The Leonard Swanson Memorial Pathway seemed like a good break-in start for our bicycles. The bike trail starts near the Cleghorn Springs State Fish Hatchery and traverses about 9 miles (one way) through downtown Rapid City to end near the Central States Fairgrounds. The trail is concrete/paved nearly all the way, but can get confusing through all the downtown road construction that is currently underway. But hey, we managed. The best views we caught were the Canyon Lake Park and Meadowbrook Golf Club. Other than that it was mostly downtown sights with a scattering of small community parks. I think I’ll forgo posting pictures of Safeway and the local gas stations…
The bike path pretty much follows Rapid Creek all the way to the area of the fairgrounds. 
A peek at Canyon Lake 
Gee, I wonder why they call that “Gazebo Island”? 
Welcome to Canyon Lake Park 
Not a lot of mountain biking skills needed here. 
Passing by the Meadowbrook Golf Club 
There were a few low-bridge obstacles, you tall folks watch out! 
Nice golf greenery along Rapid Creek.
Jeanne located a REAL bicycle trail, a participant in the Rails To Trails system, called the George S. Mickelson Trail, and promptly set her sights on it. Our dilemma was logistics that include a K9. The trail is 108 miles long, stretching from Deadwood south to Edgemont. There are 14 trailheads scattered along the trail and the Hill City/Custer areas are about the midpoint. We generally have about a 6 hour window where we can leave Woodrow Wilson at home, but not much longer to avoid a major “clean up in aisle #5.” Now, you might be silently yelling at me, “Hey stupid, just kennel the mutt!” We learned the hard way on our visit to NYC that Woodrow Wilson is not amenable to being kenneled any more. And with Hill City being about a 40 mile drive from home, we would already lose a couple of hours in our window. So while we were contemplating the plan, we took a roadtrip over to the area of Hill City to check it out. We found several campgrounds in the area (probably already booked up for the summer, we’ll find out soon), then circled back home, still wondering how this is gonna work out. But since we “were in the neighborhood”, we returned via Road 16A (Iron Mountain Rd) so I could try to get proper photos of the Presidents as viewed through the 3 tunnels cut through the mountains (OK OK OK, hills already. As locals say, there is a reason they are called “Black Hills”.) My attempt at artsy-fartsy photography on our previous visit to the area failed miserably. This time, traffic was not outrageous, so I was able to achieve my objective. Now my only challenge is that I get the right names linked with the right tunnels in the pix.
Doane Robinson Tunnel view of the Presidents… 
So, looking out the southeast end of the C C Gideon Tunnel you see nature… 
…but turn around and look out the northwest end and say “Howdy” to George, Thomas, Theodore, and Abe. 
A view from the Scovel Johnson Tunnel
As all of you fellow full-timers know, life on the road can create daunting tasks when you need to get chores/repairs done and we are all at the mercy of the various business’s scheduling gremlins. We who are constantly on-the-move live life with a moving target mentality regarding appointments. We have been lolly-gagging in Rapid City waiting on a repair date for my rear slide mechanism grinding issue, so we have been able to thoroughly explore the area, including just the simple things in life like all things “city-life”. It certainly helps when there are lots of sights/features/points of interest in the same area you are burning time in. One such outing took us to check out the Rushmore Mall in Rapid City. It was a Saturday close to noon. I was surprised to see the lack of shoppers there at that time. The China-virus-hysteria has been a non-issue in this here part of the world for quite some time, so I find it hard to use that as an explanation for the lackluster patronage of the city’s big mall. We stumbled onto the Trader’s Market, a strange sight to see inside a big mall. This appeared to have been one of the usual big department stores typical of most U.S. malls, but now it was a massive indoor “swap meet”, complete with a small section for selling used/classic cars.
One Sunday found us making the one-hour drive east on I-90 to the “world famous” town of Wall and the infamous “Wall Drug”. Wall Drug has morphed from its humble beginnings in 1931 as a local pharmacy in a podunk gateway town to the Badlands into a large, mostly indoor tourist-trap “mall” laid out in no particular pattern. Wall is still a podunk gateway town to the National Park, but Wall Drug on this Sunday was jam packed full of We The Tourists. We still have the Badlands on our wish-list itinerary at some point, probably after our chores are finished in Rapid City & we can relocate to the area.
Wall Drug 
Across the street from Wall Drug 
Who’d of thunk a little podunk town in S.D. could have its own Harley shop? There must be something Harley related for this area, I wonder what it could be? (This I ask, as August fast approaches…)
Not wanting to TOTALLY exclude Woody from all the fun, we loaded him up and took him back to Canyon Lake Park in Rapid City to let him lead us on a walkabout. It was about a short 2-mile loop in and among several water features (lake, ponds, channels) chock-full of very nice sized trout. We saw herds of another type of fish, we tried to ID but have thus far failed big time. If any of you recognize them from these photos and want to share, feel free to comment to this blog post.
Rapid Creek again, at the park. 
It seemed all of these types of water features had fish in them. 
Welcome back to Canyon Lake Park, Woody. 
Here’s part of the Canyon Lake Flotilla… 
Rapid City does parks very well. 
Hello, Mr. Footlong Trout 
We still can’t figure out these striped beasts… 
…anyone have any ideas? Look closely and you might see the lone soldier trout.
Well son of a gun, that gets us up-to-date on the blog, so what the heck, I might as well post it. Until next post…
