Day 4, Wednesday July 29th - A taste of South Dakota

Today we left Mitchell, SD and headed for the Badlands with hopes of getting there around mid day. Since we were in the same town as the only Corn Palace in the country, we did a drive by, it is impressive, but we did not stop.

Unfortunately our head wind from yesterday only got stronger, the winds where straight out of the west at about 20mph and steady, but it was still a pretty easy drive. We stopped at the Missouri river overlook which was beautiful.

The farther west we got the more motorcycles we saw, but the road seemed to go on forever.

Then the Badlands came into view and we started getting excited, we turned south off I90 and were almost immediately in the badlands.  The scenery was just breath taking, it was hard to not stop on the way to our campground.  We got to our Campground around 1PM, checked in and chilled a bit before heading out to explore a bit on the cycles around 3PM.

June and I were here about 15 years ago with the kids, I remember the beauty and running in and out of the car due to the heat. It is even more impressive on a motorcycle, still pretty toasty, but low humidity. We decided to take the scenic route 240 to Wall, SD where the famous Wall Drugs is located. It took us over 2 hours to travel 35 miles, we just could not help but stop at every scenic view.

We eventually made it to Wall Drugs, what a hoot! That place has everything, you could spend hours there just browsing.  We found our selves in their soda shop and got malts and milkshakes, did some more browsing.

We had planned a return route that included I90 but decided we wanted to ride 240 again without stopping with the sun at a low angle.   It was probably the most beautiful ride I can remember, the colors were vibrant and sometimes you had to remind yourself to drive not gawk in awe at the scenery.






We got back to camp and the girls cooked us up some good ole venison and potatoes, it was a good hearty meal to end our first real day of vacation.
Tomorrow we hope to do a short hike in the morning and then do some local riding, kind of a wind down day before heading to Sturgis on Friday.