Jeff's Alaskan Bike Trip 2010

Now we have the big move to try and get home. Our goal is to get across South Dakota in a day. We are riding west to east. It's very windy up here. The plains are teaming with hay fields and cows. I saw several sunflower fields. I'll have to check the next time I see sunflower seeds where they came from.

I played a golf course in Las Vegas called the Badlands. It's no comparison. You get up in these mountains that are only 2500-3000 feet and see what the high plains looks like. Several prairie dog mounds exist. Then you see the way the glaciers carved out the the canyons and look down into the lower plains. The mountains have various colors from the differing rocks in them. Now that was truly the Badlands. Make sure to check John's blog, he is eventually going to put up a video he shot with his camera from his bike while riding through the mountains. It's about a minute long and very awesome.

We drove all day, but fell short of getting across South Dakota. We camped in Mitchell at about 8:30. The crickets were unbelievable. So were the mosquitoes. We didn't have it this bad in Canada. Hurriedly, we made it downtown to a bar for some food and ESPN. I haven't seen any sports in over two weeks. If you know me, that's a big deal. The place was called Dr. T's lounge. It was actually pretty cool. They had like 15 beers on tap. 70-80's rock music filled the room. The wings were pretty good.

When we got back to the campground, we started planning out routes home and checking the weather. The Midwest is hot and stormy. We expect to get wet at some point. The mileage is 5000 down and 900 to go. We will see how many days that will take us to get home.