Day 10: Sturgis

Finally, we arrived at the Sturgis Biker Rally

Thursday, August 12

We both slept better on the second night of camping, but Allen couldn't have been more relieved to be done with the camping portion of our trip.  The outdoors isn't really his scene, and being away from AC, a cell phone signal and wi-fi for so long made it tougher, but I appreciate him being a trooper about it the past couple days.  Just like I'm glad that I went camping with Brad in West Virginia back in June to pick up a bunch of pointers, I'm glad I went camping now with Allen to work out the kinks before I do it solo for most of next week.

Dinosaur Park

We didn't even bother trying to make breakfast at the campsite in the morning.  Instead we went to a Perkins in Rapid City, where I stuffed my face with a giant fruity breakfast platter and the waitstaff thought my name was "Urk."  We had plenty of time to kill after the meal, so we went to Dinosaur Park, which was supposedly listed on USA Today's Greatest Roadstops list.  It was free and featured some giant fake dinosaurs and some views from above Rapid City, but definitely cheesier and more disappointing than we would have guessed.

In essence we had been experiencing the Sturgis Bike Rally all week long just because of how the bikers had made up the overwhelming majority of pedestrian and street traffic everywhere we went in South Dakota the past few days.  Even so, we couldn't pass up the chance to go to the heart of the rally, and make a stop in the town of Sturgis itself.  It turned out to be mostly a gigantic street festival, but its really hard to describe just how bizarre the scene was.  As Allen and I kept discussing, during the day it was like being in a parallel universe.  Instead of shorts and a polo shirt, nearly every person we saw was wearing jeans, boots, leather jacket with skull prints, a bandanna and ridiculous facial hair.  Even with my 10 day beard growing in, Allen and I were still the two least hairy people at the event.  Driving a Civic, one of the more common cars in the country, made me feel like a complete outsider.  There was a constant deafening roar coming from the streets.  It was definitely bizarre, but really interesting to walk around for awhile.

After we had our fill of that scene, we moved over to the neighboring historic city of Deadwood and spent  some time at the Silverado Casino.  There were Playmates signing autographs behind our table which provided quite the distraction, but Allen made a killing in blackjack.  Me, not so much.  We went to the Miner's Den, a steakhouse inside another nearby casino, for dinner and I ate a taco salad.

At least my facial hair let me fit in slightly more in Sturgis

After dinner we drove back to Sturgis for the Rock and Rev concert.  We had seen billboards during the week that 3 Doors Down, Daughtery and Hinder would be playing tonight and decided to check it out.  Each night of the week had different bands performing in what ended up being a great lineup for the week as a whole (bands on other nights included Godsmack, STP, Stone Sour, Alice in Chains, 3 Days Grace, Cage the Elephant, and Guns and Roses).  The show we went to was a good one, and included some more bizarre behavior (female bartenders sitting on top of patron's heads as they drink beers, full body painting booths, pole dancers, and plenty of interesting people watching).

The show didn't let out until after 1 am, and we had about an hour drive to get to our hotel in Sundance, Wyoming... our tenth state passed through this trip.  We had to wake up the woman at the Roadway Inn to let us in, and it took awhile for her to figure out the reservations, but eventually we were able to get to our room and went to bed sometime before 3 am.

Miles traveled today: 163
Miles traveled total: 2,487
States traveled: 10