Day 5 - Thursday 22 September

Have decided to blog by the day, as we're getting slightly behind and the dates are getting all screwy.
So here is day 5, a travelling day. We have about 350 miles to cover today, leaving the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, and travelling up right through Wyoming into the Black Hills  of South Dakota and the Town of Custer.

So off we go, an early start, and we woke to a frost, we actually had to scrape the car!

Not much to show you from the drive, Wyoming (at least the bit we drove through) is not blessed with much in the way of scenery, unless you like dried yellow grass as far as the eye can see..

Anyways..... after several hours (about 6 in total) we arrived at Wind Cave National Park. A stop on the way to the hotel, seemed a shame to drive past and not visit. As the name suggests it has a big windy cave, but that's not why we stopped here.  It also has lots of wildlife and is apparently a good place to spot Buffalo.

So, first critter of the day, clearly not a buffalo..., a prairie dog. They are everywhere in the park, you can hardly point your camera anywhere and not get one in the picture.

Buffalo on the other hand, it turns out, are not so easy to find! It's only a small national park, with wide open views like this...

and they have a population of about 4,000 buffalo, so you would think you could find them, pretty easily, but no. We did see one or two from the main road, but it took a while, down some very dusty off road tracks to find the motherlode. Well about 300 in total, the picture doesn't really do it justice, couldn't get them all in, but there were a lot. Who knows where the other 3,700 were hiding?

A closer view .....

Another local  "critter"...

A pronghorn

Elaine can talk to animals you know.......

and sometimes they talk back!!

It doesn't look it, but the light was really going after Dobbin here said hello, so we drove onto the hotel, a pizza, and bed.  Tomorrow it's Mount Rushmore!