Friday June 15th: Custer, SD to Thorton, CO via Custer State Park and the Needles Highway

We had gotten in to Custer the night before with enough time to find a good dinner and have an hour or so to swim.  The place we stayed was very nice.  The kids loved the fancy (fake) waterfall in the back.  It was nice to be able to eat breakfast on the patio.

You will notice that Alex is into "funny" faces on this day.

We started out doing some hiking.  Maya tired out pretty fast on this day.  After a while she didn't want to get out of the car every time so sometimes we stopped and Alex and I got out to take pictures and she just stayed in the car.  After right away in the morning we didn't do much hiking.

We did the Wildlife Loop through Custer State park.  At first we weren't seeing much (it was a fairly hot day) but were finally rewarded with some Pronghorn, then of course the Prairie Dog town, the burrows and the bison.  In fact we got stuck in a bison "traffic jam" for a while which both kids thought was just awesome.  It cracked them up when we saw the bison all lined up at the entrance to a campground.  Alex had to quickly roll up his window at one point because one very large one was so close he could have stuck his head in the car.  Maya loved seeing all the babies.