More Travel Journal and Snapshots

 Hi everyone. Hope you are enjoying your weekend. 

It is really crisp here in New Hampshire today and feels more like late September or October than August. It does not feel like summer, and they say another day of rough seas so no boating this weekend for us.

Thought I would share a few more pages from my Dakota travel journal.

I am showing this spread twice because the top photo is a better view of the right page and the bottom photo is a better view of the left. Both pages have images cut out of a newspaper, and I find fussy cutting newspaper doesn't always go that well.

Custer State Park in South Dakota, which is what these pages (especially the one on the right)  are inspired by, has some fascinating little one way tunnels.

 I really like this park. On the right side I used the newspaper map, our car window sticker that showed we paid to be there, as well as a little sticker. on the left I used the rest of the stickers from the set, as well as that funny car sticker which I added the exhaust and the driver. I stamped the mammoth because south of the park there is a mammoth paleontological dig site which we visited.

Here's some views from Custer State Park as well as the mammoth dig site.

And the mammoth dig site:

 You can see here the skull and some tusks from multiple mammoths. These bones are believed to be 25,000 years old and the animals died because they fell into a sinkhole and couldn't get out. There is no evidence from this site that they were hunted here. They also found fossil bones of giant extinct bears, giant extinct buffalo, camels and even dire wolves.  (Fun fact, horses and camels evolved here in North America and then left through various land bridges that formed during glacial times. Horses were brought back by Europeans, and camels have just plain disappeared except for those at farms or zoos.)

And in the attached museum they had many of the removed fossil bones, as well as some that came from elsewhere. This fossilized body of a baby mammoth was from a cave in Siberia and displayed in a climate control case. To me it is truly amazing how the Siberia permafrost and ice maintained the skin and hair of this animal that has been dead for over 10,000 years.

And lastly, a couple more pages. The postcards are ones of when Mount Rushmore was being carved. Mount Rushmore shows the heads of some early American presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. For those of you who might not be familiar with these people, they were all presidents who played a major role in our country, from being the first president, writing the Declaration of Independence, being the first environmental president to releasing the slaves and navigating through the Civil War of the 1860's. (As well of course as many other things)

Mount Rushmore is right outside of Custer State Park and is a very iconic American place.

OK, I think I have maybe 1 or 2 posts left from this and then I can say I am done posting about it.

Or least a lot of the highlights. (It took me 5 Shutterfly books to do my trip photos so be glad I am only giving you glimpses. Smile).

Enjoy whatever time you have left of your weekend.