Day 7, Thursday, June 23

I headed out across South Dakota with the intent of making a very long day’s ride to the Badlands. What I hadn’t counted on was what happens after dusk here. Apparently SD has had a LOT of rain in last few months. Consequently they’ve got a bumper crop of bugs, all of which ended up splattered across the front of my motorcycle, my boots, and the visor of my helmet. I had to ditch my plans to make it to the Badlands and pulled over at a KOA in Mitchell. WHAT A DISASTER. It was with out doubt the worst single night of camping I’ve ever had in my life. It started out the moment I pulled in. The rain meant a bumper crop of mosquitoes. These weren’t your little garden variety buzzers. They were plague proportion swarms of inch long blood thirsty beasts that sounded like army helicopters. You couldn’t even breathe in without getting them in your nose or mouth. After a LOT of cussing, I got my tent set up, took a shower and took a running dive into my tent to try to bring as few of the bugs in with me as possible. I killed 20 of them in the tent before I turned off my light and lay down. As though that weren’t enough, the temperature felt like it was about 90 degrees in the tent and it was so humid that I was literally dripping sweat as I lay there on the air mattress. Never mind a sleeping bag. At about midnight the temperature finally started to drop but was accompanied by an ominous display of thunder and lightning. Approaching 1am the tempest hit. Torrential down pour and 70 mph winds (no exaggeration...I found out that wind speed from the weather radio the next morning). Even though my tent was fully staked out, and I was physically holding it up from the inside with my hands, the wind literally shrink wrapped the tent around me. I don’t care HOW water resistant your tent’s fly is, it will leak in those conditions. Thankfully the only things in the tent with me were my air mattress and sleeping bag still in its stuff sac. Then I remembered, CRAP, that means my boots and helmet are outside tucked under the fly which had been thoroughly defeated by the winds. When the wind, but not the rain, subsided a bit, I reached out and brought the boots and helmet inside the tent, turned off my light and tried to go to sleep. It worked for about 15 mins before I was waked up by something crawling across my face. In fact, a bunch of things crawling across my face. Turns out that I'd pitched my tent beside an ant nest and had managed to put my helmet squarely in the middle of it! The rain had stirred up the ants and they, finding a delicacy of splattered bugs on my helmet and boots called all of their relatives and friends in for a feast, and that feast was now spreading out over the inside of my tent. So I cursed some more, threw the boots and helmet back out under canopy and spent the next hour killing the ants and mosquitoes which had now set up residence in my tent. By the time that was all done, the sky was already starting to get light. I don’t know how much sleep I got but it wasn’t much. If someone had told me that every night of my trip would be like that, I would likely have abandoned the dream, packed up my bags and headed home. It was terrible.