Wednesday 29 May 2013

175 Wall, return to the Badlands and Rapid City

Tuesday 28th May  2013     Miles Today  78  Total 6071

We apologize that we failed to mention that yesterday was Memorial Day in America, which sort of relates to our Armistice day.  The American flag was shown every where. This is a National Holiday over here.

This morning we awoke to fabulous sunshine coming through the blinds.  Poor Ray had woken at 4am and was unable to get back to sleep.  Worrying about sorting out a new screen probably didn't help.


This cabin was like a small palace inside. Not cheap but very pleasant.


We had breakfast and Ray was able to secure the type of windscreen he wanted to be delivered by Fed Ex to Rapid City, at their main office tomorrow.  We packed up and went into Wall, which is a famous little town with a grocery store that is known throughout America for being a watering hole for all travelers. There is a main street that still looks like something out of the wild west, except for all the modern S UV's and cars, but it was great fun.

We pulled up outside 'Wall Drug Store' and they had hitching posts. I decided it would be rude not to tie our trusty steed to it. It got a lot of strange looks.


If I find Karen chatting up any more cowboys, I'm gonna put her over my knee for a whuppin.


This really is an old West town. I stupidly did not expect it to be like this. I thought this kind of thing was further South.


We posted another package back to Britain and had a wander around.  As we were returning to our bike, we met another group of riders who were checking out Wallace.  It turned out that one of the guys, Darren, recognized the bike and us from a motor cycle blog that  Ray writes on, scarey huh?


Me, George, Darren, Oops (cant remember your name - sorry) and Karl, another rider who joined us later

Whilst chatting to them, they said that they had come up on a dirt road near the park gates to the Badlands and seen Bison/Buffalo, so we made the decision to return back to the park and see if we could see them.




Once in the park we saw these little guys, they are so cute, I have a big collection of pictures of these guys too, but here are just a couple. They are Prairie Dogs and have their own little city on the plains.




This gorgeous bird was hiding in the tall grass. 


Western meadowlark I think.

Then came the big guys. The group photo shows some of them, but they were a way off on the plains, but this next big guy was right by the side of the road and watched us for a while until the urge to scratch became to much for him and he lost interest, but he was massive and oozing power.



We left the park by this off road track which was about 10 miles long.  We arrived in Rapid City, got settled and are here for the next two nights.  Tomorrow we are going to travel around the Black Hills of Dakota and see Mount Rushmore, but most importantly, hopefully the new screen will arrive at the Fed Ex offices.




A bit late but I managed to get these out of the little GoPro waterproof camera. They are stills from a video.

This is the pheasant, God rest the stupid birds soul that a split second later, destroyed our screen.

Not a good picture but you can see the hail and street flooding.


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