The Touring Series: Beggars Again

 

A Guitar Ted Productions series

Thanks for joining me again on another adventure in "The Touring Series". This tour was dubbed the "Race Against Death Tour". This tour occurred in August of 1995. The three participants, Ryan, Troy, and your's truly, left from Cedar Falls, Iowa to try and get to Winter Park, Colorado in two weeks. Here I am reproducing the tale, mostly as it was posted on the blog in 2009. There are some new edits and additions. I also will add new remarks and memories where appropriate at the end of each post. 

 Once again, there were no cell phones, internet, social media platforms, or digital cameras in use by we tourers in 1995. I will post images where I can, but this tour wasn't well documented in images, so there probably will be very few sprinkled throughout. A modern image will be used only where it depicts things I want to clarify, like where we were in that part of the tour via a map image, or the like.
 
The "Touring Series" will appear every Sunday until it ends. Look for past entries by scrolling back to a previous Sunday's post, or type in "Touring Series" in the search box to find more.  


The "Race Against Death Tour" is looking for water...again!
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Now with about 20 miles to go to Rapid City, we had to find some water. Troy had motioned that we should stop at the next likely farm house. It wasn't very much further up the road when we came across a farm, hard against the side of a steep hill, at a point where the road turned straight west to Rapid City. The wind had let up somewhat, but was still a formidable force, and after our hard efforts, we were not at our strongest at this point. The wind also had contributed to a much higher than expected water uptake by all of us, so we were again in a desperate state of mind as we knocked on the screen door.

We rode 73 plus miles that day from Interior to Rapid City.

A shadowy figure of a woman answered, but did not come out. She seemed apprehensive and afraid of us. I suppose we did look strange, being cyclists, and there were a lot of those crazy motorcyclists about too. Strangers. Not welcomed....

She spoke to us from the relative safety she had behind the door. After explaining our situation, she was willing to help, but we couldn't come in, and we had to hand up our bottles through the door. It didn't really matter to us, because we were focused on the water only. However; we did manage to ask about the wind. She had a name for it......(I wish I would have remembered it). The woman said it came at odd times, sometimes lasting only a few hours, sometimes for a whole day. Well, we got a closer to a full days helping, and we were not thinking it was good luck either!

As we bade the woman farewell, we took the last run into Rapid City, which seemed as though it was going to take forever. I remember I kept looking at the map and thinking every mile was an eternity. Well, I suppose we were going pretty slowly, even though the wind became less and less until just before town, it was fairly calm. No matter, the damage had been done already, and we limped into a road side convenience/tourist trap late in the afternoon about ten miles from Rapid City.

Here we saw a couple of motorcyclists playing pool on the pool table as we rummaged about for good stuff to eat and for anything suitable to re-hydrate with. We wandered about the place, seeing things and just vegging out on anything mildly interesting. Not really wanting to move on, we mounted up and made the last stretch into Rapid City, where it was agreed upon that we would get a hotel room for the night. We were beat, and setting up camp was quite out of the question.

Modern day Google Earth image shows the race track at Rapid City (Green dot)

It wasn't long before signs of civilization were everywhere. This buoyed our spirits after a long, tough day. Rapid City not only brought a slight uptick in our spirits, but also in our tempo. Of course, there was a LOT more traffic which added to our excitement.  But we weren't put out at all. A "real" city, and something we hadn't seen since Sioux City, was a welcomed thing. I saw the race track on the edge of town and thought back to the "V.I.P" I spoke with back at Witten. "200 miles to the race track at Rapid City", I could clearly hear the words being spoken in my head by the man. I smiled as I remembered and the race track disappeared behind me. We forged into the heart of downtown and found a place called the Lazy U Motor Lodge. Looked good to us, so we checked in and got cleaned up.
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Whew! What a day! The whole experience was so overwhelming, I think we were in a daze by the time we got to that little roadside store near Rapid City. Then it was a feeling of relief, the wind was dying, the city was nearing, the day was almost over. Excitement rose in each one of us. The strangeness of the day, my experience alone, (which I never spoke of to Troy or Ryan), the awfulness of it all...... We just wanted it to be gone. And for the time being, it was. Now it was time to cut loose.  

Next week: The Rapid City Scene!