Saturday 25th September 2010
This morning we decided to start the day with a swim and a dip in the hotel hot tub, before breakfast.
Today was our second day at Crazy Horse and we had an interview with a Native American who worked at the visitors centre to get her view on the project. After this we knew we had a quick turnaround as we had been offered a prime position for the mountain blast. Every so often they blast parts of the mountain to shape the sculpture and combined with a visit from the state governor they were doing this today. About 10mins into our interview we were told we needed to finish as we needed to go to watch the blast.
When we had packed up the kit we heard the call on the radio, “Three Minutes to blast”, it turned out our guide Pat had a broken radio and had missed the earlier notices, so we sprinted to the nearest area we could and managed to get the kit up and recording just as we heard “10 seconds to blast” over the radio.
The most striking thing was the delay between seeing the explosion and hearing it.
We then made our way down the road to get an ariel view of the statue from a helicopter ride over the top of the statue. This for me was a special moment as I have never ridden in a helicopter before and had always wanted to.
I rode in the front passenger seat and took off the door so I could film out of it. They didn't ask me to, but I clipped the camera to me just in case, especially as he said if I dropped it, it would go though the tail and that would be the end.
It was an incredible experience and so much smoother than I ever thought it was going to be. We managed to get some lovely footage in the 15 minutes we had in the air.
That concluded the Crazy Horse filming, so we said goodbye to Pat and took a piece of rock from the mountain blast as a nice souvenir.
Tonight we stayed down the road in a lodge so we were close to our next story, the buffalo roundup. We arrived at the lake lodge just as the sun was setting so I thought it would be nice to have a swim in the freshwater lake next to where we were staying. The water was FREEZING but oh so refreshing. I did get out pretty quickly though.
That evening we pondered firing up the BBQ but soon discovered that although the lodge had a hob and microwave, there was no cutlery, crockery or cooking equipment at all.
We settled for the restaurant at the late which had a somewhat restrictive menu. We all went for a salad to avoid any fried food, but my chicken salad came with a deep fried chicken breast, Mmmmmm.
Once again we were last to leave the restaurant and the hoovering and cleaning was well underway as we tucked into our meal (around 8pm). We ordered a dessert and took it back to the lodge. We have decided to slip forward all our meals from this point to fit into American time.
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