Started into South Central Wyoming and the view rapidly turned into mostly this:
Luckily, they’re turning the area into a huge wind farm so there was at least that to break up the horizon and provide some visual interest
After a short 5+ hour drive, we made it to our first stop of the day and another box to tick off our bucket lists! Devils Tower National Monument:
And it was at about this time that we first started seeing the bikes
because as it turns out, and we didn’t realize when we planned the trip, it’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally week and there are bikes everywhere! We’ve been to bike week in Daytona and it’s mostly confined to Daytona and a few locations nearby but at Sturgis, the bikes are all over Eastern Wyoming and Western South Dakota. Even with the Covids, it’s a huge event with thousands of bikes coming from all over and every bike that I saw made me miss having mine with me 😞
So following the bikes we headed east to South Dakota:
and through Sturgis to our stop for the next three nights:
While taking this photo, we noticed an odd barking sound and following it came upon this sight:
there are prairie dogs everywhere – hundreds in patches all over the badlands area and that was fortuitous as we had just been having a discussion on whether we were on the planes or a prairie – now it was obvious that it had to be a prairie!
And a preview of the Badlands tour to come:
518 miles today and 3,916 total.
