Bike Week is Over

Friday night we all went out to the Buffalo Chip Campground for a Chris Daughtery concert. Daughtery has definitely reached star status. The crowd went nuts for him. After each song the bikers would rev their engines instead of applauding. Girls were screaming, some flashing their boobs; it was wild. Saturday afternoon, Lucy and Andy got packed up and left on their journey home. Then Ed, Jim and I went to Sturgis to have dinner with Val and Ryan. We watched a blues band while we had dinner and then off we went to make the rounds again. Of course we ended up at Gunners. We had a ball and the sad part about leaving was saying goodbye to Val and Ryan. They are great folks and they certainly showed us a great time while we were there. We all agreed they made our Sturgis trip all that much more memorable. Sunday, we all left. Ed was going to Arkansas to visit his daughter and her family and Jim and I are headed to Michigan to tour the upper Michigan peninsula with our camping friends, Mem and Larry and Janice and Ralph. We stayed the first night at a Wal Mart in Minnesota then on to St. Paul, Minnesota to go to the Mall of America. The mall was awesome. It is said to be the largest mall in America. It has an amusement park in the middle of the mall that is four stories tall. In the bottom of the mall is an aquarium. Then they had zillions of stores and restaurants. Of course one of the stores was Coldwater Creek one of my favorites and Chico's another favorite. I stayed as long as my poor feet would let me stand. We stayed overnight in a state park. About 11:20pm we had the most horrific storm I have ever camped in. The lightening and thunder was unbelievable. We kept watching the news to make sure we weren't having a tornado because they had called for tornado warnings about 20 miles north of us earlier in the evening. They also were reporting hale as big as golf balls. We got some hale but it didn't do any damage. The storm went on until about 12:30. Both dogs were shaking and crawled in bed with us. That didn't make me feel any better; I figured if the dogs are this scared, this is a bad storm! The next morning I was doing laundry and found out several people in the park had gone into the restrooms in fear of a tornado landing. It was quite the night. We traveled Route 8 thru most of Wisconsin today and are spending the night in a Wal Mart in Michigan right over the state line from Wisconsin. The route we went today was really neat. We went through all these little towns with populations of less then a 1000 people. One town boasted 95 people. Rt 8 was the Main Street through these towns and it was really neat to pass thru them. We stopped for lunch in one of the towns. I also saw some wild life on this road, 2 porcupines and a black bear. It was really neat. The bear was coming down a bank and I think he was going to cross the road and looked up and saw our big bus coming and he wheeled around and went back up the bank and into the woods. I wasn't able to attach any pictures this update because I'm using my cell phone to get connected and I guess the pictures are just too big they wouldn't download. Well we should meet up with our camping buddies tomorrow and start our next vacation in Michigan. Until then.........