June 23, 2015 - Flew to Rapid City

We got up pretty early and arrived at Rapid City around 10AM.  After we got the rental car, we drove to our hotel Residence Inn to store luggages and to start our tour.  The 1st stop was to see the Presidential Square in Rapid City downtown. There are 40 live-sized statues of past presidents standing as pedestrians on street corners of streets between Main & St. Joseph in Rapid City downtown.  We saw Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, George Bush Sr., Lyndon Johnson and etc.  It gave us a good opportunity of taking pictures with these presidential statues.

We also walked by the famous Artist Alley.  It is a small alley with lots of street arts.  It is something interesting to see in a conservative city like Rapid City.

Then, we had lunch at the Firehouse Brewing Co (recommended by a staff in the Rapid City Visitor Center).  We had an outdoor setting with nice lunch in sunny weather of Rapid City.  

After lunch we visited the Bear Country USA which is an outdoor wildlife park just half an hour south of Rapid City.  Over there, you drive in your car and watch wildlife from your car.  At first, we were not quite sure what kinds of wildlife we would spot.  However, to our surprise, there were a lot of wildlife and actions there.  It looked like these wildlife felt that they own this place, and they were just roaming around and did not even bothered by cars driving by them.  There were bears, elks, bighorn sheep, arctic wolves, reindeers, and bisons.  

There is also a babyland area featuring small animals and baby animals.  The bear cubs also did a tree climbing act for our enjoyment.  We had a wonderful time spotting animals and took a lot of pictures there.

When we were ready to go out for dinner and noticed that there was an happy hour going on in the hotel lobby with hamburgers, veggies, beer and wine.  After making sure that it was for hotel guests, we stayed there and enjoyed our free meals.  The Residence Inn found by JC was a brand new hotel in the area and just opened a couple of weeks ago.  It still smelled brand new and had a very good rates.  Good job on JC’s part of finding such a nice hotel as our base for the week.