Day 5, Thursday July 30th – Cooking in the Badlands

Today we tried the camp kitchen pancakes for breakfast but we had to go back to our campsite and retrieve some of Ed's Maple syrup, Smucker's just won't do when you are used to the real thing.

We wanted to get a hike in before it got too warm and decided upon the Notch trail which is only about 1.5 miles long but has some vertical. 

The views hiking and at the top of the overlook were stunning.

By the time we headed back for the bikes it was getting quite warm, Ed was so thirsty he would drink anything.

Overall it was a really nice hike and we were glad we did it in the morning.

Since we had done the scenic 240 route twice on Wednesday we took a longer ride south of the Badlands through Kyle, SD and onto the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. We stopped in Kyle looking for lunch, and were directed five miles down the road to the Ranch Hotel and Restaurant, if they had not pointed us there, we would have missed it and there is nothing else for miles and miles and miles.

It turned out to be a great place to stop.

Frankly there is not much to see at Wounded knee, but it was a really nice ride.

The scenery is just amazing, we got a real feel for the vast distances in the west where there is simply nothing. As the day went on the heat was building, by the time we got back to camp around 5PM. We were all 'cooked'. It was in the mid 90's and the sun was smoking hot.

It was another good day of roughly 225 miles of great riding.

Tomorrow we will pack up from this luxury campground of power, water, services and shade to move to Hog Heaven in Sturgis for the week. Temperatures are forecast in the 90's so we are going into the frying pan but will be out riding in higher elevations much of the time.