Wild West Tour: Issue 10

Day #9: Devil's Tower, WY. to Valentine, NE.

Today's route was full of sites to see. We left pretty early today, around 7:45 AM. There isn't much in the close area to Devil's Tower so we had to ride for a while to get to some food. We ended up eating breakfast in Sundance WY. This little town was about 30 miles from Devil's Tower and a nice gal at the gas station told us where to eat. It was a little restaurant, of which I have forgotten the name already. The food was really good, I had there flagship breakfast the Devil's Tower. This was a biscuit, sausage and egg all covered with sausage gravy. I thought it was very good.

After eating we knew that we had a big day ahead of us, on the plate for today was, Sturgis, Deadwood, Crazy Horse, and Rushmore. We also had a ride of about 400 miles to get to our end point of Valentine NE.

Sturgis, as you probably know, is home to the World's most popular biker rally. Even though the rally doesn't start for another 2 weeks the town is already getting busy. Sturgis is really a small town with a population of around 8600 people. During the 2 weeks that the Sturgis Bike Week occurs the population jumps to about 160,000 people. The vendors are already set up in some places, which was nice for us to be able to look around. We were able to look at the shirts that were all still very organized, and on the radio, you could here ads for businesses, looking for employees for the rally.

After finding a few shirts there, we left for Deadwood, the place where Bill Hickcock is buried. This town is now very touristy and was bustling with tourists. We noticed that a lot of the upstairs windows had photos of or manikins of women. We took a few photos and moved on through towards Rushmore and Crazy Horse. This area of the Black Hills seems to be pretty tourist focused, the scenery was great none-the-less. We ate lunch at a cafe in Hill City, across the street was some sort of museum that had some trains, they would blow the whistle every little while.

We headed next to Crazy Horse Memorial which was really quite a site to see. The size of this project really was amazing. You don't get to get really close to the memorial unless you want to pay a hefty fee, but this memorial is amazing. There really is a great story behind not only Crazy Horse himself but the designer and originally creator of the mountain side sculpture.

After Crazy Horse we checked out Rushmore, which was also a great feat. Up close you get an idea of the detail that went into the memorial. I think we got some good photos of it. It was starting to get hot and we had a long way to go so we really didn't stay too long there. We did get one bit of information from the booklet. This granite is among the hardest and oldest rock on the planet. It erodes at the rate of 1 inch every ten thousand years. This is really amazing when you think about it.

So as the heat rose we moved on, we came to Wall, WY which is the home to Wall Drug, probably one of the most famous stores in the U.S. It is a huge store that contains, just about anything you can think of. There claim to fame comes from there, $.05 coffee and there FREE Ice Water. Here I got to sit on a Jackalope for a picture. Again, we didn't stay too long, but long enough to eat an ice cream.

After Wall Drug we still had about 140 miles to go and it was getting later. We also knew that we would be headed into Central time so we would actually loose an hour. We finally arrived in Valentine NE at around 9:10PM. We checked in to the camp site, but didn't set up because we hadn't eaten yet. We ate at the PepperMill Restaurant downtown Valentine. Oh, Valentine is really in the middle of nowhere, but the people here are amazingly nice. We found out that the closest WalMart is 2.5 hours away. Did I mention that we are in the middle of nowhere.

Our campsite is nice, and right next to some sort of cattle place, we get to hear the cows moo all night long. Fortunately the wind is blowing the other direction or I am sure we would also smell them :).

Well that was our day, full yes, but again another FUN day. We only have 1 more campground to stay at on the way home, and that will be in Newton, IA.

See you next time!

-matt-