After a couple days of layin around on my ass more inclined to drink beer than ride anywhere, I started getting restless again. Took a ride down into the Black Hills to Mt Rushmore
It was actually smaller than I'd always pictured it, but still super cool.
As an aside, it is customary where I'm from to take a northbound road when going north, and a westbound road when going west. Should one desire to head East or South, you just go backwards down the West or North road... The Black Hills blew my my mind. Changed my whole perspective of the universe and my place in it. Here's a map.
And here's what it looks like when you're in it.
No sense of direction at all! My ride through the hills consisted of trying like hell to find Rushmore, then trying like hell to get out, with a brief thought of discovering the Crazy Horse memorial. I was winding around God knows where, when all of a sudden, I was on the outskirts of a town. Out of the hills and forest, a quick reference of my sextant told me Sturgis was about 30 miles thataway -where I arrived to find the old Navy vets huddled around something called a "smartphone" (this was 2008) reviewing the doppler radar image of what appeared to be the apocolypse headed in our direction.
All radios in camp were tuned to the weather service forecast for extreme thunderstorm activity with golf ball sized hail. Sweet mother, we were worried. We had a few trees for shelter from the hail, and before long we all had our bikes picketed underneath one or the other. It was early in the evening so many other folks were still out on the road somewhere. The wind picked up ahead of the storm, and we soon had our hands full catching tents as they rolled through like hippy tumbleweeds. We only had a few extra stakes, so we were tying them together and staking down one corner. Mercifully, the weather service had downgraded the hail to "penny sized". I was still pissing down both legs at the thought of that, but I took solace in the fact that it could be worse. I coulda been one of those poor bastards out on the highway 200 yds away stuck in traffic trying to get in to the KISS concert a mile away! The wind was gusting 35 or so, and as the first raindrops began to fall, we wished our bikes well, said a little prayer for the KISS army outside, grabbed some campchairs and hunkered down in Dennis' BIG-ASSED tent with enough beer to last 40 days and 40 nights. All while cursing the short-sightedness that resulted in 4 dudes in a 8' x 8' tent with no wimens and thus no way for us to repopulate the earth after the storm passed -should we survive.