by kenny

We stayed in the Rapid City area for about 4 days. We got sucked into a 3 night stay at Rushmore Shadows Resort. The deal is that if you take a one hour tour and listen to a sales pitch (to buy into the vacation company), you get 4 days and 3 nights free. So we did. And we ended up buying too (which is so unlike us). It's a pretty good deal for full-time travelers or people that vacation a lot. We got a lifetime membership that allows us to stay at campground across the states for free, or really, really cheap. It also includes cheap airfare and fancy international vacation on the cheap. Anyhoo, while we were in Rapid City, we checked out Dinosaur Park, Storybook Island, and the Chapel in the Hills.

Dinosaur Park is a free, cute little hilltop kiddie park that was created in the 1930's. There are 5 huge "life-size" concrete dinosaur sculptures, all painted the same shade of bright forest green, and you are encouraged to climb on them. It provides nice view of Rapid City and has a gift shop with cheap hot dogs and nice people.

Storybook Island is another free kiddie park, but is much more elaborate than Dinosaur Park. The park was started in 1959 by the Rapid City Rotary Club and runs off of donations. It is 8 acres full of colorful sculptures and sets of all kinds of fairy tale, storybook, cartoon, movie, and Disney characters, and animals. They offer children's theater program, and random entertainment like balloon sculptors and street magicians. It was a pretty fun place to walk around.


The most amazing this we saw while in Rapid City was Chapel in the Hills. The Chapel is a stave church built as an exact replica of the Borgund stavkirke, of Laerdal, Norway and it is built out of Douglas Fir from Oregon. It is operated by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and still holds services. It is free to enter the church and to walk the grounds.


Inside the Church (1:50)