Today was a long and eventful day. We started out leaving a little later than usual due to some extra time needed to pack the bounty of food provided by Main Street Market last night. In some ways you could say that our route could be broken into four very different segments. The first segment, from Rapid City to Mount Rushmore started out as fairly foggy, but that eventually lifted as we made it to the monument. This segment also marked our entrance into the Black Hills, it's been quite some time since we've seen hills of this caliber, however I think we all made it over them without too much difficulty. In addition, on the final climb up to Mount Rushmore, a driver going in the opposite direction stopped and cheered for us, it was just the encouragement that some of us needed to climb the last half mile.
We reached Mount Rushmore just in time to see Greenpeace protesters rappel down the side of Lincoln's head and unfurl a banner commenting on Obama's environment policy. It was a little disappointing that their protest had to be at the expense of all those trying to enjoy the monument. While we were standing around watching the Greenpeace spectacle, we happened to meet a young boy who had been diagnosed with cancer at the age of three weeks. He's now been cancer free for nine years, and is a healthy kid. We invited him to be part of our team photograph, which we'll try to get up as soon as we can.
Our second segment led us to the town of Custer. While we continued to wind our way up and down hills, we had an added challenge of a headwind. Because of our late departure and the long time we had spent at Mount Rushmore, our lunch stop ended up being much later than usual, leaving many of us very hungry. Thankfully we had more than enough food to leave everybody more than satisfied for the third segment of today's ride.
Our third segment was best defined by a sign we saw along the way warning "NARROW WINDING ROAD NO SHOULDER". At first that seemed like a very scary proposition, however the traffic on US-16 at that point was fairly minimal and also had to slow down enough that riding with traffic was very possible. Along the way we had some amazing views, some great climbs and descents, and was easily one of the coolest stretches of road that we've seen thus far.
Our last 20 miles into New Castle was dominated first by a long series of downhills that took us all the way into Wyoming and a few miles past. During this stretch of road many of us rarely went slower than 20 mph, and at points some of us exceeded 40 mph. Unfortunately the downhill was not the only thing we encountered on this portion of our ride. As we descended further and further we could see a large storm starting to brew over the Black Hills. While we managed to avoid getting wet, we did hear the tornado sirens go off and encountered some pretty nasty winds.
Thankfully we managed to avoid most of the storm and made it safely into our destination where the church ladies provided us a wonderful meal of lasagna and a variety of salads. I think most of us would agree that today has been one of the best, and certainly one of the most exciting days yet.