We didn’t really have anything for breakfast, so we postponed that for the time being, and broke down the tent, gathered our gear, and packed up the bike. We rode up Hwy 212, 45 miles to Laural, MT, the intersection with Interstate-90. We fueled up the bike, and bought some soda and snacky bits for breakfast.
And one last one before we started off…
Fueled up, we rode east, eating up the miles on I-90, stopping only briefly for something to drink on some Native American reservation whose name I don’t recall. As we were getting within a close distance of South Dakota, the skies began to get cloudy and grey, and as we stopped in Spearfish, SD for a few minutes we began to feel scattered raindrops. On my ride a couple summers ago, on this same route, it started to rain in nearly the same spot, at about the same time of day, and it turned into a thunderstorm. We had planned to make it Badlands NP, east of Rapid City, and we were hopeful that the rain wouldn’t turn all that much worse. We donned our rain gear, and continued on, the rain was fairly light and the temperature wasn’t too cold, so we weren’t uncomfortable.
I pulled over around Rapid City to make sure Stacey was ok with how things were going, or if she wanted us to stop for the day. She said she was fine if I wanted to continue on, and to me the rain didn’t seem that bad, though we had spotted some lightning off to the sides, so I was game. The whole time we were riding, I had been referencing the GPS, to see what was ahead, where the next town would be, etc. After fifteen minutes of riding, it started raining harder, which by itself wasn’t that bad, but the wind had started up. I started riding slower, which I’m not quite sure was a good or bad idea, but we were really getting blown around. On top of that, semi-tractor/trailer combinations were going faster than we were, and were passing us, taking away almost all our visibility for sometimes close to a minute. I started to have to continually monitor the mirrors to see when they were coming up behind us, then scanning the road ahead for curves, etc, before they passed so I could stay on the road with being able to see.
After putting up with this constant hard side wind for nearly 45 minutes, I had had enough, my nerves were shot and it didn’t look like it was going to get any better for a while. I pulled off at the Wasco, SD exit. There was one hotel there, and one non-manned gas station. We got a room at this hotel which ended up being in a house across the street that had been converted into a couple hotel rooms. The storm cleared a couple hours later.
Just look at these high quality accomidations:
Yes, that is a puppy mural above the bed!
We were both extremely excited about the room:
We spent the evening cooking up some packets of noodles and cheese over my little camp stove on the bathroom sink, drying our gear out, and watching a documentary on Edward R. Murrow, the World War II journalist, on one of the 3 channels we got on the tv.
Mileage for the day around 475 miles.
