Today was a three-espresso-stop day. We rode down into Rapid City this morning for the first double shots. Btw, I don’t drink espresso, just normal coffee and today the motel coffee was good enough.
Afterword, we rode up to Mt. Rushmore, about 30 miles. My how things change in four years! I was here four years ago and the cost to park was $5 for car or motorcycle. Today it is $11. But wait, that’s for an annual pass! Right! How many people come back at all within a year? Practically no one!
We were too cheap to pay the price! Once you are inside the memorial you walk down the “avenue” and the presidents are right there in front of you. OK, that is impressive, but you take a few photos then what? There are a couple of touristy places there happy to part you from even more money but unless you plan to spend several hours there hiking around that’s pretty much it. So we rode down to the view point and took pictures:
It occurred to me as we were riding up the wonderful road to Mt. Rushmore that since we left the Blue Ridge Parkway our roads have been pretty straight, especially through Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota. It was great to be on curvy roads again!
We continued on down toward Crazy Horse and the town of Custer. We came around the bend and there was a parking area to pull off and view a profile of George W. (By the way, can you name all four presidents memorialized on Mt. Rushmore without Googling them? Answer later.)
In the “Profile” viewing area a lot of people were taking photos as was to be expected. But they were not taking photos of George’s profile. They were taking photos of:
These goats were totally unconcerned with all of the people around. They were just interested in eating. There were another mother and child on the other side of the road.
We rode on down to the town of Custer, passing up Crazy Horse because Don wasn’t feeling well. He and Trisha have gluten allergies but last night we ate at a Mexican restaurant and he couldn’t pass up the chips and salsa. Today he was paying for it. So he needed a second espresso. We found this funky little espresso shop, the only one in town it turns out.
Don instantly felt better. Bet you didn’t know espresso had such healing powers!
We continued our ride through the Black Hills of South Dakota. As we were coming out of the hills, the vistas opened up and we could see all the way into Wyoming. Wyoming, like Montana, is Big Sky country. I have no idea why but the sky is huge! The vistas are huge. And the wide open spaces are even wider than in South Dakota and Iowa.
Our destination on this leg was the small town of Lust….no….that’s not right. LUSK, the town of Lusk, Wyoming. Lusk has a Carnegie Library. I didn’t know this but Andrew Carnegie donated millions to build free libraries around the world, mostly in the US. Most of the libraries were unique, built in a variety of architectural styles. The Lusk library was built in 1919 and is still a free public library.
We continued our ride and Wyoming flattened out into vast expanses of grasslands as far as the eye could see. The only trees to be seen were the few planted around homesteads plus a few pockets planted here and there. Otherwise, just grass!
In the town of Casper we stopped for our third double-shot espressos. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about when I say double espressos, here’s a photo of Don and Trisha’s espresso cups. They hold just two shots of very strong coffee, straight out of the machine, no water added, no milk, no lattes or other foo-foo drink. Just pure strong coffee in these little tiny cups. The cups are actually smaller than thy look in the photo.
Our ride continued across the straight roads on the flat plains at about 5,300’ elevation until we came to a large lake, Boysen Reservoir. There we started down the Wind River Canyon. What a beautiful rock wall canyon and road to ride! All was great until 11 miles from our motel – road construction! We got held up for half an hour or more. Then it was 5+ miles through just-laid chip-seal. Made it OK, though.
In several of the photos you will notice the sky is a whitish-gray, not blue. That's smoke from wildfires in Oregon and Washington. There is a large fire directly on my route home! The alternate routes aren't near as nice of rides. We'll see what develops between now and Saturday/Sunday.
The presidents carved on Mt. Rushmore are: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt
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