Keystone South Dakota. Unlucky Day 13.
No. Holy crap! This is where I'm staying. No internet access so I'm writing this tonight and will post tomorrow night. My laptop is on a glass table. Have you ever tried to use an optical rodent on a glass table? Doesn't work too well.
I shoulda gotten up earlier this morning. I didn't realize I was gonna have to drive so far today. I didn't get to Mount Rushmore until 5:00 PM and I was driving fast all day.
I took I-94 to 85. From I-94 to I-90 on 85 I may as well have been on an interstate. It was two lane but it was straight and mostly flat. I didn't have any trouble passing. Cruise control on 75.
I got on I-90 and got back off on 85 south. Now the driving got fun again. I had the top down. The only bad thing was getting behind a biker going uphill. The sound of the bike drowned out the radio. I had a good station too. They were playing my kind of music: rock from the 70's and 80's. I mean real rock. Guns and Roses, Van Halen, AC/DC, Ozzy. Driving music. There was a station in Tucson like that. Alas, Atlanta does not have a decent rock station any more. The last one was 96 rock and they changed to Project 96 and they now play nothing but Gen Y crap. Grunge didn't bother me. The stuff now is crap. No one knows how to play lead guitar. Yeah. I know. I'm an old fart. I've turned into my father.
I took 85 down into Wyoming where I picked up 16. Yeah. I know. I shoulda gone to Devil's Tower, but I was running late and was worried about finding a place to stay.
Yannow, I really wish I had a good way to take notes while I'm driving. I write these posts in my head and then when I sit down at the computer, I forget everything I wanted to write about.
What about radio commercials? There are two that really drive me up the wall. The first one is where the kid says, “Mommy, will you still love me when I'm six?”
“STFU kid! Mommy's busy. Go watch cartoons.”
The other one is the Ovaltine commercial where at the end the kids say, in chorus, “More Ovaltine please.”
Here kids. Drink this Drano and STFU!.
There was one in Oregon for a toothpaste that brags that it is packed in recyclable cardboard and the toothpaste tube itself was recyclable. Nothing about the toothpaste. Does it get your teeth clean?
Back to my trip. There are bikers everywhere! Duh! I'm right next to Sturgis. The first place I stopped there were no rooms, but she sent me right down the road to the Holy Crap Lodge and they had a cabin. Unfortunately, I had to get up three steps to get in.
I can hear Cindy now. “OMG! Steps? WTF are you thinking?”
So I got checked in, got my stuff up the three steps into the cabin, and went up to see Mt. Rushmore where I took this picture.
Crap. It looked better when I was cropping it. I never claimed to be a photographer. I shot it from the parking lot and there was too much light coming from the sun just off to the left.
I plan on getting an earlier start tomorrow.
Posted by denny at August 12, 2007 07:07 PM
Some of use were beginning to worry.
I thought maybe you'd stopped in Sturgis, and when you started snapping pics, got mobbed.
I was scanning the Rapid news looking for a headline "Grouchy old Atlanta man Died while having great sex with sixty plus hot biker chicks". Funeral won't be until October so the mortician has time to get the enormous grin off his face.
glad you are having a GREAT time. Too bad its not with a bunch of those fine women. Or is it? ;)
Geez Denny. I say this with total Blown-Eye love, but that is about the suckiest of suck-ass pictures of Mount Rushmore I have ever seen. Dude. I know, I know...the sun, the angle. Still, Ansel Adams you are not.
Also, re: "Atlanta does not have a decent rock station any more." Nor do we, and even worse, we don't have a single country music station. And even worse than that, the Khalil Gibran School of Arabic Studies, or some shit, opens in Brooklyn next month.
Gott save us. Happy traveling though!
Posted by: Erica on August 12, 2007 08:01 PMSo so pic, but I can make out that they left about enough stone on the left side to carve out hillary's ass.
Posted by: Daryl on August 12, 2007 08:32 PMDenny, don't let any of the pictures bum you out. I am SO envious of you taking a trip like the one you're on now. I have always wanted to see the country in the manner you are doing it in. I had wanted to ride my bike out to Sturgis this year and use the event as an excuse to see the mid-west. Unfortunately, I couldn't take that much time away from my clinic so decided I'd have to do it after hiring someone else to work with me. At least now, I can live vicariously through your photos which at least wet my appetite for what's to come if and when I ever make the trip.
Ray - Get off your ass and do it! You get older every day. Do you want to look back and say that you wish you would have done it? Do it! Now!
Posted by: Denny on August 12, 2007 09:35 PMSo how many of you can name all the presidents on Rushmore? No googling, cheaters.
Posted by: kerrcarto on August 12, 2007 10:34 PMDenny- Buy yourself an MP3 player. I have an 8 gig MP3 player with a built-in microphone that plugs right into the USB port on my computer to upload my music into it, and that I can use to record notes to myself if I need to for work.
It's much more convenient than trying to write stuff down while driving or rely on your memory.
And it can hold 2000 songs at 160 KBS, which is about CD quality audio.
I paid under $200 at tigerdirect.com, but I didn't need (or want) the video capability some have, so that lowered the price considerably.
Avoid the Apple iPods unless you have a MAC. Oh, and my truck's CD player will not play my niece's iPod Nano, because it does record the songs in the .mp3 or .mp4 formats., and the only place to buy music for Apple iPods is at Apple's i-Tunes store.
Then you can upload whatever songs you like into the MP3 player and play those rather than trying to find a good radio station.
I even have a plug-in on my Grand Cherokee's CD player that I can plug the MP3 player into, and they also sell adapters if your car has a cassette player.
Posted by: Rob Cooper on August 12, 2007 11:31 PMFYI, you can upload songs into an Apple iPod from a windows computer, but only from Apple's iTunes store, since Apple uses a different format than Microsoft's .mp3 or .mp4...
Posted by: Rob Cooper on August 12, 2007 11:36 PMTwo Notes:
Ray: Denny is CORRECT! Get out on the Road NOW and budget at least 2 weeks no matter what! You won't regret it. As an aside, I once towed my Wing all the way to Phoenix ... and caught a serious case of the 'razz' from my fellow bikers who met me there. But guess who was fresh, alert, relaxed and able to enjoy the Cruise up to Monterey, then over to Vegas via Death Valley? :)
Den: As regards Road Notes, I use an old Ipaq that is just about dead, but it has a button on the side that I simply hold for any duration of voice-notes. It will take a few trips until you get your comments down correctly (so that they don't sound so dis-jointed), but the Notes allow for a stitching together of the more subtle-elements of your road observations.
Posted by: DanS. on August 13, 2007 12:16 AMWashington, Lincoln ,Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt and I am sooo jealous... we went in the summer of 1994 and the mountain was fogged in... went up two days in a row and NOTHING!!! I was so disappointed.. but I guess thems the chances ya take..I plan on a trip again next year and I really hope I finally get to see it live and in person!
Posted by: jackie on August 13, 2007 01:27 AMWashington, Lincoln ,Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt ???
I thought it was the Four Tops!
Posted by: DanS. on August 13, 2007 02:04 AMDenny, if you're using MS Photo Editor, just go to the Image menu, push the brightness and contrast up and viola'. It'll blow the sky pure white, but WTF, you'll see the faces better.
Posted by: Gus Bailey on August 13, 2007 11:37 AMDateline: December 1974
I was driving from Atlanta to NY with Hudson, Chuck, Can't remember and myself.
We heard Kung Fu Fighting 17 times on the radio.
I'll take Ovaltine anytime.
Denny, I think we stayed up the road from the Holy Smoke in Keystone, a few weeks back. It was at the 4 President's Best Western, on highway 16A. We also ate at the Holy Smoke BBQ restaurant, close to the campground the cabins.
Even before Sturgis week, we saw too many bikers and all of them were from .... Iowa. Go figure. I loved driving through SD on I-90. No state patrol, so no speed limit. Even going through the construction zones 65 mph was easy in SD.
Posted by: DebbieKinIL on August 15, 2007 12:47 AMDebbie - I first stopped at that Best Western since I joined their club but they were full. The girl at the desk sent me down to the Holy Crap Lodge.
Posted by: Denny on August 15, 2007 11:51 AM