Perkasie, Pennsylvania
This summer, twenty-four youth and adults from our church went out to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
in South Dakota on a mission trip. It took many long days of traveling to get out to the west.
During the trip, to amuse ourselves, we got a little wound up and silly as you can see by Melissa and Carey's beautiful modeling of bathing suits.
Our van played a lot of card games, did a lot of sleeping, and a lot of talking.
We took out four vehicles, so we used C.B. radios to keep in contact
while on the road. The nick names for each of the vehicles were:
Not Clifford, Blues Travelor, Dumbo, and Red Dog.
On the way out, to break up some of the travel time,
we stopped to do some sight seeing.
We traveled through the badlands and stopped at several
different places to take pictures and to climb the land.
It was neat because you could see all of the levels of
rock formation and there were even levels that were
red, yellow, and blue.
We also stopped at Wall Drug.
Here, you could buy any kind of souvenir that you wanted
and take lots of fun pictures
Dan spent his money wisely and bought a hat, guns, and a badge and also earned the name "Sheriff Dan".
Meghan and Melissa make great Indians, don't you think so?
We also stopped to see Crazy Horse Mountain Memorial.
The picture to the right is what the mountain will look like when it is completed and the one below is what it looks like so far. This mountain has been worked on for half a century already and will probably take another century to be completed.
Our last stop before reaching the Indian reservation was the famous Mount Rushmore.
Can you believe that these four heads could fit on the forehead of Crazy Horse three times? It's true!
We were lucky enough to get the chance to see a Pow Wow. It was really neat to see the outfits that they wear, to hear their traditional music, and to see them dance. Each outfit is made completely by hand and can take anywhere from six months to a year to make. These outfits, made of beads, leather, and feathers, can easily weigh fifteen pounds. They are absolutely gorgeous to see!
Once we were in South Dakota, we stayed at a camp on the reservation.
These were our six wonderful counselors: Leanne, Dan, Mel, Chris, Trish, and Jody (on the ground).
They were all talented musicians and taught us lots of fun and beautiful songs.
We were broken up into smaller groups with one counselor in charge.
Here, my group is singing songs:
Melissa, Sarah, Trish,and Tammy.
The children were also so happy and anxious to see us. Many days,
they brought their pets with them to show to us. In fact, the one day,
we were joking that there were more animals than children.
Fred was adorable! Here, Fred and one
of his friends were blowing bubbles.
They got the biggest kick out of them.
Alan loved playing baseball. He'd stand there and wait for you to throw him the ball. He got so excited whenever he hit the ball and it went anywhere.
