Day 8, August 2nd – Custer State Park, The Needles and Iron Mountain with Jenn and Joe Temple

Today we met up with Joe and Jenn at their house in Black Hawk around 10AM and set out for the Custer State Park wildlife loop. With Joe as our guide we can just follow and not worry about getting lost or making a wrong turn. 

Joe showed us some of the lesser traveled roads and we covered the Needles Highway and Iron Mountain roads that are just perfect motorcycle roads, bridges, tunnels and pig tails.

 

We also took a stop at Sylvan Lake, it was made by damning between two huge rocks.

It made a very nice lake that has short walks around it and behind the damn.

 Trail behind Sylvan Damn, rocks stuck between huge rocks above.

Back side of Sylvan Damn














From Sylvan we all decided we were a bit hungry so stopped and had Buffalo Burgers.  We then moved onto Custer State Park for the wildlife loop.  It is a great ride even if you don't see wildlife. 

We did come upon some one making an ass of himself in the road.  Jenn straightened him out.











We did eventually find several herds of Buffalo, they were not close but close enough.

We took the short route home since we all were getting a bit fried in the sun. 

We said our goodbyes to Joe and Jenn between Rapid City and Black Hawk.













It was another day of perfect weather and great riding, we clocked around 180 miles in the day and are over 500 miles of biking since our arrival. We have not made plans for Monday yet, but we have rain coming on Tuesday, so we will likely go for a ride. 

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.

Day 6, Friday July 31st – Goodbye Badlands, hello Sturgis

Today we took it easy. We packed up camp and drove the 120 miles from our Badlands KOA to Sturgis Hog Heaven campground.

When we arrived to check in, Ed and Jean had no issues, but the Jaquish reservation could not be found....well we got sent to the office. It turns out they had mailed us last year's receipt not 2015, after getting that straightened out we picked out a site close to where we camped last year and set up.

Helen and Steve had invited us to their house for dinner so we headed over there, about 25 miles around 16:00.  

They live in a canyon where deer are everywhere, we saw two laying in the grass as we drove up their driveway and later one walked right through their yard.

When we arrived we were happy to see that Jennifer, Joe and Jonah were also there. We delivered the requested maple syrup from Jane and Larry as well as a quart from Ed and Jean. I think there are pancakes for breakfast at the Schroeder's tomorrow. Joe and Jonah left before dinner since Joe had to be up early for work.

We had a really nice visit and will likely ride with Joe and Jennifer on Sunday.

Tomorrow we will hook up with John and his cousin, Bill, after they pick up a bike rental in Rapid City. We are thinking we will ride the Needles Highway up to Rushmore, we will see. 

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. 

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.

Day 3, Tuesday July 28th - It is a really long way to South Dakota

Today we departed our truck stop in Morris, Il about 06:30 with hopes of reaching the edge of South Dakota by night fall. We stayed on I80 and thought maybe we could meet up with June and Jean's niece Cindy around mid day in Rapid City, Iowa, however it did not work out. We may try again on our return trip. If you want to see some windmills take a drive down I80, they are everywhere and huge. We even saw a truck with a single blade on the highway, it required escort and was so long it was interesting to see it change lanes. We have heard that much of the stimulus money over the last 8 years has gone into our highways, but I can tell you it was not I80. It is not terrible, but it is not good either.  We did hit construction but for the most part it was pretty spotty. Somewhere in Iowa, the wind changed, we hit intense rain and high winds, it was white knuckling for a bit of the way and once we passed the front we bucked a stiff head wind for the rest of the day. After roughly 650 miles of pretty hard driving we arrived at our objective Lake Mitchell campground around 19:15. Lake Mitchell is a municipal campground with less than 50 sites on a small lake, it has clean showers, is quiet and pleasant, it was a good random pick for a camp ground.

Mitchell is the home of the "Corn Palace", we may do a drive by tomorrow on the way out.
Tomorrow we will depart for the Badlands, it is a pretty straight shot west on I90 of about 225 miles, we hope to get there early afternoon to have some time to look around a bit.

Day 2, Monday July 27th - The fly over states

(written by June, posted by Fred)

     Monday we left Junius Pond, NY at 6:40 AM to meet with Jean and Ed in Seneca, departing for points West at 8:30. We drove through NY, PA, Ohio, Indiana and finished the day in Illinois. We slept with the truckers in Morris, IL when we finally stopped at 7:42 local time (crossing one time zone). We had a nice dinner at R Place Restaurant.

     Tuesday we hope get on the road around 6:30, hoping to cross Iowa and probably reach South Dakota for the night. We will be passing through Rapid City and will try to connect with Cindy if the timing is right.