Hot Springs, South Dakota

The Wind Caves national park campground has nice scenery, but I would like either cell phone coverage, wifi coverage or TV reception (and a swimming pool would be nice), so we pack up and drive 30 miles to the Hot Springs, South Dakota KOA campground. Seemed like a good idea, but this KOA is not very well managed. They are almost empty (I will later realize why) and assign us a campsite that we try to get into for 15 minutes, but it is just too small with too many trees. They then assign us a different campsite, which is also a challenge but we finally fit into it. When we are finally parked, the lady comes out and apologizes and says she should have assigned us one of the pull-through sites. "Would you like to move to one of those?" I look at her and say "no thank you". Between waiting for her to assign us a campsite, not being able to fit in the first assigned campsite, and taking awhile to fit into the second campsite, it took us almost an hour to simply get parked. We will later find out that their free wifi doesn't work and their advertised heated pool is not heated. Oh well.

After the frustration of getting set up at the KOA, I do not feel like making lunch so we head into Hot Springs Dairy Queen for lunch. We see a used book sale in town so stop and buy a few used books; and then head downtown to fill our bottles with water from the town spring, and look at the old sandstone buildings in the town.

We then head over to the Mammoth Museum. I don't feel like looking at old mammoth bones/fossils, so Joe and Jere go in to see all of the mammoth bones while I sit on a bench outside and read a book.

We then head back to the KOA for some swimming pool time. The water is really, really cold so we have the pool to ourselves.

Beautiful weather so we have dinner outside on the picnic table, relax a little and then watch a DVD "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (featuring Devils Tower Monument).