59.8 miles today, 1739 total
We left the KOA in Rapid City at about 8:15 this morning, and headed straight to a store to get our usual breakfast of bagels and cream cheese. Conveniently, most bagels come six to a pack so it’s two bagels and a third of a pack of cream cheese each, and off we go, ready for action. There was no convenient park on route so today we consumed them road-side, within sight of I-90. Fueled up, we were ready for a straight shot east with a north westerly wind helping us along. Here’s the root from my GPS, note that red is faster and blue is slower.
There were undulating hills for most of the first part of the ride so we had fast downhills followed by slow climbs over and over again.
The road was straight.
The scenery was beautiful.
Steve got another flat (that’s not very interesting anymore) and I spent some time with a porcupine. I set my camera to portrait mode and took another couple of pictures.
Apart from those incidents, the most interesting development of the day was the howling crosswind, it became quite a challenge.
By about 1:00 p.m. we ran out of asphalt and had to make a decision about gravel versus freeway. We did this while we ate lunch in the shadow (sun and wind) of Wicksville Community Church. We are not sure where the community that goes with the church is, because there was nothing for miles around.
So we got on the freeway and if you look at the map above that’s the first long red section. We were blazing. It was great. We got off at the next exit to discuss strategy. There was a sign indicating roadworks ahead and a maximum vehicle width of 12 ft and that sounded suspicious. Luckily, a local woman pulled up in a big SUV and said “this looks like three men with way too much energy”. She was able to tell us that one of the freeway bridges was being replaced and both directions of the freeway were running on the remaining bridge. She told us about a nice gravel road and she mentioned a bit of a hill. This road had been on Bob’s original plan, so we set off and as usual the scenery was beautiful.
And then we saw the hill!
This is where a chart is useful (see below). The big divot is where we went downhill on the freeway and then went very very slowly back up on gravel.
It was worth it though because the view from the top was smashing.
After that we had a few more inconvenient gravel climbs (chump-change compared to the big one), followed by a very satisfying long downhill on asphalt. We made our final approach to Wall at high speed on the freeway with the wind at our backs.
We rewarded ourselves with milkshakes at Wall Drug.
There are signs quite literally all over America for Wall Drug. It’s a strange little, or not so little, store designed to sell all sorts of trinketry. Is it worth a stop? Maybe; we enjoyed our milkshakes but didn’t indulge in any additional commerce.
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