Day 8 ( August 13):

      Last night we went into the town of Hill City not too far from the Black Hills Monuments and our campground. As we neared town we were surrounded by more and more bikers that had come to South Dakota for the big rally in Sturgis. Many of them take a week's vacation or more and spend a day or two in Sturgis and then the rest traveling around out west. The closer you get to Sturgis the more bikes you see. As we neared the town of Hill City( 50 miles from Sturgis), there were hundreds of bikes lining the streets. They even shut down the main drag in most of these little towns just so the bikers can park their bikes.

      Since we were there to eat, we parked and walked through the bikes to get to The Alpine Restaurant and Hotel where we heard they served a great filet mignon. Tyler stopped to take pictures to show the guys and I enjoyed watching the people. There were young couples of course but many of the bikers were older. We visited with one couple about our age who were from Iowa while waiting for our table at the restaurant. They do the rally every year and love it.

    


 This morning we were up at 5:30 a.m., showered and left to spend the day site-seeing. We started with going up the Needles Highway to Mount Rushmore. We drove through several small tunnels and rock formations surrounded by tall pines and meadows.

  We saw some deer and chipmunks but none of the bison that had been promised. The Black Hills are perhaps the most pleasing scenery I have encountered on this trip. The early morning sun and shadows made it even more interesting and we actually had to turn on the heater to stay warm. We enjoyed seeing the monument from a distance. It really is a lot smaller than I thought it would be though.

    

 We left the Black Hills and headed for The Badlands. While the Black Hills are mostly granite, the Badlands are sandstone and are similar to what we saw in Wyoming although not as colorful and their formations are perhaps more interesting sometimes thinner , coming to what apears to be a razors edge and then sometimes they are very rounded like a mound.  

 The weird formations make them look like something from a Star Trek episode. Alongside the rock formations runs a vast plain where we were again told we could see buffalo and we did, traveling down a dirt road we saw 1 all by himself down in the basin and then three on the grassland. Not exactly what I was expecting but we did get to see some and from a great distance. Their heads and necks are absolutely gigantic.

  





 What we weren't expecting to see actually popped right up in front of us...prairie dogs! They were funny and playful just like you would imagine. They really aren't that afraid cars or humans and must be very prolific little things because once we knew what to look for we could see that they seemed to be everywhere.

     After a long drive through The Badlands we headed across the state to Mitchell ,South Dakota,  dinner and rest.