“Joinin’ us for a ride? Great! We’re heading out for about 3 weeks at the beginning of August. I’ll email the approximate route to you. If you are up for travelling the whole time with us, that’ll be fun. There are two other people joining us; a good friend John from Alberta and Vikki is flying to Alberta from Ontario to meet up with us. Vikki will ride on the back of John’s bike. We’ve been planning this since spring. We have a couple of definite destinations we plan to stop at. Having another couple of friends from Yukon join in will be a lot fun! We leave the Island in 2 weeks and head to John’s place.  Can’t wait to see you both!”

Six of us were taking off on a nice long motorcycle ride, primarily zigzaggin’ through several states in the US; 4 bikes and 6 people. I was the only female rider. After the trip, my friend Monique noticed how much fun I was having and bought a bike for herself as soon as she got home. My other friend Vikki keeps ‘threatening’ to buy one.

I started out my trip crossing the Rocky Mountains. I’m always in awe when I travel through the mountains, no matter how many times I’ve done it. The six of us met up in Alberta and headed straight to the state of Montana. As soon as we crossed into the US, a terrible storm with hale and lots of rain hit us hard. We managed to ride just a few kilometres to a restaurant to take cover. Luckily, that storm was the only one we came across while we were travelling for 3 weeks.

Montana is a beautiful state. We camped in a state park one night. There was lots of bear activity; I’m used to being in bear country. There was no one else in the campground except us. To ensure Yogi and Booboo didn’t wake us up, we strung our breakfast up in a tree a few campsites away.

As we travelled, we camped or rented motel/hotel rooms, depending on where we were. I get tired of eating in restaurants pretty quickly when I’m travelling. Most of the time, we’d make breakfast at our campsite before we headed out. We’d pass through a town, buy whatever we needed to make lunch and find a nice place along the roadside to eat. We’d of course pick a nice scenic spot to enjoy for about an hour and then off we’d go again, down the road. Dinner was usually quite late. If we weren’t camping and cooking dinner over an open fire, we’d pop into a restaurant close by to wherever we were laying our heads down for the night.

I wanted to see the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I’ve travelled through many, many reservations throughout Canada and the US. Pine Ridge is a huge rez. Most of the time we travelled, we were on secondary roads and sometimes secondary roads to those secondary roads. The odd time we even landed on dusty dirt roads just to check it out! By the time we made it to South Dakota, the south west corner, it was getting late and would be dark soon. We continued travelling through the reservation, hoping to find a meal and a place to stay.

We finally came across a motel with a restaurant attached to it. It was dark and everything was closed. The restaurant was closed too, but we could see movement inside, so of course we knocked on the door. They were nice folks. They told us it was too late to feed us and the motel was being renovated. We managed to convince them to rent some rooms to us. By then we didn’t care if renovations were underway. We had nowhere to go and it was dark. We weren’t sure we’d come across anything else for a few hours if we continued travelling.

I’m pretty sure we were in Pine Ridge. It was a dusty dark little place with no one around it seemed. We were told we could get food at a gas station down the road and some beer if we wanted too. Our rooms were scary to say the least, but I didn’t mind. I needed a place to sleep. I rolled out my sleeping bag and didn’t bother with using the blankets, pillows or sheets that were on the bed. It was sort of like camping inside, except there wasn’t a nice fire burning. The rooms were quite sparse, but it didn’t matter.

My friends John and Colin left to pick up 'dinner to go' for us from the gas station down the road. I didn’t have much of an appetite by then anyway because it was late. They managed to find beer too! They said they pulled up to a drive through beer place and placed their order. We didn’t have a table to put the food on nor chairs anywhere. So there we were, with our dinner consisting of all of the chicken and pizza the gas station had on hand and our take out beer. I’m not sure how long that food was sitting around; some of us were pretty hungry. Dinner was laid out in the parking lot. I found a nice comfy spot on the curb. We had great laughs that night about how our day went and the sights we saw. You have to make the best of whatever the situation is I say. And, hey, I made it to Pine Ridge. I wanted to see it and travel through.

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is considered one of the poorest areas in the US. It’s actually a dry area – alcohol free zone. I learned the next day about it being dry. I apologize Pine Ridge, for breakin’ the rules. I realize now, when my friends followed directions for food and beer it was a few minutes to the state border to a place called White Clay, Nebraska. White Clay has few residents – less than twenty, I think. White Clay’s primary business is to sell alcohol to the residents of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Unfortunately the rez has many folks, the Sioux Nation, struggling with alcoholism and living in abject poverty with not much around for miles. I’ve seen living conditions like this before however, so I was not shocked by it.

The next morning we thanked the folks who operated the motel and restaurant, for letting us stay. With the daylight, Vikki and I figured out where the gas station was and bought coffee to go for all of us. What a dark place at night it was.

We continued on through several states as we made our way to the east coast, North Carolina and then north and west to Canada.  Colin and Monique left us after we visited Memphis, Tennessee and headed back to Canada.  My bike trip with the rest of the group eventually ended in Ontario where I helped my mother recuperate from surgery for 2 weeks before I headed back home to the west coast.