South Dakota, Come and Gone

Number of miles: 2,435
Fastest speed: 45.6 mph

Total number of hours spent riding: 223

Equivalent number of consecutive viewings of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (extended versions): 19

In the proverbial blink of an eye, South Dakota has come and gone. Bland as a state it may be geographically, it completely surpassed my expectations, to the point where it might be my favorite state I've passed through yet. It was a welcome relief after a month of serious mountains to have a straight, flat shot, with the wind at my tail much of the way. And contrary to the generally surly attitudes of Wyomingites, South Dakotians have been above and beyond friendly and helpful; I've been given taken out to breakfast by strangers who approached me while outside a grocery store, I've been offered places to stay, showers, ice cream on a hot day, and a hundred other kindnesses.

Welcome to South Dakota

I took my first rest day at a couch surfer's house in Rapid City. Arik, the host, was wonderfully generous with his house and food and instruments, and his place turned out to be something of a hub of activity in the city; four other couch surfers were there with me, along with any number of neighbors and friends and even dogs that seemed to drift in from the bushes and hang out and tell stories for a spell. I walked into his house dirty, tired and sunburnt; after finding myself a mason jar of water and noting the NPR on the radio in the background, I knew I'd be staying a day. Rested and rejuvenated, I set out for the Badlands.

As fortune would have it, the weather was on my side. Normally the Badlands are, well, bad, nay, hellishly scorching this time of year. Turns out, though, that this whole region has been having the mildest summer on record, and I headed out to them under a welcome cover of clouds, and passed through with a gentle sun. The Badlands are truly other-worldly; I really think at least one away mission from an episode of Star Trek should have been filmed there.

Heading into the badlands...

...and the subsequent citation.

The nightly storms have been incredible, far and away more violent than anything I experienced in Wyoming. With the sprawling openness of the land and skies, you can see a storm coming from far away, but they roll in fast. There have been nights where my tarp simply did not provide me adequate shelter, but one of the more fortunate features of the landscape of South Dakota is the abundance of abandoned barns and houses; I've slept in several of them, and I really don't know what I would've done without them. (Consequently, I've found an old abandoned pot plantation on more than one occasion.)

Some of the local weeds.

I'm in Minneapolis right now, staying with a Mennonite intentional community, whose members are quite well-versed in the arts of dumpstering and biking and all those nifty city things. I think I'm going to stay for a day and explore the city, and then it's off on a whirlwind metropolitan tour of Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago by way of the Mississippi. I was kind of hoping to be in Chicago in time for Critical Mass next Friday, but that's still a good 500 miles down the road, so probably not this time.