July 31-Aug 9 marked the 69th Annual Sturgis Black Hills Motorcycle Rally. The anticipation of this event has been accumulating over the past several weeks. Stories of things that happen during the rally are just crazy-bad accidents, hospital census skyrocketing, thousands of motorcycles covering the streets, crazy weather... most of which happened. For those that don't know, Sturgis is a smaller city in the Black Hills about 40 min. away from Rapid City. Other than the annual rally, you pretty much pass through the town on I-90 without giving it a passing glance. Oh but when the rally comes to town... Sturgis Rally is Meca for motorcyclists, it's like their Christmas. Todd and I hope to get a motorcycle towards the end of his deployment to enjoy next summer and we can only imagine how awesome a leisurely ride through the winding roads of the Black Hills will be! We started our Sturgis experience last Sunday when we went to Hill City to mountain bike. (Insert where mountain biking goes into this blog post) Todd has had a mountain bike forever but broke it in college and has not gotten it fixed since. Pensacola and Abilene did not exactly serve as pristine mountain biking locations, nor did they have the means to fix a broken bike. The Black Hills on the other hand is a mountain bikers paradise-thousands of trails of all skill levels are hidden throughout the hills just waiting to be biked or hiked. You could seriously ride/hike a different trail and never repeat the same one! So last Saturday we went to one of the several local bike stores that specialized in mountain bikes to get his bike fixed and, of course, ended up walking out with a shiny new Kona mountain bike for me! After church we made our typical drive out to Hill City and took to a couple of trails to break in the new and newly repaired bikes. All of the surrounding cities to Sturgis are also taken over with bikers during the rally so being in Hill City sparked our desire to head to the rally. We took the scenic route from Hill City to Deadwood and into Sturgis with hundreds of bikers all around us taking in the beauty of the Black Hills via motorcycle. There are two distinct parts of the rally-the downtown "rally" and "the legendary Buffalo Chip". We decided to spend that Sunday afternoon at the rally and then the following weekend (this current weekend) at "the chip". The rally part was really cool. Thousands of bikes lined the 2 main downtown streets of Sturgis with hundreds of vendors set up selling food, shirts, bike stuff, etc. It was a great place to people watch and check out the many different motorcycles. There are many bars in Sturgis so the night life is really hopping during the rally (we didn't go to those). This Friday we made plans to go out to the chip and see Buckcherry in concert. The Buffalo Chip is a huge camp ground where they bikers camp out during the rally and enjoy concerts at night all week. We went with another couple and had a blast-again-another great people watching spot. The weather however was CRAZY! A huge hail storm came through just before we got their dropping golf ball and baseball size hail over Sturgis making it look like what can only be described as a war zone. Tents and cars where destroyed and one guy even got knocked unconscious! So we camped out, had some fun, got really muddy, didn't get much sleep and left the chip around 9am Saturday and decided we could now check that box.
As of today, there was only one fatal motorcycle accident (the lowest ever), only one really nasty storm (but it did rain everyday), and a really busy emergency room at Rapid City Regional (but overall hospital census is still pretty low). Pretty successful rally in my opinion.
Coming up next weekend will be the Leading Ladies 1/2 marathon in Spearfish, SD about an hour away where we will spend the weekend. We are very excited to finally make it up to Spearfish because it is in a canyon and is supposed to be a beautiful part of the Black Hills. And in case I don't blog next weekend about it, Todd verifies in the B1 the week of August 17.
More fun times in the Black Hills... to bad summer is coming to an end and the snow is just around the corner :(