After seven and a half months of planning and reserving flights, cars, hotels, and activities, we were on our way to our month-long road trip in America. Ten-month-long war in Israel notwithstanding, flight cancellations all around us, our El Al reservations held firm, and we woke up in Boston at a hotel near the airport on July 16th.

We reserved Premium Economy seats for every flight; something we never would’ve done even as little as five years ago. With age comes compromise. We arrived in Boston well-rested and likewise in Rapid City, South Dakota, after two flights; Premium Economy on all. Worth every penny. Of course, if you don’t have it, you can survive Economy, even in your 70s, and if you’re addicted to travel as we are, it becomes a moot point. But the extra comfort meant starting our vacation without needing a rest day after each flight. In fact, minutes after we landed in Rapid City we were at the Alamo Rental Car counter to pick up our comfy Hyundai Elantra and hit the road.

The Rapid City airport is tiny compared to most of the mega airports we’re used to. Delhi, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Rome, Tel Aviv. The two men staffing the Alamo Rental Car desk provided foreshadowing for our entire trip. They received us with smiles and kind words. They offered us maps, listened to our plans, and made helpful, gentle suggestions. They offered basically all the cars on the lot (not all that many) at no extra charge and only reluctantly waved goodbye when we drove off.

I’m always a little surprised that there is such a thing as rental cars. Mostly brand new cars in perfect condition. I get it that insurance will cover any damage we manage to do but they don’t know us. At all. Maybe we’re the worst drivers EVER. If they’d spent a few days driving the highways in Israel they’d probably charge a lot extra for Israeli drivers. But, no, they happily waved goodbye and we were on our way.

Our first Walmart experience had me laughing at my partner. He’d actually never in his life been in a Walmart. Yes, he was born and raised in the United States. He lived there until he was twenty-eight and has been back for visits many times over the past decades. And, yet, he’d never been to Walmart. He was in shoppers’ heaven. Despite having been on two flights that day, he wandered the aisles in amazement. We stopped in to buy a cooler, ice, and basic food for the next week. We ended up checking out every aisle, from appliances to clothing, to shoes, to over-the-counter medications. Of course, being a man, we walked out with only a cooler, ice, and food for the next week, but he also walked out with a new-found respect for that American icon, Walmart. We were to visit Walmarts in several cities over the next month.

An hour later we arrived at our hotel which boasted a view of Mount Rushmore from our room Unh hunh. You know how that goes. If you walked to the end of the outside balcony and stood on tiptoe, craning your neck around a corner, you could vaguely make out the famous foursome in the distance.

No matter. We were psyched.

At the front desk, we learned that in half an hour there would be a nightly flag ceremony. Half an hour. Yikes! We’d been traveling since about ten o’clock a.m. and it was seven-thirty p.m. My partner wanted nothing more than a shower, food, and sleep. But – a flag ceremony! – come on, dude. We’d be leaving the next morning after seeing as much of Mount Rushmore as we could absorb. He’s nothing if not a great traveling companion. We were in the car quick as a flash and on our way.

If you’ve never been to Mount Rushmore: it’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere. It’s not on the way to any place you want to be unless your Great Aunt Martha lives in South Dakota. And nobody’s Tante Shoshana lives in South Dakota or any state within three states of South Dakota. For some reason, it found its way onto my bucket list decades ago so here we were.

And if you ever do find yourself there for some very mysterious reason, DO NOT MISS THE FLAG CEREMONY!!!

It was amazing. Moving is too small a word. Thousands of people every night during the tourist season, and they are all – each and every one – patriots. They’re proud Americans. They stand for the National Anthem (and seem to know all the words) and even for America the Beautiful, with hand on heart. When there’s a call for anyone who’s served in the military or has a family member who’s served in the military to come down to the stage, the stage is filled to overcrowding with people.

This is Trump Country. It’s the other America. It’s an America with which my partner and I are not familiar.

It’s an America where a teenager offered me her hand (unasked) to help me rise from the stone wall seating. Where children behave and sit or stand quietly while adults speak. Two things, sad to say, we didn’t see in Boston or Florida, later during our trip.

We both learned new information about Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and, especially, Teddy Roosevelt.

.

The next day at breakfast at a diner one of the owners suggested we drive the back way into Mount Rushmore. He was as friendly, without being intrusive, as the Alamo Rental Car staff, and we took him up on his recommendation. It was one of the most beautiful, impressive pieces of road we traveled. Beautiful forest on either side of us. A quiet, windy road through the Black Hills with two short tunnels. One of the tunnels framed Mount Rushmore in the distance.

Breathtaking.

We spent another hour or so wandering around Mount Rushmore and then headed to our next stop – the nearby Crazy Horse Memorial.

A short half-hour away, we parked and climbed on a mini-bus to go up the gravel road to see Crazy Horse chiseled into the mountain. Only the head of the famous (or infamous) Oglata Lakota warrior and one of his arms – pointing ahead – is finished. Commissioned by Henry Standing Bear to be sculpted by Korczak Ziokowski in 1948, the Native American Nation refuses any financial support from the United States government on principle. Not hard to understand given their history. The constant lack of funding has made it challenging to employ enough workers to make serious progress over the decades.

Considerably larger than each of the heads of the four presidents depicted in Mount Rushmore, perhaps 4-5 times as large. It is an impressive undertaking.

Crazy Horse fought at the Battle of Little Bighorn – Custer’s Last Stand – and surrendered to US troops the following year. In yet another broken promise by the US government, he was killed by the military guard after surrendering.

It seemed only fitting to continue on from there to the Battlefield of Little Bighorn. But it was time to rest a bit so we slept overnight at a motel with little cabins in the town of Buffalo,

So far the trip had been everything I’d hoped…and more.