After eating delicious donuts and coffee for breakfast in Ft. Collins with Becca and Robert, we picked up our rental car and headed to Wyoming.

We weren’t in Wyoming long (we’ll be back in a few days to explore) because we headed east to take a gander at Nebraska.

Nebraska was way less boing than I expected. We actually saw some decent scenery.

We stopped in Scottsbluff for lunch at Shari’s. Her pies are AWESOME. I had the Montana cherry that won 1st place in 2010… I don’t even like pies, but this was almost as good as eating pizza (I love pizza). 😉

Also, Nebraska seems to be more Christian than the Bible Belt and that’s hard to beat, folks. Almost every radio station was either Christian music or someone yelling about hell. And the girl in the coffee shop told us, “God go with you on your journey”. It was nice but definitely a little strange-feeling for me.

We drove through a bit of nothing before reaching the Nebraska/South Dakota border…

And it seemed fitting that in Nebraska we got blocked by a tractor in the road for a while…

Right before the border we went through a national grassland. Didn’t know that was a thing here.

Finally, after a lot of yellow grass, we made it to South Dakota.

We continued through the grassland in South Dakota on a state highway.

And then, something quite unexpected happened.

Our highway turned into gravel. And then our gravel turned into dirt. Apparently in South Dakota dirt roads can be state highways… It was annoying, but the Black Pecan (our black Chevy cruze) got us faithfully through.

But soon after our nearly off roading experience, we found ourselves in the Black Hills.

Almost immediately, we saw a female elk and about 5 wild turkeys! Awesome!

I also found a giant dandelion…
Actually the biggest I’ve ever seen.

And then we finished our drive to Custer, South Dakota: where the motorcycles are.

The short version of the story is that apparently, of all the weeks in the year, this week is the 74th or 75th annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in a town an hour or two away.

The town normally has ~6,000 people. This week, it has ~600,000 people. So you can imagine that all surrounding towns are PACKED. Hotels are all 3 or 4 times more than normal. Even the Super8 cost $200 a night!!!! And that was back in March when we were booking stuff.

So I was really annoyed when I first found out about the situation – mad even. But, we decided to make the best of it and enjoy this probably once in a lifetime experience.

It’s actually kinda fun to see all kinds of bikers biking in. Old. Young. Restless. Single. Familied. With the family. Without the family. Cross jackets. Skull jackets. Cool people with cool stories I’m sure.

Tonight we made our way to the number one rated burger place and ate buffalo burgers! Delicious! And it was Erisa and Anxhela’s first burger of any kind!! Crazy!