Day 89 South Dakota
Trip Start
May 07, 2008
1
96
205
Trip End
Nov 22, 2008
Spearfish,
South Dakota,
United States
Sunday, August 3, 2008
The plan is to take a couple of days around the South Dakota Black Hills area and absorb the history, sights, scenery, wildlife and famous mountain sculptures.
What we have found out is, we have timed our visit perfectly to fit in with the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, held each year and this is the 68th annual of this event. Well done team, if you are into motorcycles of all shapes, makes, colours and sizes. The event creates a gathering of up to 500,000 bikes into the area for a week, NO it is not a misprint, up to ½ a million or more motorbikes! WOW what an experience.
The bikies are, as we have found out now more, have an average age of over 45 or more, and they travel from all over the world to attend this, we ran into some Australians from Perth.
A few of the 500,000 bikes
We drove our Castle as best we could fit amongst the many moving bikes, onto the road to Deadwood. One could ask what and where is Deadwood? It is part of the essential? History of the Wild West era and was a goldmine town established as a lawless town in a gully that produced gold.It also has the fame of the place where Wild Bill Hicock was shot in the back of his head whilst playing cards. He had by this stage given up being a peacemaker sheriff, and had taken to being a professional gambler. There a few theories about his death, was it a conspiracy, (yes even back then there is always the "conspiracy" theory), was the guy working alone? A question never answered, even though his killer was caught not a few doors down from the shooting. Another famous name from this town was Calamity Jane, who earned her name because of her clumsiness, but established her fame and name by becoming madam, she died bankrupt but still was given a big funeral paid for some of the notable townsfolk.
The town has still a lot of the same buildings built when it was established back late 1800 early 1900.
We had a ride around on a trolley but were a little disappointed it was not narrated.
We walked the street with a lot of Bikies and it is extremely hard to estimate the number of bikes and bikers in the town at any one time
Earnie is leaning on the door
. It was a constant flow of people and very noisy bikes. We are starting to "get over bikes" by this time.(This is not Sturgis the supposed centre of the gathering)We checked out one of the museums that held a lot of cowboy and Indian artefacts, including the deck of cards Wild Bill was playing with and some of his personal belongings including his gun and pipe.
The town was still a successful gold mining town up until 2000, the deep gold mine leads were still being worked until that year.
Time to roll out and leave the town to the bikes, we chose to head into Sturgis, a town on our way and the town that had created this noisy gathering of motorcycles. IT is hard to describe the flow of motor bikes as we drove the 15 miles on to Sturgis, there were just as many coming towards us as there were behind or in front of us. Please note here they were all well behaved on the road and kept within the law, it is just the sheer weight of numbers of them that feels "intimidating", obviously around here this week, "BIKES RULE!" NO helmets and certainly different dress codes and displays.
Well we entered into Sturgis, and the town closes off around 16 blocks to allow the bikes to take over, including vendors and such like, similar to a 4x4 and Caravan show but much bigger
The sign tells us all
.We did our tour of duty through this town as best we could, and then set our sights to Rapid city, a false start and U turn later we headed down the highway to Rapid city. We headed directly to the museum, NO we are not quite museum' ed out, besides this one was advertised as the latest technology, Correctly so, we might add.
We wandered through this museum that had information about the planet and the formation as well as the Early Americans (as in Indians and then to the settlers), a fully hands on and well deserved reputation as a museum. We touched things like a mammoth's tooth and ancient fossils as well as bison hides and other wonderful stuff from the animals, land and Indian cultures to the white settlers. Truly another "notch in our belt" of information added to our journey!
From here we followed our good friend Mandy towards our home for the next couple of nights, we booked ahead now we were aware of the challenge for accommodation within a 50 mile radius.
Well Mandy decided, we required a more stressful approach, other than which we had, had over the last few days, she took us to a turn off of a dirt road(busg track) that was refused to be taken by the driver, (to the relief of the fellow travellers, The driver is sure) but gee now where do we head? Well after a short "discussion" we reset Mandy to take us to a town "close" to the destination
They Caught up with Rick
. She did this through narrow twisting roads, but at least they were paved, and we came to a town called Hill City, Again the bike problem had over run this town, (Did we mention we were over bikes by this time.)We did another turn because we couldn't simply drive through, The pathway was for Motorbikes only! And then headed along a route that created a fit and outburst from Mandy, at the first possible place, we pulled over to have a three headed consultation with the map and a decision was made to follow the detour through this town out the other side, YEE HAAA we found the correct route and highway, we found our temporary home and booked in. This has to be by far the biggest KOA park we have been in, it is huge with many wash rooms and facilities as well as play areas and camping areas. We mention here it is very large but very full with many bikes and other assorted travellers.
We were pleased with our site and our foresight to book ahead. Tomorrow we hire a car to check out the National Parks and state parks.
