Saturday (October 1st) saw me packed, up and riding before the chill had left the air. I had a long day’s ride planned: a meandering route heading west into Custer State Park to ride Needles Highway, then down into Nebraska before finally back west to my room for the night in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
I originally ended up in Wall, South Dakota because it looked close to the Badlands on a map and still had an affordable place to spend a week at. It’s a tiny town, made up mainly of stuff near Wall Drug, which is a different blog post. I had a bunch of small moments in Wall, nothing worth a post of its own, but perhaps together a series of vignettes and thoughts.
The Badlands are amazing. It’s hard to know what to say about them, I spent a few afternoons and evenings exploring them, doing some small hiking and just taking it all in. Scrambling up rocks, watching the sunset, hanging out with prairie dogs, watching the stars gaze silently back; it was all delightful.
When last we left, I was sitting in a gas station in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I knew my destination was in the neighborhood just down the road, my waterlogged cell phone with directions had fizzled out, and it was still raining. I rode into the subdivision thinking I had a vague idea of the street name and might remember the number. Turns out there are two streets with the same name, one was a Lane and one a Place and both had addresses that could have been correct, and I was a bit fuzzy on the last digit anyways. Also, each house had four units. Blast.
This evening was supposed to be when I got a lot of stuff done, like assemble signs (done!) and update some blog posts (um…). Instead I saw Wall Drug (more in another post, one word summary: lazy), researched cloud backup (ugh) and then gave up, tossed on my gear and headed out to see the star swept sky over the Badlands.