The Preamble (or pre-ramble?)

Since Melissa was nice enough to set-up the blog, I thought I’d add my first post with an overview of the trip.

We decided on the Black Hills area because Mel’s never been, and I haven’t since my teenage years. Dan made the suggestion last year and we jumped right on it! Early on, we decided to take the truck and tow the bikes on a trailer – not because we’re too old (maybe a little), but nearly everyone that goes to Sturgis complains about 700 miles of brutally boring interstate driving. 

I was nearly about to pull the trigger on a trailer purchase when I talked to my outlaw brother-in-law that he had a trailer he was preparing for a Sturgis run in August. He offered its use and I grabbed at the chance. All I needed was to mount some additional D-rings, get some locks and quality tie-down straps. As for the bike, I’m setup well and just needed to do basic maintenance; same for the truck & trailer.

We’re staying in Newcastle Wyoming – just over the SD-WY border and about 45 miles from Mount Rushmore. This location is ideal for day trips to all the Parks, Monuments, Sites, Cities and tourist traps in the area. We have 7 riding days and 5 planned routes for a couple of “do whatever you want” days. The planned routes have no schedule and we want the flexibility of changing anything at anytime. I used Google maps for route planning and there is no way to distinguish between Paved and Unpaved roads so this flexibility is important!

Black Hills Area

We’re departing Thursday night, driving through the evening and should arrive in Newcastle just after noon Friday at a nice relaxed pace. We’re staying at a “cute” little Hotel that had extremely good reviews. Since they have WiFi, our daily detailed post will be made each evening, but on the road, cell coverage allowing, we plan on short mobile picture posts. Our checkout is Saturday but we haven’t finalized our return plans yet.

Even though I have trust issues with Google, their blog platform Blogger has really good mobile apps (iOS & ‘roid), and a hell of a lot more free space than Wordpress (free) we used on our Canadian trip. If you look to the right, you can subscribe to an email subscription which will alert you whenever we make a post. It’s quick & easy but you do need to click a confirmation link in the Feedburner email to activate. At the bottom of this page there is a link to subscribe to a newsfeed of the posts if you’re into that kind of thing.

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