I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

I just had the best 2 days off EVER. With the exception of North Dakota last weekend.

Last night Andrew and I went to the VFW... yes, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Bar... to meet up with some fellow park rangers.  Andrew and I were the youngest people there by about 50 years... It was an evening filled with dart-playing and karaoke.  Hysterical.  Jerry, one of the park rangers who invited us, used to be a professional darts player and gets really into the games.  AND he picked Friday night to play darts because on Friday nights, the VFW has karaoke night.  All the 90-year-olds go up on stage and sing hits from the 40s, 50s, and 60s... I especially liked this one woman in her early hundreds who sang Lynn Anderson's "Rose Garden;" so classic.

I sang 3 songs, myself, as I have to live up to my title of "whippersnapper."  (In preparation, I made sure to pregame the evening and then steal booze from everyone when it was his turn to play darts.)  The first song I sung was (obviously) "9 to 5" by my homegirl.  Then I decided to sing "Downtown" (why? no idea.)  And then, the woman who was running the karaoke event came over to me and tried majorly flirting (FAIL) and asked me to sing Tom Jones, to which I said, "No, but I'll sing 'Islands in the Stream!'" So then we sang that song together...

TODAY was also quite fun.  Andrew and I went to Wind Cave National Park.  Wind Cave is the 5th largest cave in the world.   The pathway throughout the cave is extremely narrow... you have to walk one person behind the next the entire time.  The tour was awesome, except for the part where the man in front of me had the worst body odor I've ever smelled in my life... and the people behind me?  A group of obnoxious seven-year-olds who thought they would loudly count out how many stairs there are in the cave.  (And there were hundreds.) Cute.

On our way out of Wind Cave, we saw a ton of wildlife in Custer State Park... buffalo and deer and prairie dogs and wild horses...  It was particularly exciting when we had to wait 30 minutes for a giant herd of Buffalo to cross the road.

Ah, the life of a park ranger!