It's a year today since I smashed my final assessment at UWE
It's a year today since The Old Police Cottage was no longer our home in any way
These gave me plenty to think about on the long ride.
It's also a month today since I flew from Heathrow to Portland
And at some point today we passed the 1500 mile mark for the ride.
BOOM!
We left the Keystone Holiday Inn express around 8am. The first 20 or so miles to Rapid City was great, small steep ups and downs, winding roads to manage the undulations and nicely wooded, the Black Hills of South Dakota. Storming up some of the hills made me feel parts of my lungs other hills couldn't touch, but then I was reminded we are still above 4000ft in altitude, so maybe that had an effect.
As we got within 6 or 7 miles of Rapid City the route got less scenic, but there was a good gradient in our favour, even if roadworks and a crappy hard shoulder were not. We collected ourselves at a Starbucks on the corner of something and St Patrick. Having never been a Starbucks customer I refrained, apart from a refill of my water. Not sure if it's really that important witholding my custoim, I've been to McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, used Amazon and more alcohol companies than I care to mention. But i missed one coffee... hooray me!
So Rapid City, in my brief encounter, not very happy with it, we may have missed the interesting centre with it's many statues of presidents, but the outer parts are as uninviting, soulless and sprawling as any other city we've ridden through thus far. Given the time for reflection in the future I will look more into the reasons for this, state planning, federal planning market forces, constitution, The American Way? but for now I will continue my ride.
[After writing I read this article imagining the future of land use, it re-hashes a lot of the same old predictions around, density, urbanisation, climate change dealing with population growth, and is mostly from an American perspective. But there's a whole bit about "urbanism 2.0, or Heartland Villages" yeah I thought this kind of stuff sounded vaguely possible, from my study in Bristol when studying planning, but having seen and ridden through the all pervasive sprawl in the slice of the states we've covered so far, I just can't see it happening in the majority of places. Dense urban living isn't the American dream in the wide open spaces of the West.}
Once out of the city limits we had a sweet 5 or so mile section of highway that was dead straight. The hard shoulder was ridable and there was a tailwind. Dreamy. There were four of us out front and though not caning it we made good time. A stop off at the corner shop (no corners anywhere near) to re-group again and grab some supplies from rubber ducky and the next meet up was in Scenic in another 20 or so miles (62 for the day). Apart from a brief stop to get the van outta some muck I was in the mood to storm the highway. And I did, bashing the pedals and still soaking it up.
As I went over the crest of a small gentle hill the badlands appeared. I 'had a moment'. Bloomin' awesome. We stopped to get some scram at Scenic, A cool little ghost town in the Badlands.
I've been looking forward to this part of the trip: the long straight roads, the scenery, the openness the skies, probably since I'd even signed up for this adventure. It's awesome. I dunno where I got my love of these open roads from, except the movies. But with the views and the exertion I'd put in earlier was good to have that space to let my mind wander when I gave it a chance.
Another example of trying to take too many pictures of something I should just be watching. But i watched a fair bit too. It seems the EPS (Excitable Puppy Syndrome) may have returned.
And finally:
There's been some chat of top ten Westerns. So in order to get back to the original intent of this blog... here's a list of ten Westerns:
- Blazing Saddles
- The Good, The bad, The Ugly, (also representing the whole dollars trilogy for the benefit of brevity)
- True Grit
- Ravenous
- Dead Man
- Back to the Future III
- The Three Amigo's
- Once Upon a time in the West
- High Plains Drifter
- 3.10 to Yuma, take either one.
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