| Cruisin' |
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| Written by Susan Hollingshead | |||
| Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:07 | |||
 Today the Voyager Association had a prescheduled bus tour of the local US air force base which we did not sign up for. Rick and I had visited the Pensacola air base while we were in Florida this past spring so seeing another one was of no interest to us. Instead we went on a motorcycle cruise of our own but first Rick made some wiring adjustments to our bike.We use our XM Roadie (the small portable one) with both the bike and the car however when it is on the bike, because it gets plugged into the cigarette lighter outlet we have a lot of wire that needs to be “tucked” away. It also has to share the outlet (by way of a dual power plug) with our GPS system and yesterday the two blew a fuse. This morning Rick hardwired the XM Roadie into the electrical system putting less strain on the outlet and by doing so it tidied up the wires. We chose to drive through Custer State Park on our way to the Crazy Horse Memorial Monument. We had been there once before in 2002 (in our pre-fulltiming life) and we wanted to return to see if there were many changes. The Crazy Horse Monument is a work in progress and makes Mount Rushmore (which has become horribly over commercialized since I first visited it in 1992) seem minute in comparison. (Rick and I went to Rushmore in 2002 and were deeply disappointed so today we saw no need to return.) As motorcyclists Crazy Horse gave us a discount and we only paid $5 each to enter but would have gladly paid the regular price of $10. There is a wonderful native museum there and the history of Crazy Horse is amazing. Sadly, it too seems more commercialized but for us, though it seems to have lost some of the native spirituality we sensed on our last visit, it was still worth the visit. We rode through the Black Hills, along some of the best roads seeing some really beautiful countryside. We passed through Deadwood and stopped in Sturgis where next month, the largest annual Motorcycle Rally is held. We’ve heard that the number of attendees range upward of 525,000. That’s a lot of bikers! The weather was perfect for our cruise and we came across many other Voyager riders cruisin' too along our way. The picture on the left is the Crazy Horse Memorial Monument; on the right is a cast model of what it will look like someday when it is finished.
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