July 18 Day 18

Ahhh, a night in an air conditioned hotel room, how refreshing. Now it's back to the great outdoors and 90-100 degree riding!!

We packed up this morning with plans to head to Custer South Dakota. It will be what I like to call a "relocation day", just getting from one area of the country to another with no expectations of seeing anything very exciting. So don't complain if the pictures are boring :)

For starters, here is a great shot of the local Sheridan Wyoming water tower :)

We noticed these strange rock groupings along the roadway... Lennie thought they looked like giant piles of poo droppings ??

Not much out in these here parts of the country, although this fellow does seem to have a little bit of everything! Lennie was only able to capture a small portion of his property... to the left of the photo, he had about 15 single and double wide mobile home trailers. Most of the trailers were torn open like sardine cans, and looked like they were recovered from the aftermath of a tornado. Tough to make out where the folks actually live in all of that mess.

The landscape was pretty boring, mostly flat grazing land, with the exception of small areas of slightly hilly terrain.

We ran into this guy at the gas pumps. He is towing a hydroplane (tunnel hull) racing boat on a trailer. These boats are very small and lightweight, but they are very wide. In order to get around having to get wide load towing permits (which often only let you tow on certain roads, and only during daylight), these guys use what are called tilt trailers. The boat gets loaded onto the trailer, then the trailer tilts upward to hold the boat at a 45 degree angle, wide load issue solved!! Pretty ingenious.

The temperature reached 100 degrees today. We have these little wings mounted under the mirrors on the bike that can be rotated (remember "wing" windows on older cars). If riding in cold weather, they can be rotated closed to keep the cold air off of my hands and upper body. If riding in hot weather, they can be rotated to an open position to catch and channel air to help keep you cool. They work well at redirecting the air, but when that air is 100 degrees, it doesn't have much effect :)

At these temperatures, it also feels like your brain is cooking inside the helmet. It helps if we stop more frequently and get something cold to drink along the way.

Another of those "road to nowhere" shots. It still amazes me at how undeveloped many of the areas are out west! Pretty country, but it gets boring after a few hours. The speed limits on these back roads are 75, so you do make reasonable time.

Someone out there who is responsible for naming these things sure must know my wife !!

As we approached Custer SD, we noticed this strange cloud formation to our north. It looked like a giant mushroom. Told you we had no expectations of exciting sights today.

We make it into Custer, and even beat the afternoon thunder storms that were in the forecast. We dropped off our luggage at the hotel and headed out for some dinner.

Custer is located about 20 miles from Mount Rushmore, 4 miles from the Crazy Horse Monument, and about 6 miles from Custer State Park which has a really neat wildlife driving loop.

Tomorrow we will hit the wildlife loop, in search of more of those pesky "road" bison. We'll spend most of the day in this area, and end up in Rapid City SD at days end. Then Wednesday morning, we will start the ride homeward. Hard to believe that the trip is winding to an end.

Our stats for today indicate that we covered 223 miles, bringing our trip total to 5087 miles. Below is a map of our route from today.

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