What a glorious day to wake up to!  The sun is shining; the temperature is warm, 78 degrees.  The little Greybull Motel we are in, offers coffee in the lobby, so I head straight there for some Joe.  I chat with the manager, Michelle, and look over the ‘small continental breakfast’ she told me about the night before.  I grab 2 coffees and tell Michelle we’ll be back for breakfast.  We sip our coffees while we pack up and then load the bikes.

While eating breakfast, Michelle and her husband John tell us all the scenery ahead we should definitely check out.  John is really a caverns man, he explains and says he’s now been to every one in the Mt. Rushmore area and suggests we try to see as many as we can.  The subject turns to wildlife and big horn sheep and mountain goats and I say these are the two animals I have yet to see in the wild, even after all the riding we’ve done up through Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory, not to mention Washington.  John maps a course for us out of Greybull, we thank and him and head to the bikes.

I slip my helmet and gloves on and start my bike and realize that I have no audio at all on the bike.  The CB does not work and this means I have no audio to listen to either.  I alert Terron, who then gets the tools out, takes off the seat and starts trouble shooting.  A few explicative and about 45 minutes later, he figures out that a connection came lose.   Just a screwdriver and it’s fixed.  Oh and by the way, he also realizes that he actually broke it the night before, trying to fix a different problem, which by the way, is still broken.

Oh well, we are now on the open road, under sunny skies and 78 degrees.  And when I say open road, I mean open road.  I’m amazed, when I realize that we are only the only motorized anything on the road for miles at a time.  And this is when I’m also staring at the passing scenery, thinking; “Who the heck decided there needs to be a road here? Why?  And who built it?”  And then I feel cold!  That 78 degrees disappeared within ten miles.  It’s now 50 degrees and my fingers are frozen!

This is now the second day in a row that I’m loving the scent in the air. I smell wildflowers!  There are so many of them.  I don’t know what they are, but I see lots of periwinkle and purple flowers and then many that are bright fuscia!   Then we enter the town of Basin, WY where the welcome sign proclaims “Lilac City of the World”.   Cool, my head swivels left, right, left, right as we drive through this little town, looking for lilacs.  Not one!  How odd.  Oh well, there are fields of flowers still ahead!

This is the Bighorn National Forest that we’re driving through now.  I don’t see any big horned sheep or mountain goats but I do see more pronghorn!  They look so graceful, grazing on the side of the road, barely looking up to see us go by.  Beyond them, there’s a full spectrum of red rock mountains all around us.  Every twisty turn of the road, reveals another carved section of earth.  The raging rivers here gouged the landscape over time.    Most of the water we ride alongside or cross over is running fast, and at times, white with rapids.  The far off mountainsides reveal many layers of rock and sediment, in varying shades of red and magenta.

The colors appear muted for a number of miles, but then transition into a vibrant, bright red.  Here, the layers are less apparent; it’s just red top to bottom.  And now when I look down at the Nowood River that we’ve been paralleling, I see that it’s no longer blue/green or clear water, it’s now a dark red, murky, muddy color.  After more than an hour of riding through this wonderfully chromatic spectrum of red rock, I see that the landscape is changing again.  There are now trees and green pastures and we cross Tensleep Creek.

Then I see Ten Sleep Veterinary Services, Ten Sleep Baptist Church, Ten Sleep Senior Citizens Center and the Ten Sleep Post Office.  Oh, this is a town called Ten Sleep!  I figure the name has some origin in Indian culture and I’m right.  Later when I look it up, I learn this little community was half way between two trading posts and the Indians measured distance by the number of “sleeps” it took to get to a location, and this community was ten sleeps between the two trading posts.

We depart Ten Sleep and move on toward Buffalo, WY.  The rock is no longer red, it’s gray and shaped like giant boulders.  After an hour of riding through these sleeping giants, we reach the point that we’re going to hop on I-90.  We stop for gas and stare at the skies ahead.  There are dark clouds, the sun is gone and I can see that we’re about to get wet, so we gear up.   This storm is big!  Terron checks radar on his phone and tells me we’re not outrunning this one, we’re running into it.   For the next 7 hours, we are soaked, despite our foul weather gear!   Strikes of lightning illuminate the dark skies all around us.  And it’s cold!  At another gas stop, I add glove liners, but it takes only minutes for those to also become soaked.  Thank goodness I’ve got a good audio book playing in my helmet; Tom Clancy’s Threat Vector.  That will keep my mind occupied, while I sit in a pool of water on my seat and the rain drips from my helmet down my back!

Finally, we turn off the interstate into the Black Hills National Forest and the road to Mt. Rushmore.  My dad, no matter where he is, always says, “Hey this looks like Wisconsin.”  I don’t always agree, but right now, if he were here, I know he would say this and I would agree!  The rock formations and green trees, do look like the Wisconsin Dells to me!  But it’s South Dakota and it’s beautiful, even in the rain, so lush and green.  Terron spots the turn for Crazy Horse and goes in.  It’s $10 to get in and he pays it, just to get closer.  But we are so soaked right now, we don’t even get off the bikes to go in the visitor center.  We just roll up, take a few pictures and move on.  Be sure to stare in awe at our $10 photos!

As we ride through into Mt. Rushmore, the rain lets up a little bit and again, we roll up, snap photos of the monument and move on.  My family travelled here on summer vacation when I was little, but this is Terron’s first time ever to see this.  We have a National Park pass, so we can go in, but Terron says, “I’m good.  Been here done that.  Let’s roll!”  I agree and we zoom off for more adventure.

Now we have a new mission:  get to Murdo, SD, where we earlier made a motel reservation, so we can get out of these wet clothes and get a hot meal.  GPS says we’ll be there at 8:30.  Something should still be open.  Along the way, I start seeing all the signs for Wall Drug.  There are so many, announcing everything you can see and buy and enjoy at Wall Drug.  But, we ride on past.  I hate missing Wall Drug, but I’m so miserably cold and wet, I just can’t stop now.

Down the road, we pass the sign that says Central Time Zone.  Doh!  Will anything be open at our hotel stop?  We check into the motel at 9:30PM and see a sign that says “Diner” across 2 parking lots.  The clerk says they stop serving at 10:00.  We park the bikes, run our bags up to the room and briskly walk to the diner.  We made it!  From the limited menu, we both order fried chicken, which totally underwhelms, but it is the first sit down, hot meal we’ve had since we left home three days ago!

When I get up to leave the diner, I literally leave a puddle on the seat!  I’m not kidding!  Thank goodness these are just plain, plastic diner booths.  Back in the room I try running the motel out of hot water during my shower!  But there’s still plenty for Terron, who went to the front desk to ask for a fan to help dry out our gear.  After showers, we turn the bathroom into a clothesline!  BTW, the clouds are still over us!  I hear thunder and the rain still pounding outside, as we drift off to sleep.