Day 2 - Arrived in Rapid City, SD

We arrive in Rapid City last night around 7:30PM Mountain Time Friday!!! I didn’t post last night because I was just too tired.

Here’s yesterday recap:

We left Moline, IL at 3:39AM. Got a good night’s sleep and I actually felt refreshed. The one hour time shift helped a lot. The weather was great and the temperature was in the upper 60’s low 70’s. Not long after leaving Moline we crossed the Mississippi River into Iowa. This was my first time in this state. It’s true – hundreds of continuous miles of corn fields. We continue through this area with absolutely great weather conditions for riding.

We continued through Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and Waterloo to pick up US 218 heading into Minnesota. Once we were in Minnesota we get onto I90 westbound knowing that we had more than 500 miles to travel on this almost straight interstate highway to Rapid City, South Dakota. Then the weather conditions began to slowly change for the worse.

Once we were on the other side of Sioux Falls, we notice a storm system forming to the South. In this part of the country you can see for miles all around you. We began to see hundreds of bikers heading eastbound on I90. Were they all leaving Sturgis early? This continued for hundreds of miles (easily several thousand bikers by then). Back to the storm – it began to rain so we stopped under an overpass to put on our gear. And you guessed it – a few miles down the road we cleared it and it stopped. Then it began to got HOT and I do mean HOT. I looked down at my air temperature gauge and it displayed 109 degrees. We were approaching Phillip, SD so I used my XM weather feature to check the temperature there. It showed the current temperature at the Phillip airport was 114 degrees!!

This is only part of the story - can you imagine traveling for hours in this condition combined with high cross winds! Rich said that at times it appeared that I was leaning at a 45 degree angle to the left. Of course he didn’t have that challenge on his trike. I really wished I was on mine during this stretch. We persevered and arrived safe and sound.

Now we are off to Sturgis today. From this point on our travels will be at a leisurely pace. Photos to be posted later today.