and the whole, sucking up to Teddy Roosevelt thing is really irritating...

i went there as a child and thought that this will never get done. i went back as adult and the face had been completed and i was just blown away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial

It's so ugly and preposterous, it's *fascinating*. Also, it's a lot smaller than all the pictures I'd seen since before I was born led me to believe.

Driving through the otherwise-beautiful Black Hills, passing busload after busload of senile oldies and retarded suburbanites, I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of there.

(ps: the Crazy Horse statue is equally hideous and unforgivable)

I got a t-shirt.

Rushmore was a lot more fun when I got to see it as a kid in 1988. The Park Service totally rebuilt the visitor's facilities in the late 90's, but in 1988 the place hadn't been touched in decades.

There's more than just the mountain--there's the visitor's center, artist's studio-cum-museum, footpaths through the mountain forest...all kinds of stuff to explore.

When I was a kid, every detail of the place was perfectly preserved from decades past. Even the cafeteria menu and the trinkets for sale in the souvenir shop were exactly as they would have been in the 1950's. It was like a rare and completely charming opportunity to actually step into the past.

Of course, this reliving of a Brady Bunch vacation was heightened considerably by the fact that we traveled in a 1968 Plymouth Satellite station wagon. The kind with the way-back seat that unfolded to face the rear window.