Day 7, Saturday August 1st – Mt Rushmore

After a bit of a restless night due to the wind, both Ed and I were up in the wee hours pulling in our awnings, we woke to a beautiful sunrise over Hog Heaven.

Our plan for the day was to make it to Mount Rushmore. We left the campground after a good breakfast around 09:15 and headed for the Black Hills. Despite the number of bikes on the road, it was a great ride up and up and up. The roads are like silk and scenery is beautiful. Every small town you pass through has rolled out a welcome mat for the bikers, it is really quite a sight to see.

We arrived at Rushmore around noon with plans to meet John and Bill there. John had rented a Harley from Rapid City HD and was picking it up in the morning. We were parking our bikes amongst thousands of bikes and there was John parking about 5 bikes away...lucky. Rushmore is still an amazing monument.

After Rushmore we were hungry and headed for Keystone and found a nice place called 'The Ruby House' where John and Bill joined us for lunch.

We wanted to see the progress on Crazy Horse since 15 years ago when June and I visited it, so we extended our ride to pass over the Hills and to the west side. The ride was through switchbacks and tunnels, it was just beautiful.

Unfortunately, it does not look like much progress has been made, but hopefully they will complete it someday.

After Crazy Horse we headed back for camp, once leaving the hills it got pretty warm on the bikes and we arrived at camp about 17:30 after a pretty awesome 175 mile ride.

After showers and dinner we boarded 'DA BUS' for downtown Sturgis. To ride Da Bus you buy a wristband ($50 for the week) and the buses run between the campgrounds, downtown, local towns and saloons. To ride Da Bus is an experience in itself, they serve beer and shots on the bus. A toga party of about a dozen people boarded the bus on the way down (when the seats were all full) and coming back there were some happy people on that bus. We will likely use it to get to some of the Saloons later in the week that are outside of town.

Downtown was packed, but it was still pretty cool to see all the bad ass bikers pretty much behaving themselves.

There are more cool bikes than one can take in.

We did manage to elbow our way into One Eyed Jacks and Easy Riders for a drink, but we left the place standing when we left.

We got back to camp around 11PM...it was a full and good day.

Tomorrow we plan to head for the Custer Loop with Joe and Jenn.