Day 21: From Rapid City, SD to Kodaka, SD: 102 miles

So today might as well have been three separate rides, and the middle ride was by far my favorite. After eating breakfast in the dorm cafeteria, we headed out in ‘chance of thunderstorm’ weather and the rain did not disappoint for the first 30 miles as we became wet and dirty. We had a nice pace line led by Jeff, followed by his girl ducklings. After  mile 37, I had enough of looking at tires and dropped back to take some pictures. Thank god I was with Nelle for part of the day because she spotted our first herd of bison!

We then began to enter the badlands, only to exit them 2 miles later, and then reenter around mile 70. The 2^nd third of the day was BEAUTIFUL. The badlands were incredible and I felt as though I was in Looney tunes running around a desert with weird rock formations like Wild E Coyote and the Road Runner. I stopped so many times to take random hikes, climb up the rocks, and take many photos. Since I was alone, I made many friends with strangers in order for them to take my photo, because pictures of rocks without people gets pretty boring after awhile. 

I continued my journey and stopped at “The World’s Largest Prairie Dog” with the intention of taking another photo with a giant fake animal BUT alas, I need not do so because there were REAL LIVE PRAIRIE DOGS and I was able to feed them peanuts and even pet them. Here is my montage:

In my excitement, I had completely forgotten about the following sign that I saw many miles back... hopefully I’ll survive :/

So the last third of the ride, the dreaded headwind that the whiteboard had predicted (that I had decided wasn’t going to happen after it was noon and I felt no wind) finally came to be, and boy it was stronger than ever. I was probably most nervous about this ride due to the weather predicted of 15mph wind coming from the East, chance of thunderstorm, and gusts up to 21 mph. The last 20 miles presented us with a 20mph wind with gusts up to 30mph and hence it took me over 2 hours to do 20 miles. Kind of crazy when you can run faster than you can bike (what ran through my head when I saw the 6mph on the cyclometer). But we made it and are now some very sleepy cyclists.

We had dinner at the H+H and what I really want to talk about is the amazing woman we met there. Today is the birthday of our ride coordinator, Lynn and while on of the riders, Tim, was talking about finding a cake in town (which did not exist), a woman in the restaurant jumped out of her seat and volunteered to bake the cake herself! She ran home, popped the cake in, and showed up about 70 minutes later to our campsite. Such a sweetheart.

                                  Lynn is on your left blue and Susan is dead center