Waking up, I felt a repetitive banging noise going on inside my head. Where was that coming from? Was it due to the rare cask-strength Scotch that Malkie had produced round the campfire the previous evening, for slow contemplative sipping. Hardly. More likely the half bottle of Bushmills that Uncle Stephen unwisely left in the RV and which also appeared. But thinking back to the night before there was one other eau de vie – a complete soaking which Malkie and I received when a thunderstorm rolled in and we refused to budge from the fire until it was well established.
Having scrambled to put everything away, we retired to dampen the bedsheets and listen to the thunder. The rain raged all night, and was still drumming the roof of the coach when I awoke. At one point a bolt struck extermely close by with a blinding flash and a crack to strike terror into the heart. We don’t get thunder and lightening like this at home.
Browsing forlornly at the weather websites over breakfast we noted how we had not included any time in the plan for weather disruption. This could put a spanner in the works…
After a while the skies brightened and we decided to risk it and drive off. We are exploring the Black Hills of South Dakota today, which is not natural territory for a big rig. But the beauty of having the dinghy on behind (the white car we’ve been towing) is that we can drive to somewhere convenient, unhook the dinghy and go exploring.
The Black Hills are a beautiful forested mountain range, separate from the Rockies, so-called by the Native Lakota tribe because from a distance, the hills are dark with trees. You may think you haven’t heard of them, but I’ll bet you recognise this local attraction:
There is another mountain sculpture in the Black Hills, this one unfinished. The Crazy Horse Memorial is a non-state project to carve a sculpture of Crazy Horse, a Lakota warrior and leader, on land considered sacred to the Lakota. It has been underway since 1935, and is nowhere near complete. This is due to the scale of the design, which when finished, will dwarf Mt. Rushmore both in size and complexity.
With a mental note to come back here in twenty years (and spend a week in the hills, not a day), we reunited with the mothership and drove on into the Great Plains of South Dakota. From here we need to make some good time in order to be in Virginia by Day 12. However, we have seen a lot and the weather has cleared, so it’s time to leave the tourist trail and the convenience of RV parks behind, and venture out into the American Midwest.
Wow, that last pic is what they mean by Big Sky. Keep on trukkin’….another fire pit awaits you here in Virginia with view of the Blue Ridge in the loveliest state in the Union! Oh, and a horse for Malkie….