Catching up on things

I have to make this quick because we are using Jason's phone to hotspot internet for us. When we left Shannon's house in Fargo, it rained cats & dogs all day til we arrived in Mobridge, South Dakota. All our gear worked really well. The Klim gear and our boots stayed completely dry on the inside. Make sure when you shop for waterproof gear that it says waterproof not water resistant. The rain was so cold we ended up wearing our heated gear. I absolutely love the heated grips on my BMW. My gloves were soaked but my hands stayed toasty warm. We ended up getting a hotel room for the night to let everything dry out and warm up.

The next day Jason had one of his "scenic routes" planned into our route. I told him it wasn't a great idea to do dirt roads after it had been raining for several days; but he said I needed to get used to my bike on dirt roads before getting to Alaska. Well...the route was definitely scenic. The second the road turned to dirt it was mud as deep as our rims. Jason was like "oh it looks better after the bridge so lets keep going." We slipped and slid about 5 miles into that road before we decided to turn around (and for the first time ever I was holding the camera when Jason slid sideways off the bike haha). Jason looked at his gps and it said we had about 20 more miles of this crap; so it was in our best interest to turn around. I must say though my BMW was quite stable through that mess. Slow & steady! Once we reached pavement again, we had to knock all the mud out from under our fenders and then put the pedal to the metal for the Black Hills.

We have had so many beautiful twisty roads (since we avoid highways like the plague). We were heading around some twisty curves getting into Custer National Park and there was a huge buffalo on the inside of the curve! We passed quite a few of those giants on the way to our campsite. Our campsite was nice (right next to a creek). As we were setting up camp for the night people kept coming up to us and warning us about a huge storm that was coming. We had just enough time to cook up some amazing minestrone soup before lightning started going off everywhere. We threw our boots, tank bags, and camelbaks under the tent rain fly and got cozy for the night. It was the loudest, wettest thunderstorm we have ever seen haha! We were quite impressed with our tent though. There was 2 inches of water flowing around our tent all night and we stayed nice and dry.

From there we cruised through the twisty pigtail bridges of the Black Hills and past Mount Rushmore. We were hoping to make it all the way to the Big Horn Sheep mountains that day but we ran out of daylight. We found a beautiful little campsite in Pine Haven, Wyoming right on a lake. It was a great spot but once again we had a thunderstorm through the night. Definitely not as much rain though.

Today we made it to the Big Horn Sheep Mountains with all the beautiful twisty roads and even took another one of Jason's "scenic routes." This scenic route was supposed to just be a dirt road but they had put a fresh layer of deep gravel down; so it slowed us down quite a bit. We have some amazing pictures from the last few days so I'll put the link below for the photo gallery again. We are currently in Red Lodge, Montana for the night. Tomorrow we head to Bear Tooth Pass and onto Yellowstone National Park.

Copy and paste the link below to view our photo gallery:
http://mommer.smugmug.com/Motorcycles/Alaska-2015/49948984_NtmPzL#!i=4132717478&k=qHFcmx7