When I last posted, I was on the road with my family at the Mall of America. The second part of our vacation was more educational and personal.

Part Two: South Dakota

I may have mentioned before that I have a weird bucket list. For a lot of Americans, however, visiting this site is a pretty standard item, along with the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, and the Lincoln Memorial.There's a funny bit about Mt. Rushmore by Jim Gaffigan about how Mt. Rushmore was a sacred place for the Lakota native people...so the U.S. government naturally carved white guys' faces into it as a gift.

So if you find yourself in the vicinity of Mt. Rushmore, you can also visit the Crazy Horse monument, which, although unfinished, is also impressive.

We also visited the Badlands, which were majestic as heck. Here's a requisite selfie. And, no, I wasn't getting any closer to the edge.

Plus, also, there was this.

The highlight of the trip for me, however, was Deadwood. Though the town is touristy and filled with bars and t-shirt shops, I found this photo of my great-grandmother in the

Adams Museum

, located two blocks off the main drag.

I've mentioned Deadwood in passing in a previous

blog post

. Long story short, the Chinese half of my family lived in Deadwood, drawn there by the gold mines and resulting industry.The end result of all of this was me, in 2016, driving my kids across America to visit this scrap of my family history, this remnant of the past.