2/20/2023 0 Comments Road to nowhere south dakotaMammoth venues like the Knuckle Saloon filled with Bud Light drinkers comparing notes on their bikes, eating beef tips and watching live bands. The organized mayhem of Sturgis, once I made it through miles of two-wheeled traffic jams and found a rare four-wheel parking place, was vaguely like Mardi Gras, though, with leather and much more engine-revving. I’m guessing that would impress the Sturgis crowd about as much as tales of miniature golf experience impresses the PGA leader board.īut I had come to be an outsider, to spend a few days in a culture easily more foreign to me than many foreign countries. In case you haven’t guessed, I am not a motorcycle enthusiast the closest I’ve come to riding on a Harley-Davidson is clinging on the back of sputtering moto-taxis in Latin America. It’s also about two hours from Sturgis - though some bikers stay even farther away - but it is only 30 minutes from the entrance to Badlands National Park ($15 for a week pass), with its stark buttes and pinnacles that look like a giant kid built a sand castle 500,000 years ago and it stuck. The room was still available because the gravel road approach is not very popular among bikers, Ms. Eventually the road leads to a house, and not any old house: a Sears prefab from the catalog, a Mission Revival model, with all its original wood and barely altered since it was completed in 1923. Just rolling plains of pasture and already rolled bales of hay line the route there - beautiful, spare land, a sort of fantasy Dakota that would be hard for outsiders to imagine living in permanently and (I imagine) hard for anyone who grew up there to leave. That is where you’ll find the Triangle Ranch Bed and Breakfast, eight miles down a gravel road from a spot between two exits on Interstate 90, and if you see a soul during that bumpy stretch, you either got quite lucky or believe that cows have souls. And now that I’ve found the middle of nowhere, it turns out to be more remote than I could have imagined: on a rural mail route way outside of Philip, S.D., population 750. I used to mean it as a put-down, but I’ve discovered that it’s actually a good thing. It turns out I’ve been using the phrase “in the middle of nowhere” incorrectly my whole life.
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