hill city to billings montana

Our campsite owners provided a wonderful breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, homefries, onions and biscuits with gravy along with coffee and juice all served at picnic tables in a cabin. It was a huge undertaking as the biker community ate early and lots. It was a great start to our day. We headed out to travel thru the black hills and were again accompanied by numerous motorcycles. The Black Hills are described as an island of mountains in a sea of prairies—the hills are the highest point east of the Rockies and are pine covered mountains. We followed highway 385 up to Deadwood, then thru Lead to Spearfish via the Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway. Deadwood was the site of the last big frontier gold rush in North America—both Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane lived and died there. Deadwood is still a gaming town so we thought we would park the car, roam the main street and maybe even try our luck at some of the slots but even at 9am the place was alive and full—no room to move or park so we just turned the car around and headed for the highway and the beautiful drive thru the mountains along the Spearfish Creek which runs north for some strange reason. As we proceeded further to the west we lost site of the motorcycles and once into Wyoming there were very few to be seen on the road.

We travelled in the northeast part of Wyoming—it is between the Black Hills on the east and the Big Horn Mountains on the west. It was hot but not humid and very windy—someone said it was always windy in Wyoming. We could see for miles on the wide open plains under clear skies—no smog or humidity here. We had hoped to have a feed of ribs for lunch but they did not serve them until evening so had to settle for prime rib instead.

We left Wyoming and entered Montana close to where Custer made his last stand at the battle of Little Big Horn. Actually we stopped at the information centre in Hardin and found another of those wonderful community museums that documented the past of the county—it is located 15 miles from the famous battle. We spent time exploring all the buildings that they had moved to this original farm site—the original farm house and barn are there but there is also a school, a doctor’s office, a church,--22 buildings in all. It is a lot of work and very well presented so worth a stop and had it not been so hot we might have spent even longer there.

We decided to stop for the night in Billings Montana and are in a nice little motel right downtown next door to the hospital and their medical complex. This particular motel chain, Riverstone Inns make it a policy to build near hospitals and give a special rate to patients needing daily tests and treatments or families visiting inpatients. Their regular rates for the likes of us are also more reasonable than any of the other motels in town. Since we only wanted soup for supper we decided to try the hospital cafeteria—a good choice it was too, as the soup was good, the sandwich freshly made to our specs and the salad nice and fresh. It was nice to walk after dinner but not too far as it was just a little to hot for our liking.