Day 4:

We had a leisurely morning, cleaning the bikes at the Arrowhead, wandering around town for breakfast and cheap bike-cleaning toothbrushes. We found a special on brushes with girls’ names on them. After we were done, little Cindy’s toothbrushes looked like they were used in the bilge of a prison ship. We finally got our acts together, and Mark was pretty relaxed about our dawdling. We hit the road on our clean machines around 11:00am (hey, it’s Mountain Time) and slabbed to Spearfish, where we exited the interstate and took 14a to Cheyenne Crossing. The road is also called the Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway, and it is certainly scenic and twisty, but the 35-mph speed limit tended to thwart our enjoyment, at least officially. We followed 14a to the towns of Lead, Pluma and finally Deadwood, made newly famous by the hyper-realistic HBO show of the same name. We got on 385 south to Hill City, the location of the KOA and the MGNOC National. We arrived relatively early in the day, and picked out a campsite in the trees, and found a nice tight hay bale for a coffee table. The weather was intermittent showers interspersed with impossibly blue sky and sunshine, and the fleeces were necessary after the sun went down. The rally proper was in the back of the KOA campground, the front being RV World and a camp store. Beautiful Guzzis were parked among the trees, and we saw a lot of old friends: Gordon and Chris from Wisconsin, Mark E. from California, Wayne and Vickie from NC, and a bunch more. As much as I liked the rally, though, after a week on the road it felt like a stop on the way that took a little longer than most. The hills and trees blocked the horizon in most directions, and I was already missing the wide open terrain and distant horizons of Wyoming and Colorado.

Day 5: 

We took a nice day ride on Saturday without Kim, who was coming down with a cold or the plague, down 244 past Mt. Rushmore, stopping at the parking/viewing area where we experienced what must be the most vile pit toilets on earth. Barbara was especially unappreciative of the public facilities. At Keystone, we took 16a (Iron Mountain Road) to the junction with 36 and entered Custer State Park, where an 1,800-pound bison galloped along the shoulder as we motored by. Thankfully, the drivers of the cars in front of us didn’t stop to rubberneck at the big, furry, funny-shaped cows, so we weren’t trapped by traffic as the huge animals ran by. We stayed on 16a past the park headquarters to the foot of Needles Highway, and I wondered who would run out of gas first before we made it back to 386 and civilization. Needles Highway (route 87) was a, errr, gas, past some freakish geological formations called, duh, The Needles. There were more bikes than cars, and in some places the rocks were hard against the edges of the road, so traffic seemed to squeeze through between the tall spiky stones.

We made it back, gassed up, and headed back to the rally site in time for the roasted pig. The catered BBQ was served under big tents, and was fantastic. The sun dropped low in the sky and lit the hills and pine trees with that perfect light that lasts 20 minutes, and then dusk set in and we headed for the tents to layer on the clothes. People stayed close the fire, which pretty much sucked until Mark and I put the cave-man touch on it. There was some weird group dynamic going on I never really fathomed, where the group wanted the wood added to the fire in regular increments seemingly designed to have a not-so-warm fire. Screw that! The evening passed quickly and we crawled in our tents soon enough to prepare for more travels. I was secretly happy as I drifted off in my half of the double-mummy bag.

Day 6: We saddled up, ate a breakfast of coffee, fresh fruit (what a revelation for rally food!) and juice, and said our goodbyes to Wayne and Greg Field, and headed out in search of Nemo Road and its good friend, Vanocker Canyon Road. Local knowledge can be indispensable when scoping out great roads in strange lands. (Just so the local’s frame of reference is similar to yours. We would find out later that one UPS driver’s good road is another motorcyclist’s gritty nightmare.) After a twirl or two around the northern suburbs of Rapid City looking for 234 West, which became Nemo Road, we boomed out of the northern end of town into the countryside. Both Nemo and Vanocker Canton Roads ran through some spectacular river valleys, and my long atrophied fly-fishing muscles ached in my sport-touring slouch. There were ranches every 25 miles or more, a couple for sale. Step One: win lottery...

We ended up in Sturgis, at a convenience store next to a truck stop. No chaps-and-thong-clad, silicone-enhanced biker-chicks-gone-wild. There was dust, and a couple of nice little kids on spider bikes. It was June, and the Disney-dentist-biker corporate-fueled mayhem was months away. We beat it out of there on I-90 just for seven miles to Whitewood, where we de-slabbed onto Route 34 and headed northwest. The roads were free, and the scenery spectacular and changing and we enjoyed the hell out of them all, passing maybe one car between Rapid City and the time we arrived at Belle Fourche, the last taste of South Dakota before we re-entered Wyoming. At Alladin we got on Route 24, which would eventually take us past Devil’s Tower. At Hulett we had a nice lunch in a mom and pop café and found some gas at a non-attended farm store. Great idea and a welcome sight, but something that would never work back home, where some local thugs would blow up the dispensers to see if they contained any cash.

The terrain flattened back out, and eventually we could see Devil’s Tower on the horizon. The “Close Encounters” tones ran in my ears and I thought of crazy Richard Dreyfuss making mud mountains, in the house. There is a KOA at Devil’s Tower, and they wanted some ridiculous fee per vehicle just to get in the grounds, so we took photos from the parking lot and hit the souvenir store. All the t-shirts sucked, so Kim bought a few wooden pencils. I had borrowed some Givi bags larger than the pair of tiny floss-box E21s I own, and my friend and neighbor Steve who lent them to me allowed me one new sticker before the end of the trip. I picked a particularly ugly Sturgis biker themed sticker and slapped it on the left saddle bag, next to his Yankee Beemer Sled Dog sticker. We headed out on 24 to where it connects with 14, and took 14 back southwest to Moorcroft. We explored out route 16 through Upton and Osage to Newcastle, but unlike the fine beer of the same name, there wasn’t much interesting to speak of (road- or town-wise), so we turned north onto route 85 and then onto 585 back towards Sundance. We had called ahead, and our most excellent innkeeper at the Arrowhead was away when we arrived, but had left our room keys hanging in the doors. We found out later some of his friends from Iowa had shown up unexpectedly and he and his wife had hit the bar.

It was a glorious warm sunny afternoon, and the light was at that perfect photogenic angle that nighttime soaps seem to have 24 hours a day as we settled into the lawn furniture, beers in hand. I think Mark actually relaxed. Our host arrived and we enjoyed the late sunshine, and we all noticed a beautiful red Chevy convertible slowly drive by, twice. We were discussing the fine Chevy when he came by a third time and pulled into the Arrowhead lot. The owner, John from Minnesota, got out and checked into the motel, and then came out and joined our conversation. Seems he had been traveling to Sundance and staying at this very motel since he bought the car when it was a year old. It was a 1958 Impala, originally purchased by a Minneapolis doctor, who sold it a year later because it was too “flashy” for house calls. The doctor traded it in on a 1959 Corvair, and John bought the Impala. He had replaced the original automatic transmission with a truck three-speed, and it had been repainted, but otherwise was an original 1958 car. John was in his seventies and still took the old Chevy on long trips, staying mostly off the interstates.

We watched the sun set lower and cleaned up for dinner, again at the excellent ARO just across the street. At dinner we met Bill, an octogenarian motorcyclist who noticed our Guzzi shirts and struck up a conversation. Bill was a local World War II veteran who still rode an ST1100, but was thinking of trying something smaller, and had been eyeing a Breva 750 as his next ride. We had a nice chat and he checked out the Guzzis in the Arrowhead lot. After a stroll around town we had a few beers and crashed for the night.