All Harley All The Time

Tuesday was a pretty big shift in gears (pun intended) as we dropped the sightseeing for a day and, instead, dropped hard-earned American currency on an all American company - Harley Davidson.

We again traced South through Deadwood on Route 385 South but cut over through another beautiful and scenic area to Rapid City, SD, where we found ourselves among - guess how many - a jillion people at the Convention Center which was totally occupied by the official Harley Davidson people (while the unofficial remora-type vendors crowded the nearby parking lot).

It was here that we visited the HOG "booth" to pick up our official "2008 Sturgis Harley Owner Group" pins to adorn our leather jackets. Cheryl found a few gifts for friends, and we went outside to watch some stunt bikers - crazy kids on Ninja-style Harley-offshoot Buell motorcycles. And, I availed myself of the free bike wash.

Lot of good that did, though, because the next stop was Black Hills Harley Davidson where the parking lot was gravel, dust, and more dust. Black Hills HD is a monstrous-sized dealer with, again, a ton of other vendors out in the parking lot. The money dropping got more serious here as we picked up new butt pads for the ride back home, t-shirts, etc.

After this, we met up with Bill and Frank at Elk Creek Steakhouse for dinner, and then rode back to Rapid City (about 15 miles away) for some libations and billiards at a local Irish bar. In glancing out the window, I saw the blackness of a big storm coming from the west - the direction to return back to Deadwood.

It was pretty reassuring, though, that the waitress told us that the really BIG hail seldom fell downtown despite what the emergency broadcast system was saying on television. In fact, it DID rain like cats and dogs but, thankfully, no hail. We simply waited it out and played pool as a group. Jeff, Cheryl, and I (with Cheryl again on the back of my bike, left about 10:30, donning our rainsuits for the ride home (30 miles to Sturgis and 15 to Deadwood), but encountered no more rain and relatively dry roads. The latter I was particularly grateful for because the Sturgis-to-Deadwood trek is nothing but constant curves where at least this rider's confidence goes down a bit - especially after that tipover episode from the night before.

Wednesday we're going to Hulett, Wyoming to see, at the very least, the famous Devil's Tower which was made famious by Richard Dreyfuss' nutcase performance in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Guess you can see it from many, many miles away, so photos to come from Cheryl on the back.

(PS - thanks for all the nice comments from some of you reading the blog . . . . )