Sitting in a hotel room in Valentine, NE. Southwest South Dakota gives me a new understanding of rural. We got off the interstate, since I was getting a bit tired of the 40mph cross winds + semis + endless chain of RVs and bike trailers. Took highway 43 though the area. At one point we went just shy of 40 miles between stops. We saw two cars on the road. None of the local gas stations (all three of them we saw in about 70 miles of highway driving) sell premium. Middle. Of. Nowhere.

The badlands however were pretty awesome. Totally worth the 10 dollar park admission fee. Probably not worth the royal hassle the Park Rangers were giving to a lot of the bikes coming though. Apparently they were searching alot of the bikes that came though. I pulled into a visitor center and what I thought was the motorcycle parking (pretty much everything in the area has dedicated motorcycle parking for the week or so). It wasn’t motorcycle parking however, but the impound lot where they were searching bikes. I’d estimated 50 bikes were in there.
At the one gas station in the middle of nowhere mentioned above, we got talking to a local who happened to work at the Badlands National Park. He seemed to indicate the rangers target bikes and the Rangers went out of there way to hassle motorcycles. Lovely.

Me and my dad split from the rest of the group today. Kind of glad. Trying to make anytime with 7 bikes in a group is a bit of a pain. “smoke breaks” start taking an hour. Etc.

Off to Kansas tomorrow. Hopefully the wind wont be quite as bad in NE as it was in SD. Man, that just about wore me out. The little Bonneville was getting tossed all over the place. First time I ever thought “man, it would be nice to have a 1000 pound Harley about now”.