We left western South Dakota for Fargo on the eastern side of the state. Did the drive in one day as there’s not much to see in between. We did come up with one interesting gem along the way, though. It’s called the enchanted highway. Some school teacher and self taught scrap metal artist created giant scrap metal sculptures and put them along a minor highway and now it’s “enchanted”. It’s about a 30 mile drive from one end to…
After golf we showered up and headed over to the chateaux. The family that started the town of Medora (I won’t bother trying to type that name again) had a chateaux they used when they were in Medora. It was a ten bedroom home that they also entertained in when people visited. Anyway they offer self guided tours of the house so after golf we did that. The home itself wasn’t overly impressive except when you realize it was just…
The next morning we fulfilled another of my reasons for wanting to come here. They have a golf course that’s the number one rated course in North Dakota. Nothing in the state that’s in the top 100 in the country so that had to do. It was a beautiful day and the course was very nice with great scenery. There were quite a few holes that you were hitting from elevated tee boxes over a bunch of tall brush down…
Ok so I’m not exactly into westerns and cowboys, except for maybe Blazing Saddles, but you have to see the few things that are offered in Medora, Nd. And one of them was their Cowboy Hall of Fame. Not exactly the country’s hall of fame but pretty impressive for a small town. It was basically a tribute to all things cowboy for the state of North Dakota. They had some interesting exhibits on the way of life of cowboys and…
After breakfast we headed to the national park, originally the main reason for coming here. They had a small museum mainly considering of Theodore’s influence and adventures here. They also had his original cabin that he stayed in during his grieving times, which was somewhat interesting. The park itself was not nearly impressive as most of the parks we’d been to further west but I think that’s what we’re gonna find as we continue our trek eat. We did see…
We left Sturgis to park at Ellsworth Afb while we both headed off to work for a few days. After returning from work we headed north into North Dakota starting on the western side of the state. We parked in a campground in the small town of Medora, a town really made popular by Theodore Roosevelt’s love of the black hills and cowboy lifestyle. When he was in his early twenties his wife and mother both died on the same…
Our last day there we went to the Crazy Horse monument. For those not familiar it’s basically the Indian version of Mount Rushmore that was started in 1948 and still isn’t complete. The sculpture who began the project worked on it from 1948 til his death, at age 74, in 1982. From there his family has taken over the project and is working on it to this day. The face was completed in 1998 but there’s still a lot of…
We met our friends Tiff and Lori at the Full Throttle Saloon. This was a place we’d also been to last time we were here but it had moved. Last time we stayed here we were at a campground called Glencoe, which was fairly close to the Buffalo Chip, where we stayed this year. Across the street from Glencoe was a bar called the Full Throttle, which was where we spent a lot of our time when we wanted some…
One of our days we went to Deadwood, Sd. This is a place we had visited on our last trip to Sturgis back before we started this Rv adventure but it’s a place we could visit over and over again. Deadwood was a town that was illegally established back in the 1870’s. Illegal because it was on territory that was granted to the Lakota Indians just a few years prior. But gold was discovered in the area and that was…
We spent a few of our days throughout the week in downtown Sturgis where most of the activity was. Not much to write about here, the pictures say it all. Some very interesting bikes and fun bars, huge amount of vendors and shopping and something always going on. They had demo rides on a three wheel vehicle called the Polaris Slingshot. I have a video of it below. Looked like allot of fun and I wanted to do it but…
We left Devil’s Tower the next day and headed to Sturgis, Sd. The bike rally was kind of a last minute plan as we’d already been to the rally before and besides, we sold our bike before starting this adventure. But our friends were going and we don’t get to see them very often and it was pretty much along our planned route so we decided to make it though bike week with Jim suffering watching all the people have…
We both had to work the weekend after visiting Eric and when we got back it was time to leave Colorado and head north to meet up with our friends for the bike rally in South Dakota. On the way we stopped at Devil’s Tower in northwestern Wyoming. We had pretty much covered all we wanted to see in Wyoming and although Jamie had been there I had never seen Devil’s Tower. For those who don’t know what Devil’s Tower…