Sturgis

Well the rally is finally underway. You can hear a constant hum of bikes day and night no matter where you are in Sturgis. Friday evening we met up with Val and Ryan, Jen and Rob, and Ryan & Jen's, dad, Larry at Gunner's. We then made the rounds of bars we had not yet been to to take in all the sights. However, the best bar still remains to be Gunners. They added a tent structure on the back of the bar which doubled its building capacity size for bike week. While we were sitting there the Hells Angles started coming in. That was exciting - Jim and I had never seen a Hells Angles member in person. We sure had a fun time with our friends, watching the sights as usual. On Saturday, Jim and I went out to a bar called Full Throttle. It was packed. They had a lot of activities going on to include a marriage (see pic above), and burn-outs as well as wet T-shirt contests and vendors. A pic of a blow out is also above. They get in this cage contraption and two guys hold each side of the cycle so it doesn't tip over and the bikers gives it all he's got on the throttle until the tire blows. It's quite something to see. It makes so much smoke you can't see the biker til the tire blows. They have someone available to put on a new tire on the spot. I couldn't understand why anyone would want to do that to their bike, but Jim says that usually the biker needs a new tire anyway and its a fun thing to do before you give up the old tire. We stayed for several hours just watching the bikers poor in and looking at all the different bikes. Later in the afternoon, we met up with Lucy and Andy, our friends from Fredericksburg. They made it to Rapid City by about 6:00pm and we met up with them to take them up to Mt. Rushmore. They were beat, but we figured since Mt. Rushmore was sort of on the way why not see it now. Well poor Lucy, we got to within a half mile of Rushmore and she was nauseous from going up the curvy mountain and couldn't go any further, nor could she look up at the monument. But Andy did get a good climpse of it as well as a picture. We turned around and headed home and the next thing you know it is getting pitch black and we could see lightening ahead. Not knowing where the storm was we kept heading toward home with the idea we might have to pull over and wait out the storm. Now when I say pull over and wait out the storm, there were very vew places along the way to do that. For the most part, all we saw was black hills and mountains and every now and then you'd see a campground that had a building we might could have hid out in. But we lucked out and we never did run into the storm. Jim and I were worried to death about Lucy. She was totally exhausted, and her hands and legs were getting numb. We offered to have me and Jim finish out the ride and bring the truck back and I would drive Lucy back to the campground in the truck and Jim would ride her cycle. But she was determined to make it to the finish line and she did (see pic above). She needed to sit on the ground for probably an hour before she stopped shaking. They made 1750 miles in 4 days. Unbelievable!