Day Sixteen: Riding around Sturgis and making new friends.

Late last night Robby and I went to Wendy's to grab a bite and I smelled my sweatshirt and said this stinks! He said it doesn't stink, that is the smell of freedom baby! I said it smells like exhaust actually. ;-) So for today our song is Bob Seger's Roll Me Away, one of my favorites:

We rolled across the high plains
Deep into the mountains
Felt so good to me
Finally feelin free

We got up and motivated early enough to have breakfast with some of our Knox County friends that are here...see photo above. We rode all day with them. Even though we stayed locally we did over 200 miles. Started out in Deadwood, went to Rushmore, to Crazy Horse and then to Sturgis to shop. A very large storm rolled in though and I beat feet to get back to the hotel. I lost Robby somewhere shopping and also the other boys, so I literally raced the storm back to the hotel. I lost by a minute and got a little bit wet. As soon as I parked I saw a lady saying it was gonna hail, to take cover. I did and left my poor bike out in the weather. It didn't hail, but the winds got up to 70 MPH. I called Rob and left him a message to not ride to stay wherever he was. He didn't get the message. He said the lightning was so cool and he thought he was gonna get struck a time or two.

Robby called about 45 min later and said he was here and he was downstairs. He was chatting with a Purdue grad that was giving him a hard time for being a dumb IU guy riding in the rain. I went down and met up with Robby and the people that we chatted with last night when we got in. We decided to go to the bar with them and talk some more since they were so nice. ;-) Found out they are from Texas, who doesn't love Texans? We just got back from spending a couple of hours hanging with our new friends. Robby found out that they lived in the same town as his idol, Marcus Latrell. Between the Purdue and Latrell topics we had some really nice chatting! ;-)

All in all (other than the getting wet) it was a great day of old friends and new ones.

We are gonna head out of here tomorrow afternoon and see how far we make it east.

Chris and Robby
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