a half million bikes doesn't leave much room for cars!

The Sturgis rally starts either today or tomorrow. The numbers of bikes are growing by leaps and bounds each day. This campground is getting more campers with trailers every day. Many come with just a truck or car with a closed in trailer. Some set up tents and others sleep in their closed in trailers. Early in the week there were 4 or 5 campers with bikes. Each day more came. Probably half of the campers here now have Harleys parked in their sites and more are coming. When I booked these sites, Friday night was the last night there were any openings. The campground was booked solid from Saturday night onwards for about a week and a half.

Yesterday when I was up at the office uploading my blog, a trailer full of porta-potties came in. You can now see these 6 porta-potties scattered around the campground. The one bathroom unit will not handle all of these extra people. I suspect that after the campground fills up (which it does pretty much every night), they will put people in the large field behind the pool.

Tomorrow, we head a half hour south to Hot Springs where we found a Coast to Coast place that still had openings. It was the only coast to coast place anywhere in the area (of 6) that had any openings. It is that much further from the activities and frankly didn’t look like one of the nicer campgrounds. We do not spend a lot of time in the campground and even then can spend it in the camper especially when the weather is really hot. Stan shows up on Tuesday so we will not have a lot of spare time to hang around the campground. We have a list of the most important things in the Black Hills that we want him to see.

Well, back to yesterday. We got up early and finished our home repair projects. The aquarium sealant stuck the glass to the frame nicely and the door went back together with little effort. We spent some time cleaning up the caulk that squeezed out but needed some kind of cleaner to finish the project (you know home projects, you always have to go back to the store to get “ONE” more thing…a couple of times). While we were working on the window, we noticed that the door closer had lost a screw and while working was flopping around. I rummaged through the tool bag and found a screw and fixed it.

Finally we ate, finished our pot o joe and headed out into the world. The first task was to download my camera. It was close to full and needed dumping. I prefer WalMart to do this. They have Kodak equipment that allows us to download and make the disks ourselves and then to crop and print some of the pictures also ourselves. I prefer this to downloading them to my computer. It is a comfort factor. Once they are downloaded, I have Kodak disks which I can then load onto my computer. If anything happens to the computer, I have a secure backup. If I were to load them onto the computer, I could easily procrastinate making the back up disks. If anything happened to the computer or the hard drive, I would lose everything.

We looked in the phonebook and found only one WalMart up in Rapid City. Usually there are dozens of them to choose from so I went into the office and asked. “Yup, there is only one around here anywhere. There are a lot of towns but none of them are very big so you have to go up to Rapid City.”

She gave us some rather superficial directions and off we went. It is about 25 miles up to Rapid City (to be honest, it is about 25 miles to get anywhere around here). We went the back roads and finally drifted into the City. We found the first road she mentioned (it went right by the sports bar we had found on Sunday but we drove up and down Omaha street and did not find the other street. We did find a tourist information office so we went in and had a nice talk with the woman there. It was part of a bank (?) with an open door from the office to the bank. She gave us directions to the WalMart (it seems that the directions we were given were not quite right. It seems that the 2 streets we were supposed to go on and turn onto didn’t intersect. The second street was 3 streets away from the first.

We found the store and also the Golden Corral in the parking lot. We had heard a lot of ads about the GC so we went in and had lunch. It was good, about what you would expect from a buffet…good but never great. There was one interesting story there. I headed over to the dessert bar. I was holding a plate in my left hand when I found a brandy new blueberry pie (small wild berries though probably canned). They had cut it into a dozen pieces but had left one rather nice large piece. I took the pie server, recut the edges and scooped it up (in one piece) and placed it on my plate. In my excitement (I love blueberry pie) I didn’t realize I was holding the plate upside down and dropped the piece right on the bottom of the plate. I stood there with the pie server in my hand and this upside down plate and said (out loud) “oh this is one of your better moves.” I heard a chuckle and noticed the two people next to me laughing. I turned towards them and said “this is what happens when you get old.” They laughed again and I went around the counter to the ice cream machine. The ice cream was kind of a challenge. It spit out little bits of ice cream so I just headed back to the table.

I set the plate down and told Cheryl that I had done it again. She must be used to me because she didn’t notice at first what I had done. She eventually started laughing. The waitress came by to see what we were laughing about and noticed the upside down plate. She didn’t quite know what to say but I pointed out that the ridge on the bottom of the plate kept the pie from sliding around when I tried to eat it.

We headed into the WalMart and found the Kodak machines. They were both hung up because people had pulled their chips out before the processing was done and the machine kept looking for more pictures. The gentleman from the photo department came out and tried to salvage the process thinking it was something we had done. He finally rebooted the machines and we had to wait about 6 minutes for them to be ready. We took turns looking for other things and were eventually on our way.

We decided that on our way back, we would take the hike we had started when the rains came the other day. We drove back to Lake Sylvan and headed out onto the trail. The demeaning things I said about the lake and the trail were not true. The lake (pond at best) was quite a bit bigger than I had thought. In the back side, it had a lot of elevation change so it was not the cakewalk I had expected. We watched some people rock climbing in the back and had a really nice hike. We returned through the needles but could not find a place to stop to take some picture so I figure we have one more attempt when Stan is here.

Today is our last day here. We are not moving very far but there are things that are right in the neighborhood that will be a longer drive tomorrow. We haven’t decided what to do with our day. We are really short a relaxing day as we usually take 2 at each stop and our only one here was a work day. Cheryl seems to be a lost cause. It is after 9 and she is still sleeping. Oh wait, the trailer just moved a little. Maybe she is up (or a bear just jumped on the roof). Time to refill the coffee, pour one for her, make breakfast, take a shower and decide what to do with the day. Talk to you all later.

Whoa! I haven’t written here for 2 days. Friday was a lost cause. It was the second of our 2 days off in that location. We relaxed and took care of a few things. Then we studied the map and figured just how we were going to get to Hot Springs. Nothing too heavy. We made one last journey to the coffee shop in Keystone, walked around, a little fudge (which we haven’t eaten yet), took some pictures of the motorcycles along the main street in Keystone (they took up the entire street, not a car in sight), checked out a couple of souvenir shops. I think Cheryl picked up a couple of things for my birthday (shhh! don’t tell her I know).

On the way back, we stopped at Lakota Lake to check it out. It was small but a picturesque. There were a couple of families picnicking at the pond, some Canadian Geese eating along the shoreline. Across the lake (once again, pond) there were a couple of horseback riders looking so western as they road along the shore then up over the hill disappearing into the woods. Then we returned and visited with our new neighbors. They were all around us, having a family reunion. Nice people!

Saturday dawned early for us. We decided to take an early run at Mt. Rushmore. We had heard that the early morning sun made the fewest shadows on the faces. We drove over the Iron Mountain Road one last time and drove into Mt. Rushmore at around quarter to 7. There were already some people there although not many. The walkway zamboni was washing the walkways and picking up all the trash. The sun was bright and the sky perfectly clear. The wind was brisk and the state flags were blowing. I took (another) picture of the 4 presidents through the Alley of the States and had to wait for the flags to be just right so they wouldn’t block any of the faces.

We both took some pictures including pictures of us in front of the sculptures. We talked to some veterans that were there and took pictures of them (with their camera). We stopped at the cafeteria which had just opened and bought coffee (thin, watery and definitely unsatisfying) and were grateful to get it.

We returned to camp. Just as we got out of the car, I heard the sound of metal hitting metal and looked over at the road just in time to see 2 motorcycles crash to the ground. A third crashed trying to avoid the first two. No ones cell phone works in that area so someone in the office called 911. The road was blocked and there was little chance of anyone getting down the road for some time. Fire, rescue and an ambulance and some police eventually (we are in the middle of nowhere) arrived. One rider had been moved to the side of the road and the woman on the back of his bike was lying in the ditch. Everyone was reluctant to move her. The participants were removed from the scene and the last we saw, policemen with tape measures, cameras and clipboards were all over the place.

We broke everything down. We already had the trailer hooked up so most of it was easy and in 20 minutes we were ready to roll. That was when our neighbor on the other side stopped to talk. He had a little white dog that used to sit on the dinette and watch us whenever we were out. He was headed to Yellowstone for 10 days and will be in the same campground that we will be in but he should be leaving the same day we get there.

Check out time is 10 and we moved the camper at 9:59. We stopped at the dump station and found our neighbor already there so we had to wait. Once we did our business, we moved across the parking lot and loaded the car. The police were by then allowing some cars through the accident scene but we figured to avoid it and headed up Iron Mt. Road a little and caught a side road out of the area. Iron Mt. Road is very narrow and very steep up and down with lots of hairpin turns and small tunnels that we could fit through but just barely.

We had a nice drive down to Hot Springs. More prairie land, nothing really noteworthy. Hot Springs is another story. The town is long and thin with lots of red sandstone buildings, many of them empty. The bad economy has been felt here. We drove through the town which winds along a creek changing directions dividing the town into several sections. As we broke out of town and headed up the hill, we found our campground “Kemo Sabay Campground. The first impression was kind of shaky. Not the kind of place we usually look for but with a half million bikers in the area, available was the first and pretty much only priority. The office was not open and there seemed to be no one around. There were notes all over the outside of the office which basically told us to pick a site and fill out the envelope.

We walked amongst the sites and found 2 right next to each other that seemed to fill the bill. The odd thing about these sites is that they did not seem to take the placement of connections into account when they built the place. Of the 2 we considered, the first had the sewer connection in the right place but the water and electricity were on the wrong side and not really close. The second had them all on the right side and was slightly bigger but it was neither smooth nor level. No one was around so we pulled into our first choice figuring that if we couldn’t reach, we would move to the other site. Everything fit with the electrical cord just barely fitting after running it under the camper.

Just then, someone came by in a 4 wheeler to talk to us. Then a woman came over and opened the office. We talked to her and confirmed how much we owed (some tax that we have never been charged anywhere else and an extra fee for the nights when Stan will be here. Another camper came in about the same time and he talked to her then she locked up the office and returned whence she had come (wherever that was).

We got all set up. When we opened the big slide, the large piece of crown molding got jammed in it. It had come off the wall and was hanging, held up apparently only by the closed slide. Just something else to fix. I got it out and it is holding up the molding for now. We leveled it and headed to explore the town.

The first place we stopped was the bakery and coffee shop….Closed…middle of the afternoon. We checked out a couple more places and they were also closed. We did find a small log cabin in a parking lot that looked like a coffee shop; it was a Bistro that sold meals. There were a few tables outside it. They advertised Cappuccino so we stopped. They didn’t have an expresso machine but did have one of those cappuccino machines where you press the button and get stuff. We had a nice talk with the woman working there. She told us the economy there was pretty bad and a lot of business had closed. Others closed early to save money.

We kind of gave up and headed over to the movie rental place. Oh yea, did I mention that we get NO TV here at all? We haven’t rented any movies since we were on the road last summer. The company has a store in Dover so we can use our card there. We headed back to camp and immediately watched Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond Movie. Daniel Craig makes a really good Bond but plays the part very intensely and darkly. None of the humor of previous Bonds just shear dark action.

I went for a walk after the movie just to check out the campground. There was a poster that said no fires but there is an obvious communal fire place right in front of our camper. It was full of ashes and was still smoking from a fire the night before so there is still hope. I found the laundry but that took some doing. It was down the hill toward the corral in a garden shed with no doors on it?? There was a small log cabin at the bottom of the hill with a small garden around it and free range chickens wandering through the garden. I watched them for a while then watched the horses and checked out the hills behind the campground. Pretty land. There is a big cell tower up there so that explains how we get such a good signal here.

On my way back to the camper, I noticed the neighbors in their lawn chairs underneath the overhang of their 5th wheel camper (a big one). They are pretty much fulltimers but still have a house. They aren’t reluctant to give up the house but Tom has a shop there that he is reluctant to give up so they hold on to it and go home periodically to visit it.

They spent last winter in Arizona and are slowly wandering toward the west coast. They have a rather large (for campers) dog and a cat they refer to as the rotweiler. The dog is nice but we only know the cat by reputation. While I was visiting with them a friend of theirs drove in. They had met him in Arizona and he is working this summer at Custer State Park. He is in charge of the wagons for the cowboy cookout. We saw the wagons on one of our trips through the park. He keeps them in good working order and schedules the wagons, drivers and musicians depending on the daily reservations. He seems to be a fulltimer who works wherever he goes. His wife is still at home working on her retirement. His work career seems to have left him with Social Security and no other retirement so he keeps on working where he can find work. His wife wants desperately to retire and go on the road with him but she needs to keep working to get the retirement.

John travels with a cat. It was interesting to listen to Tom, John and Margie talk about their pets and travels with the pets. We sat out until 11 then came inside to get something for the supper we neglected to fix with everything that was going on. Toast and peanut butter (the universal fill in meal) came front and center and off to bed we went.

Well, that brings me up to date. We are considering going to church downtown. We found a church that is Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian. From the listing, it seems like they have a band. Whether they play during the service or not, we will find out.

By for now!

c