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Sturgis and
the Dakota Badlands 2008
We had always wanted to see
Mt. Rushmore, so this year we vacationed in South Dakota's Black
Hills. It was the best vacation we've ever had.
Much to my surprise, our
vacation overlapped the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally by a few days, so we took
in some of that event, too. The rally was interesting, but the real
fun was in exploring the Black Hills and surrounding areas. This is
one of the United States' best kept secrets....it is an absolutely
stunning area. The scenery, the roads, the game, the weather, and
the things to see and do were just wonderful.
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As soon as we landed, we drove
out to Mt. Rushmore. It's about 40 minutes from the airport.
This is the view of Mt. Rushmore and the
state flags from the Grand View Terrace area. The columns supporting
the flags show when each state was admitted to the Union. |
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A better Mt. Rushmore
shot. The presidents are Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and
Lincoln. |
| Here's another shot giving a
better view of Teddy Roosevelt. There's a path that goes from the
Grand Terrace area to the base of the statues. |
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| Vixie's
Victorian Villa Bed and Breakfast |
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This is the B&B (Vixie's
Victorian Villa) where we stayed.
This B&B has a great location...it's
only a few miles out of town, but it is in the Black Hills.
We made our flight reservations without
realizing that our stay overlapped the Sturgis rally, and when I found
that out, I was afraid we would not be able to find a hotel. We were
very lucky to get into the Victorian
Villa B&B, one of the nicest places we've ever stayed. |
| Here's an interior shot of our
room. It was a great place to stay. Vixie's breakfasts
were wonderful. |
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See what I mean?
We stayed for 8 days, and we never had the
same thing for breakfast twice.
Vixie is an incredible chef. |
| We stopped in Deadwood our first
night there. There were lots of motorcycles from the Sturgis
Rally. Deadwood is not too far from Sturgis. |
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Another shot of Deadwood at
night.
Deadwood is an old mining town nestled
between two mountain ridges. It was a famous place in the old days
(Wild Bill Hickok was shot to death in a card game in
Deadwood).
There are great photo ops in Deadwood, but
not much else. There were a few restaurants in town that looked like
they might have been interesting, but all had changed their menu during
the rally so more-easily-prepared (i.e., fried) foods to get people in and
out.
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Devil's Tower in Wyoming. There were many motorcycles on the
way, and numerous roadside stands capitalizing on the Sturgis Rally.
This was a pretty common scene on the way out there. I think that
most of the people who go to the rally use it as a staging point to
explore the area. |
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One of Harley's CVO bikes (CVO
is their "Custom Vehicle Operations" moniker). This is a
Springer. It costs about $35K. |
| This couple asked me to take
their photo with their camera, and I did.
I grabbed another one with my
D200.
That's Devil's Tower in the background. |
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I grabbed this shot while we
were waiting to enter the park. |
| Devil's Tower.
There's a path that goes completely around
the Tower.
This was a very impressive place. |
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| Another shot of Devil's Tower.
Devil's Tower was one of many high points
on this trip. It is definitely a "must see" item if
you are ever in the area. |
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This was the 68th Annual Sturgis
Rally. It's one of the three big Harley rallies in the US (the
other two are Laughlin and Daytona).
Attendance at Sturgis this year was down
sharply from previous years, no doubt due to the recession.
We only spent one afternoon in
Sturgis. Tattoos, v-twins, and tinnitus...there's only so much of it
I could take. These Harley rallies are pretty much all the
same. Watching a bunch of guys my age pretending to be Marlon Brando
50 years ago gets old fast. Funny thing about that, too: Marlon
didn't ride a Harley in that movie...he rode a Triumph!
I would not go to Sturgis just to go to the
rally, but I would go for the riding and the scenery in the Black Hills. |
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The Sturgis event is dominated
by Harleys, but other marques also appeared. The Japanese
V-twin cruisers were popular and I saw more of them than I expected
to.
The guy in the foreground in this photo is
on a Honda Valkyrie, a bike based on the Honda Gold Wing.
Honda only made these for a few years. |
| Almost no one wore safety
gear. South Dakota does not have a helmet law. I've heard all
of the brainless slogans (e.g., "let those who ride decide") but
I think people who ride like this are basically ignorant.
We saw a few accidents while we were on
this trip, with predictable outcomes for people dressed this way. |
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An R1200ST BMW in Sturgis. |
| One of the bands in
Sturgis. It was loud. |
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The next day we wanted to visit
the Badlands.
Just before entering the Badlands, there's
a little town called Wall.
The Hustead family built a drugstore there
that has become a tourist attraction in its own right. Although it's
called Wall Drug, it is named for the town, and it is not affiliated with
Walgreens or Wal-Mart.
Here's Sue in the Wall Drugstore |
| The Wall Drugstore takes up an
entire large city block, with many things to do and see. They
had quite of few of these types of mannequins scattered around. |
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Sue posing with one of the
mannequins. |
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Because we were in the tail end
of the Sturgis Rally, there were bikes everywhere. Not all were
Harleys...this is a pretty clean 1980's era Honda 750, with an old Vetter
fairing. |
| More motorcycles parked in Wall. |
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| This was a pretty funny T-shirt. |
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Another older Honda. |
| This kid's ride was too colorful
to pass up... |
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We had heard about the Badlands
from our neighbors, so we knew we had to see this area.
The Badlands are about 80 miles east of
Rapid City. |
| The colors and geology are
impressive. |
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This is the car we rented (a
Ford Edge). It was nice, and it got surprisingly good gas mileage. |
| Sue and I in the Badlands.
I guess you can tell...I'm not a Harley guy
anymore. |
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A Honda Valkyrie and a Honda
Shadow in the Badlands. |
| Another shot of the Badlands. |
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Mt. Rushmore has an evening show
that is impressive. A park ranger talks about the history of
the monument and each president, and then they show a movie in an outdoor
amphitheatre.
At the end, they ask all of the veterans to
come up on stage to be recognized, and that was pretty cool, too.
After that, they had us (the vets) retire
the flag. |
| American veterans retiring Old
Glory at Mt. Rushmore. |
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When I got up the next morning,
I saw these wild turkeys strutting by in front of our suite. |
| One of the attractions in the
Black Hills is a theme park called Reptile Gardens. It's essentially
a zoo featuring (as you might guess) reptiles, but they also have an
interesting bird exhibit. It's a bit kitschy, but as kid who's
always been fascinated by snakes, I persuaded my wife to go.
It was a lot of fun.
Here's an American Bald Eagle at the
Reptile Gardens. |
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This fellow is 126 years old. |
| Sue makes a friend. |
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American alligators. |
| A crocodile. The
crocodiles have pointed noses. The alligator has a blunter nose. |
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A chameleon. |
| A trained African vulture.
This guy flew and walked wherever the trainers wanted him to.
They have kind of a goofy loafing walk...it was fun to watch. |
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A James viper. These
are very deadly. |
| An American
copperhead. I caught one of these when I was a kid in our
backyard without realizing what it was. This guy has a sinister
smile. |
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A parrot at the Reptile gardens. |
| On our way down to Custer State
Park, I saw several cars parked by the side of the road. They
had stopped because a small group of Bighorn Sheep were out. |
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I got several shots of the
sheep, and they let me get fairly close, which was really
cool. To my surprise, they make a lot of noise communicating
with each other, and their language sounds unlike noises I have heard
other animals make. It's a blend of braying, grunting, and huffing. |
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An antelope in Custer State
Park.
We saw hundreds of antelope. |
| Stopped on the road through
Custer State Park, checking out the buffalo. |
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A shot of one of the roads
through Custer State Park. |
| More antelope. |
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There were numerous wild burros
in Custer State Park. They are used to being fed (if you stop, they
will actually walk up and stick their face into your car).
This guy was posing with two of the
burros...he laughed when his friend took the photo and said "the
three jackasses..." |
| A couple of the burros
scratching each other. |
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The Needles Highway in the
southern Black Hills is one of the world's great roadways, with scenic
pine forests, lots of game, towering granite spires, great vista points,
and even a granite needle (more on this below). We spoke to
people in the area who said it was something we had to see, so we did.
During our ride on the Needles highway, I
saw a couple of guys stopped on Harleys by the side of the road, and I
asked them to take a photo of Sue and I.
I pulled my usual stunt and asked one of
the guys if his motorcycle was a Suzuki. "No," he
explained, "it's a Harley." I picked a bad time to ask
that question, though. His Harley Sportster had just broken down
(that's why they were stopped). His friend had to ride into the next
town to get a truck to tow the bike in. What a bummer.
The guy told me he was through with Harleys - his next bike would be
anything but. |
| The eye of the
needle.
Check out the climber. |
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There were a couple of these
little one-lane tunnels through the mountains along the Needles
Highway.
I had never seen roads like this in the
U.S. |
| The Crazy Horse monument is
under construction. It is being curved out of a granite mountain in
the Black Hills, much like Mr. Rushmore, except it is about six times as
large. |
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This is what the monument will
look like when it is finished.
Crazy Horse was the Indian chief who led
the Indians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. |
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Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who
started work on the Crazy Horse monument. |
| We spent one morning visiting
the National Park that had a Minuteman missile display. It's
out near the Badlands.
This was a pretty cool thing to do.
The tour starts at the launch facility, with a briefing in this
large, elliptical, underground command center. The guide told us
that the command center would not survive a direct hit, but it
"might" survive a hit in the general area.
The launch center had a pretty cool
logo. It was styled to look like a Domino's pizza box, and the
slogan was "Delivery anywhere in the world in 30 minutes, or the next
one is free..."
We then went out to a silo, and another
Park Ranger gave us a briefing on the missile launch site. |
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A Minuteman missile in its
silo. Each missile contained a 1.2 megaton
warhead. The tour guide explained that all of the munitions
dropped in World War II together amounted to about 2.0
megatons. In other words, each of these missiles packed a
wallop equal to about 60% of all of World War II.
Each site had 10 missiles. At
the height of the cold war, there were 150 missiles in South Dakota alone. |
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Later that day in downtown Rapid
City, I saw another fellow with a Nikon camera shooting a photo of George
Bush.
I asked him to take a photo of Sue and me
using my camera, and he did. |
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There are several caves in the
Black Hills. We picked Wind Cave for a visit. |
| A shot deep in the cave. |
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Sue in the Wind Cave. |
| Another Ride
Through Custer State Park |
| After visiting Wind Cave, we
drove through Custer State Park again. Here's a buffalo outside our
car. |
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We were on a dirt road, and we
drove right through a buffalo herd. |
| Another antelope herd. |
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A dirt road leading to the
Centennial Trail in Custer State Park. |
| A curious
antelope. This guy let me get to within about 20 feet. |
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Another shot of the buffalo. |
| Buffalo crossing the road in
front of us. |
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This was the biggest guy in the
herd.
It was pretty cool being in amongst the
buffalo. These guys make a lot of noise. We could
hear them grunting and snorting. |
| A biker in Custer State Park. |
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We saw another herd further
north. I grabbed this shot as they were crossing the street in front
of me. |
| Iron Mountain Road is another
one of those roads that is just incredible. It is in the Mt.
Rushmore area, and it has a couple of spots with dramatic views of Mt.
Rushmore.
I really like this shot. There
are a couple of places where Iron Mountain Road offers such views of Mt.
Rushmore. This one is through another one-lane tunnel. |
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| Rapid City's
Presidential Sculptures |
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I saw this Harley parked in
downtown Rapid City. The beadwork picks up on the Indian theme
prevalent throughout the area.
There are several good restaurants in Rapid
City. We especially liked Botticelli's for dinner or lunch
(outstanding Italian food), and as I said earlier, the breakfasts at
Vixie's Victorian Villa B&B were absolutely outstanding. |
| Downtown Rapid City has
life-sized bronze U.S. president statues. They have 31 of the 43
presidents. Here's Sue with one of them. |
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President Taft, poised to throw
out a baseball. He is the first president to do so. |
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Sue with my favorite president,
Teddy Roosevelt. |
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Harry Truman, holding the
newspaper announcing his defeat. |
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Sue and Tricky Dick. |
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The Gipper...another one of my
all time favorites, and the greatest president during my lifetime. |
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This Indian Chief was in the
lobby of the Hotel Alex Johnson in downtown Rapid City. |
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The obligatory mail box
photo. This was in Hisega, which was just across the road from
Vixie's Victorian Villa B&B. |
| A deer on the lawn at Vixie's. |
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| South Dakota
School of Mining and Technology |
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On our last day in South Dakota,
we realized we had pretty much hit every highlight in the Black Hills
region and beyond. We opted to visit the Geology Museum at the South
Dakota School of Mining and Technology, and we were pleasantly
surprised. The museum is definitely worth a visit. |
| The main hall in the Geology
Museum. |
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A prehistoric skull in the
Geology Museum. |
| So, there you have it. We
spent 8 days in the Black Hills and it was wonderful. There is
a lot to see and do in the area, and you can see most of it in a
week. My advice if you are going to do Sturgis is this: Try to
overlap the rally by 2 or 3 days, and leave a 3 or 4 other days to explore
the Black Hills without the heavy motorcycle traffic (it was a lot more
fun without having to sit in traffic with the "loud pipes save
lives" crowd). We really enjoyed our time in the Black
Hills, in Rapid City, and at Vixie's Victorian Villa B&B.
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