Day 58: Aurora, CO

Hastings Minnesota is a cute little town. I was surprised to discover that it was actually its own community, and hasn't yet been swallowed up by suburbs expanding from the twin cities. My uncle showed me around town a bit, down by the locks and the river park, and the small lake, as well as downtown and out by the old mill. It's kind of strange that I've known my Uncle Bob for twenty years, and I think this was the first time we'd ever had a real conversation. It turns out he used to ride motorcycles as well. It was also the first time I'd had a conversation with my cousins Kelly and Christian. Last time I saw them I think they were seven and four, so we didn't have much to discuss at the time. My cousin Chris had been in Rapid City South Dakota working on a documentary film and purely out of coincidence ended up visiting his family the same time that I was there, so I got to catch up with him as well. It turns out that we've been living just a few miles from each other for the past several years, but I haven't actually seen him since I was 14 years old. We all went to St. Paul for lunch one day so my aunt and uncle gave me a brief tour. It's a really nice little city, a good mix of quaint and modern. My aunt loves old homes, so they took me up to Summit Hill to see the beautiful, huge gothic mansions made of bricks and stone. It was a short but lovely visit, and I'm grateful for a chance to see my aunt and the rest of her family. On my way out of Hastings I wandered through Minneapolis for a few minutes and wasn't all that impressed. It's a little larger and a lot less charming than St. Paul. It's like a smaller, less interesting version of St. Louis.

The ride from Hastings to Dickinson was mostly pretty boring. Fargo is smaller than I expected, and didn't seem to have much personality, though I guess it's not really a fair judgement to make from the interstate. I had a long way to go that day (566 miles) and it didn't look like it was worth stopping to investigate. Just east of Bismarck the landscape starts to become intersting, and is actually quite beautiful. I was lucky enough to pass through during the short time of year when everything is green. I never thought I'd say it, but I really liked North Dakota.

Apparently I arrived at the right time, because it was the start of Rough Rider Days, which is a week long festival including rodeos, demolition derbies, and other colorful events. My cousin is a Rangeland Management Specialist for the US Forest Service, so when we went out to see the badlands at Theodore Roosevelt National Park it was like having my own personal guided tour. I've never seen anything quite like the badlands, and the vast expanses of grassland to the south is also beautiful in its own way. I got to see a great storm too, not very flashy, but the hardest rain and strongest winds that I've ever seen. No golf ball sized hail though, which was disappointing to me, but good for everyone else. I went to my first real rodeo, and I think it was the first time I really understood the appeal of contemporary cowboy culture. Not that I'm about to go out and buy myself a big ol' hat or anything.

While in Dickinson I got a taste of the local cuisine, which in addition to good old-fashioned 'murican food includes things like borscht (I never thought beets and cabbage could be this good!), some kind of cream-based potato dumpling stew that I can't remember the name of, and fleischkuekle, which is basically a beef patty wrapped in pastry and deep fried, and it's absolutely delicious. I also had the opportunity to eat a buffalo dog for the first time. It was slightly better in texture than any normal hot dog, but at $7.50 with no sauerkraut, relish, or even mustard, it will probably be the last one I ever eat.  I actually had a lot of fun in Dickinson, but my cousin assured me that I just had lucky timing, and it's typically very boring.

When I left Dickinson I headed south to the Black Hills. I had a really wonderful route all mapped out, with lots of squigly lines and variations in elevation, and it was going to be the perfect ride. Except that most of the smaller roads that Google shows traversing the Black Hills National Forest turned into gravel, dirt, mud, or even grass once you got about 200 feet off the highway, so I ended up taking a much less interesting route which circumvented most of the forest and skipped Mt. Rushmore entirely. I've heard so much about Sturgis and Spearfish and Deadwood that I don't think they could have possibly lived up to my expectations. Spearfish is kind of a neat little town, but Deadwood is a horrible tourist trap of 'wild west' and 'gold rush' themed casinos with very little left of interest to me. All of the saloons that looked like they were worth stopping at were closed down and boarded up. It didn't improve my attitude much that I found myself in the middle of a thunderstorm. Once I got south of Deadwood the weather and the traffic both cleared up a bit, but the road wasn't as twisty in real life as it appeared on the map. When I finally made my way to highway 87 through Custer State Park that all changed though. Highway 87 is a great road, but you have to watch out for deer. They have a tendency to hang out in the ditches next to the road for some reason. I ended up camping at the Elk Mountain Campground, in Wind Cave National Park, which is beautiful and full of wild life. The buffalo and the antelope in particular are pretty fearless. At the campground I ran into an old biker from Texas named Wayne who had just retired and was now living his life on the road. He said he'd been saving money his whole life to do this, and it occured to me once again how lucky I am for the opportunity to do it while I'm still young. They had free firewood at the campground but I was never much of a boyscout and had to ask my neighbors for a lighter. After I somehow managed to break his lighter my new friend from the Netherlands offered to start it for me. In what seemed to be a typical European mix of old and new technology, he doused the firepit with lantern fuel and used a flint and steel to create a small explosion. With a nice warm fire started I realized I still had no cookware or utensils, so I got creative and invented something called Cowboy Nachos - beanie weenie on top of beef jerky.

Although Hot Springs South Dakota is a pretty neat little town the rest of the ride to Denver was relatively dull. The folks in Wyoming were all very friendly, but it's hot and boring, and though the country is pretty I didn't see anything that couldn't be found in more spectacular examples someplace else. Cheyene is a strange place. It's basically a small sea of suburbs surrounding an airforce base that's so vast its hangars can't even be seen from the interstate. I always assumed that Denver was in the mountains, since it's at such a high altitude, but it's actually on the high plains, just outside the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It's hot and dry, but it feels great to see some mountains again. Real ones, not like the misnamed little molehills in the midwest. I haven't seen real mountains since I left Tucson, and I haven't seen mountains with snow on them since I crossed the Sierras. I haven't seen this kind of traffic since Southern California either, but I'm a lot less excited about that.