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25. Apr, 2016
WEDNESDAY 04-06-08
This morning we left for Custer, South Dakota. The journey was very uneventful and straightforward. We passed Sturgis on I90, famous for its huge annual motorcycle rally held every August, with up to 300,000 bikers attending, that's an awful lot of leather.
Enroute we pulled in to Wal-Mart, Rapid City in order to buy some more duct tape. I wanted to seal the tops of the damaged roof vents completely as The Chef said the cling film won’t be too good once it gets hot (I wish!) and I therefore needed to completely cover the skylights with duct tape.
On arrival at our campground, Custer’s Gulch RV Park www.custersgulch.com the co-owner Elaine came out to meet me, it turns out she and her husband had just taken ownership of the campground earlier in the year when my email arrived requesting a reservation and details of local car hire facilities, I was their first customer. This campground has historic connections. General George Armstrong Custer brought a large expeditionary force to these Black Hills to reconnoitre this unknown wilderness in the middle of Indian country, and it was in this campground field that he and his men made camp.
We were allocated a very spacious pitch with a large area of grass next to our RV complete with a fire pit, though we won’t be using that as I’ve got my gas powered version and lots of LPG to use up. The problem we’ve found with winter having lingering 3-4 weeks longer than normal is that if you light a campfire it soon becomes too chilly to sit next to comfortably, and you finish up going indoors.
With Elaine’s help I managed to get fixed up with some local car hire. There are only two establishments hiring cars in Custer, one has a fairly low daily rate plus 25c per mile if you go over 100 miles a day and the other is $10 a day more but with a more flexible approach to the daily mileage. So I went with the latter.
I went up on to the roof of the RV and completely covered each roof vent with strips of overlapping duct tape, now I’m satisfied that they’re truly waterproof, and they still open for ventilation – British ingenuity, and chance to show our Colonial Cousins that we can still cut the mustard.
This evening we had a barbecue in order to give our new gas BBQ grill a test run. It performed very well and is far hotter than my beloved toolbox barbie.
LOCATION TONIGHT: Custer’s Gulch RV Park, Custer, South Dakota (GPS: N43.765521 W103.544811).