The first four trips were about covering ground. This one was about staying still.
The object was the Black Hills, and specifically Sturgis in the week before the rally — close enough to watch the town being assembled, far enough ahead of it to have the roads to ourselves. That is a narrow window and we caught it exactly. The stages and barricades were going up on Main Street, the vendors were moving in, and Iron Mountain Road had nobody on it.
Getting there took three days out of Austin, on the twenty-first of July, 2024. Ray rode out alone — Aimee was not able to come — and collected Jerry in Waco. Five hundred and twenty-one miles to Amarillo, four hundred and twenty-one to Denver with a Rockies game at the end of it, and four hundred and eight more up through Wyoming and into the hills, picking Robin up from Rapid City on the way past.
Justin and Tiffany were meant to meet us in Sturgis and did not. Justin was ill, and they were sitting it out in Idaho Falls. So the Black Hills were ridden on two motorcycles rather than three, in heat that never let up: a heat dome had settled over that part of the country for the week, and having ridden north out of Texas in July partly to get away from exactly that, we took it personally.
What we did have was a set of rooms above the Indian dealership in Sturgis, which meant parking two Harley-Davidsons in the Indian lot every evening and going upstairs to bed. Four nights there, two long loops through the hills, and one day off.
We left on the twenty-seventh, three hundred and forty miles of US 212 across Montana to Red Lodge, where Justin had recovered enough to ride up from Idaho Falls with Tiffany and meet us. That made three bikes for the Beartooth Highway the next morning, which is the reason anybody rides to Montana, and for the run down through Yellowstone and over Teton Pass to Idaho Falls.
The motorcycles stayed there. Ray's in-laws have a place in Idaho Falls and were willing to house them, which is the third time the club has finished a trip by leaving the bikes somewhere useful rather than hauling them home. Idaho Falls had been a layover on the first trip, three years earlier. This time it became the garage.
