Day 29

Day 29 was a day of exploring the Black Hills area with no real destination other than Spearfish, SD at the end of the day which was where we booked our hotel room to get us a bit closer to our Saturday destination.

We started off by heading into Custer State park and riding the Needles Highway.  This was taken at the Hole in the Wall picnic area.  Nothing really there but the hole in the rock wall you see behind me.

This was taken near the top of the Needles Highway, some very cool rock formations in this part of the park.

While at a stop on the Needles Highway we met a couple from Eau Claire, WI who mentioned they had just been on the wildlife loop and there was literally hundreds of Buffalo on the road.  We decided after getting shut out last night that we would double back and check it out.  There wasn't hundreds when we rolled through but it was still very cool to sit still on the bike and have a herd of 30 or 40 Buffalo saunter by like you're not even there.

Char took this of me coming through one of the tunnels on Highway 16A heading towards Keystone for lunch.

After lunch in Keystone we headed for Spearfish and checked in to our hotel before going for another loop to look around Sturgis.  Grabbed this photo at the entrance sign.  After this we headed over to the Sturgis Harley dealer, figured they'd likely be a pretty big dealer.  Well I was half right, they only had 4 bikes on the floor but I don't think there was a Harley Shirt/Jacket/Underwear/Tie/School Bag/ etc etc etc.... manufactured they didn't have on a rack.

Got to figure the owner of Flowers by Rose knows how to market her product.

After stopping for supper we got back to the hotel and had a nice relaxing time in the hot tub before retiring to the room to settle in for the night.  I sat down to do the blog and couldn't find the power adapter to plug in my netbook.  After asking Char where she packed it and finding out she didn't recall packing it, I figured this wasn't going to end well.  After searching everywhere with no luck I called the hotel in Custer from last night to find out they had it at the desk.  It sounded like the owner was not real thrilled with the idea of of mailing it to me and I would be without the netbook for the rest of the trip, so since we were only 71 miles from Custer I jumped on the bike and put the hammer down.  Made it to the hotel in record time and turned around for the return trip.  I took it a bit easier on the return trip as it was now completely dark out and there is a lot of wildlife in this area.  The last 40 miles or so the entire sky was a non stop lightning show and it was obvious some bad weather was rolling in and fast, so I picked up the pace a bit.

Less than 5 miles from being back at the hotel I saw the bright lights swinging a U-Turn on the highway behind me.  This time I didn't get a restaurant recommendation and the warning is a little more formal with it being written and documented but I'll take it, beats paying a tag for 67 in a 55 zone.

Mileage covered today was 585 km bringing the trip total to 9072.4 km.