lazy river, huge hot tub, and 2 water slides. Instead, go to the outdoor one on the Mt. Rushmore road – 5 miles S of Rapid City. I don’t remember the name; but we saw it and regretted. I am told that the WaTiKi will be doubled in size soon, but I saw no evidence of new construction.

We stayed at the Hotel Alex Johnson….$100/night + tax. The rooms were clean and comfortable, if a bit on the small side (as you’d expect from a hotel built in 1928…that is just how they did things back then). Our room had a microwave and a mini fridge. There are other motels on I-90, but they seemed isolated and depressingly suburban sprawl-y. We ate dinner at the Firehouse Brewing Company. Two apps, three burgers, and three beers for me was $70. Service was delightful. Food was substantial and tasty, as it is at most brewpubs. The beer was just OK. We followed it up with a Baked Alaska on the rooftop bar/restaurant at the Alex. They will bring food upstairs from the Irish pub on the ground floor, if you want that. I saw other diners enjoying dinner, and it looked good.

Rapid City has a number of free outdoor entertainment options during the summer. It was roller derby when we were there, but most of the attractions were concerts. There is a cute little downtown area about 4 blocks square that is worth a stroll that includes a movie theatre and several restaurants. There are a couple of day spas in the area (which, obviously, we didn’t patronize) but that I might treat my “climber girl” to if I ever find her. Rapid City is near other climbing areas such as the Needles in Custer State Park…you could happily spend most of a week in Rapid City….

Day 5 – Mt. Rushmore and home. We ate breakfast at Taffy’s Silver Spoon, across from the hotel. I had the Eggs Benedict with smoked salmon and roe and a side of hash browns ($13 + $4); one of my sons had chocolate chip pancakes with bananas and a scoop of vanilla ice cream ($9); and the other one had biscuits and gravy. The biscuits were sweet and reminded me of cornbread without much cornmeal in there. BFast for 3 was $40.00. They also serve lunch and dinner.

Drove to Mt. Rushmore – what can I say? If you’re an American, you probably should do this. And attempted to tour Jewel Cave – here, as with the Minuteman museum, my advice is to go as early as possible and get your name on the list. We didn’t tour because by lunchtime, the first tour we could get was 5:30 – and we’d have still had a 6 hour drive home. Apparently Wind Cave does not require reservations. If we’d had some more time, a hike in the Black Hills and a dip in Horse Thief Lake would have been nice – perhaps followed by a night in one of the apparently thousands of motels in Keystone SD.