If You Were a River in the Mountains Tall. The Rumble of your Water Would be my Call.

 Sorry I've been absent. We've had guests visiting. Now that I'm back, I'll continue with the vacation posts. Don't worry. We're getting close to the end of these...

On Monday, John and I decided to ride part of the Centennial Trail. 108 miles of single track. Some of it is unrideable, so we did some research to find a good section on the Northern end of it. There is a part called Bulldog Climb outside of Sturgis that was supposed to be fun to ride.

Check out this sweet, orange, gravel.

We found one of the trail heads and took it up, up, up and we had to push our bikes, it was so steep. After trying a little farther and not seeing an end to the steep climbing, we turned around and looked for the other trail head that would take us in the other direction.

This time we just had to go through a cow pasture and a tunnel under the highway, where we met some lovely bats and rode through water in the dark and hoped there was nothing too scary underneath the water.

Our bikes were very happy on the trails.

We finally got to the actual trail and it was really wonderful. It was another of those gradual ascents on the way out and gradual descents on the way back.

I climbed as far as I could, until my already fried legs couldn't take anymore and then we headed back downhill...Which is always the funnest part...Even with the scary drop-off.

 We went out for lunch, changed our clothes and our bikes and did a road ride down Spearfish Canyon Road and back.

Our bikes enjoyed the view as well.

 It was a beautiful ride - about 45 miles round trip. We stopped at Bridal Veil Falls to take pictures and had a great time checking out the scenery and the cars were very respectful of us. It's nice riding on these scenic highways, very few of the cars are in a hurry and they're all checking out the views too.

 We got to Cheyenne Crossing, which is the halfway point. We stopped and had a Payday candy bar and a beer - a winning combination. Quite a few people approached us to talk to us about our bikes and our ride. It is a great way to meet people.

 On the way back, we took a detour to check out the Roughlock Falls. Since I was wearing a Bike Iowa jersey, a guy passed me and asked me why I wasn't on RAGBRAI. I told him we were meeting them on Wednesday.

We finished our route by taking the bike trail into Spearfish and got to ride through the community campground and the fish hatchery. We did laundry that night and I made some steelhead trout with baked potatoes and roasted asparagus for dinner. Oh, happy day.