You and me and 50,000 Motorcycles

 From Forest City, Iowa, we took off north and our first stop was the Spam Museum in Austin Minnesota - yes they have such a thing - and it was well worth the stop.  After learning about Spam and the history of the Hormel Company we took off on I-90 west towards Rapid City.

We overnighted at a little RV park in Plinkenton SD since South Dakota has a rule about not sleeping alongside the road for more than 3 hours.  Very nice little park - we have it marked for a return visit.

 We couldn't pass through South Dakota with a visit to the infamous Wall Drugs:

We decided to spend a few days in the Rapid City are and found a spot just off the I-90 at a small RV park named "Three Flags RV park and Camp".  The whole area was getting ready for the Sturgis Motorcycle rally and we were lucky to find full hookups in the area.

We made the obligatory trip to Deadwood and Lead just outside of Rapid City.  Even a week before the rally, Deadwood was saturated in motorcycles.  Lead, however was very nice and we spent some time exploring the mining artifacts in a park that was honoring the Homestake mine - closed in the 80s and currently being used by Cal Berkeley to capture neutrinos. 

We then drove back from Rapid City to the Badlands National Part.  Among other things they have restored a fairly large buffalo herd there.  The rangers there have an ad campaign;  "Don't pet the fuzzy cows", we didn't quite understand why until we saw this:

The next day was "Four Presidents and a Chief":

Despite it being "done to death", we would heartily recommend to anyone that they go visit both Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse memorial.

We spent a day exploring the downtown Rapid City area.  The downtown has a bronze statue of all the president up to Obama.  They haven't gotten their Trump statue yet - we believe there is a shortage of orange bronze.

The last day in Rapid City we decided to go to Wind Cave national park.  This park offers tours of the Wind Cave - a massive cavern complex about 230 feet below the surface.  

We left Rapid City the day the Sturgis Motorcycle rally started in nearby Sturgis.  Our route (curse you GPS) .  We were totally amazed by the number of Motorcycles parked along main street in Sturgis.  So amazed we forgot to take a picture and turning the 37ft Motorhome around in city full of motorcycles was not practical.  This shot happened on our way out of town:

Ginger was not impressed with the motorcycles.

Conclusion:  We would have stayed in Rapid City longer if there was RV space availability.  As it was the RV park we stayed at - outside of Sturgis - was fully booked for Sturgis.  There was a lot more to do there.  We have already decided to return when there aren't 700,000 people at a Motorcycle rally.  We would really like to explore Deadwood and some of the other places we missed on this trip.