In my last post about “The Texan Heads to South Dakota,” I mentioned riding an ATV with the cowboys and cowgirls and the ill-tempered Bison; well, that didn’t happen: I blame that grandiose idea on my meds or age; both came into play, and Momo brought me back to reality. She’s a retired nurse, so she knows things we common folk don’t.

Momo and I don’t travel much outside of Texas, but this year we decided to take the trip to South Dakota to see the famous Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Monument, and the annual Bison Roundup at Custer State Park. We don’t have much time left in our hourglass, so we figured this would be our longest adventure.

We are senior citizens, old people, to be exact, and didn’t realize we couldn’t have hours in one day and about the same the next. In our foggyds, we are still in our 50s and as robust as Jack LaLanne, who lived to be 97, and went through half a dozen Happy, the white German Shepherd co-host on his workout show. My late 1950s-oriented mother used to stand in front of the black-and-white television, working out with him while smoking a Winston cigarette and sipping black coffee. She worked out well between coughing fits. I neither smoke nor work out, so I might live a bit longer.

We stayed the night in Wichita, Kansas, at a great hotel on the university campus. As we drove through the Kansas farmlands, the famous song “Wichita Lineman” stuck in my head for a few hours. Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell made a musical dream team. If only Glen had married Bobbi Gentry, his life would have been different. I swear that woman had the longest legs and the best head of hair in country music, and that’s before she ever sang a note. Glen had her as a guest on his Goodtime Hour show back in the late sixties and asked her how long it took to shave those legs, right before they sang a duet. She said it took a couple of hours and two stiff cocktails. Look it up; it’s on YouTube, just like everything else that ever happened.

From Wichita, we drove to North Platte, Nebraska: not much of a city, populated by people who don’t know how to coordinate their clothing or wash their vehicles, with all the men, and a few women, wearing their gimme caps backward, and Walmart is the main retailer in town. We stayed one night at a hotel there, then moved on to Keystone, South Dakota, home to Mount Rushmore, deep in the Black Hills of the Dakotas. A three-day trip that should have taken two, but our old bodies and weary traveling souls couldn’t keep up. I will give a shout-out to how much I despise using Google and Apple Maps on my iPhone. I would have done better with a folded paper map. Please, Elon, start a map service that actually works and doesn’t give you a mental breakdown.

When we got to our hotel, I realized that somewhere along the journey, my car key fob had fallen out of my pocket, probably while I was filling up our pickup with $4.99-a-gallon gas. We searched the pickup, the room, the suitcases, other people’s rooms, the parking lot, and the woods, but found nothing. Honda said we should take the car to a locksmith to change the vehicle code so the lost key fob wouldn’t work. We drove to Rapid City in the rain and fog, barely able to see the mountain roads. We got it done, got back to the hotel, and drove to our room in Keystone, $175.00 poorer. Then the day we leave for home, Momo finds my keys in the pocket of one of her thirty jackets and sweaters she keeps in the backseat of our truck. She is permanently freezing to death, even in 100-degree weather. Now we are down to one set of keys for the pickup, and we are both slipping into phase one of the derangement category. If nothing else, this trip gave us a grand showtime presentation of what old folks shouldn’t be doing.

But it ain’t over yet, dear hearts. While backing out of the handicap parking space at the 1880 steam locomotive train ride through the Black Hills from Keystone to Hill City, I backed into an illegally parked car behind us, which gave us no room to back out. So we left a note on the car’s windshield, as we do in Texas with the number and such, and finally, through the Keystone police deputy, tracked the owner down in Rapid City. She has a detached retina and shouldn’t be driving anything but a walker; her car had numerous damages from previous collisions, or had been purchased at a demolition derby, and she was parked in a narrow drive that was marked “No Parking.” A concerned elderly person called the cops on us: Bless their little heart. The deputy was very understanding, noting it wasn’t in a parking-lot-marked space, and said Barny Fife—was his hero. Now Flo and her gang have to fix her car and our pickup. What the hell can go wrong next? Car damage, lost keys, nothing left but a medical emergency. This was part of the preview I mentioned earlier.

Mount Rushmore is a wonder to behold. One of the most amazing things we had witnessed. Old George, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Honest Abe, their faces carved into a granite mountain.

We met folks from all over our country and Europe. The folks in Europe like to come here for some odd reason, and Americans like to go there. Doesn’t make sense to me. My sister, a world traveler, hasn’t visited much of the US, except Seattle, San Francisco, the Gulf, and Oklahoma, and thinks you have to go overseas for a proper vacation. I told her she should move to Europe, but instead, she sold her home in Plano to a Muslim family with numerous wives and a passel of kids, and now lives in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, near her daughter and grandson. She says her old home is now a temporary neighborhood Mosque and “Learing Centre.”

I guess I’m just a Texas bumpkin with no taste in my mouth. I don’t give one silver dime about visiting Europe: they all drive on the wrong side of the road, the language is a hindrance, and the food is questionable at best. Give me a Whataburger Junior meal No. 1, with fries and a drink; now that’s fine dining. We did stumble upon a wonderful restaurant in Keystone, The Powderhouse Lodge. Best darn food I’ve had anywhere, except for Momo’s steaks. The hostess, an older lady named Sherrye, was a wonderful old soul, and it was obvious she ran the place like a drill sergeant with a velvet-covered baton.

The Chief Crazy Horse mountain carving monument blew us away. It was better than Mount Rushmore and twice its size. The Lakota Indian Nation is financing it through donations and philanthropy; Jean Kroc, the widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, is their main source of funding. Our tour guide was Lakota, and I, being part Cherokee, we hit it off. We made secret Indian brotherhood handshakes and whispered promises to take back the country one day. He told me he has a well-supplied secret band of Lakota warriors with Jeeps and big-assed pickups ready to go when the time is right. I gave him my email and phone number.

The high point of the trip, which is the proper name for traveling retired folks. Vacations are for those still working and getting a week or two off each year; the world-famous Bison Roundup in Custer National Park was the high point.

Custer National Park, named after the famous idiot Cavalry General, sits in the middle of the Dakota Black Hills and has about 1,500 to 2,000 Bison roaming around, doing as they please. At around 2,500 pounds, they own the place. It’s a beautiful part of America that everyone should see before we pass on. George Armstrong Custer might have had prestige, a nice mustache, goatee, and long, flowing hair, but the American Indians kicked his butt. Looks and stupidity buy you only so much time; ask any of those fools in Hollywood.

Texas also has herds of Bison. We can thank the famous cattle rancher Charles Goodnight and his hardy frontier Texas wife, Molly, for saving a handful of orphaned Bison calves, raising them, and establishing a large herd of the last of the Plains Bison in Texas. The large, surviving historical herd now lives in Caprock Canyon, near Goodnight Ranch, a Texas state memorial site.

Waking at 4 AM and heading to the park in the dark, we missed our GPS-guided turn and ended up on a dirt road that led us to a paved park road with the other 20,000-plus folks. We waited in a car line for over two hours and eventually reached one of the viewing areas along the steep hills surrounding the corrals where the bison are kept for vet checkups, branding, and a few auctions for ranchers and other state parks hoping to start their own herds.

Armed with our folding chairs and dressed in our best Bison-viewing attire — Stetson hat, western boots, and Wrangler jeans — pure Texan. We made our way across the hill and found a spot that wasn’t flat but was sturdy enough to keep us from rolling down the hill’s steep, rocky slope. We were at the south viewing area where the corrals are located, and I understand there were just as many folks at the North area of the park where the Bison had been gathered a few days before.

Cowboys and Cowgirls from all over the country are picked from thousands of applications to wrangle and drive the Bison. They are not paid a dime and do it for the love of country and our western heritage, and of course they get to herd the largest and meanest beast alive. No wonder the Indians had such a hard time with them. Bison aren’t cattle, not even as docile as a Longhorn, and they have a permanent mean streak, likely because Indians with arrows chased them around the prairies, and then white moronic hunters shot them for sport and their hides: it’s an inherited generational thing. You get too close to one, and you are done for: flipped in the air, stomped into the prairie grass, and sent home in a body bag. They ain’t pets in corrals at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show. That’s the reason I decided not to take part in the roundup. A 2,500-pound bison is no match for a puny ATV driven by an old idiot.

Long before we could see the herd crest the hills, we could feel the vibration of their hooves pounding the South Dakota prairie through the ground and into our boots. We could see dust rising a few miles away. Thousands of people from every state in our union and Europe stood up, readied their cameras or phones, and prepared for one of the most majestic spectacles in our country.

The sun shone brightly, the sky was deep blue with thin, wispy clouds, and in the distance, over a few large hills on the prairie, we saw the herd emerge, not stampeding, but walking leisurely, with 60 wranglers on horseback keeping them together. A few tried to escape, but the wranglers chased them down and back to the herd. It was a breathtaking sight. Pure American western heritage. People cheered, clapped, wept, and celebrated as the historical herd of American beasts moved on the prairie to their temporary corrals. The spirit of America was alive and on full display that morning. People from every state in our country and Europe came together to witness the 8th wonder of the world. Momo and I will never forget that day.