Daily Didactic We began the day in the kozy komfort of Devil's Tower KOA. We headed up the road for a short hike to the National Monument visitors center. Here's a good thing to know. When we went into Yellowstone, Theresa had the foresight to purchase a fifty dollar National Parks Pass, instead of just paying the twenty dollar entrance fee. Turns out our pass works at National Monuments too, so it's already almost paid for itself. Anyway, the couple of mile hike up to the visitor center was very nice and had a lot of photo opportunities for the tower, what you see below is a ridiculously small percentage of the same picture taken over and over. The Tower itself is pretty impressive and is the result of an underground geological event that was then exposed by errosion when this area was a shallow sea. It is made up of a bunch of hexagonal columns. It is also a sacred native American site that settlers retitled with a fairly negative name and that we apparently persist in rock climbing against native protests. It is well worth looking at some day, if you are in the neighborhood.We did a sub-hike around the base of the tower and then followed the larger loop trail back down to our campsite, through some of the beautiful red rock that also identifies the landscape around here. We climbed into the bus and headed the roughly two hours southeastish to South Dakota. We stopped in Custer for some gas and groceries and ongoing communcation by pay phone with our cell phone company, and then headed into Custer State Park to find a campground. An observation. There are a lot of things named Custer around here, for a guy that seems to be famous for making a colossal error in judgement. We are sure that was offensive to someone and apologize in advance, but it's got us a little curious. Custer State Park is wonderfully fun to rubber neck in. We drove down the Needles Highway, which is about the width of two VW buses and takes a couple of dozen hairpin curves, with very small tunnels and rock spires that jut upward just beyond the side mirrors. It is very hard to take pictures of and we didn't do so well. We intend to head up to Rushmore that way tomorrow and will give it another shot. We found the last campsite in Blue Bell Campground, on the wildlife loop, and called it a night.