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We were up super early (for us) this morning—5:30 AM. We followed our plan to get to the laundromat first thing, arriving there at 8:00! Yay us!! We did our clothes, had breakfast, and were on the road at 9:30.
Our first stop was at the Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center in Lead (pronounced “leed”) South Dakota. This was a great stop. We took an hour trolley tour of the old mining town of Lead and then a short overview of the Sanford Underground Research Facility which is in the old Homestake Mine tunnels. If you are interested in the “sciencey” part of this, I recommend looking it up on Google. They are in the process of building the world’s flagship Neutrino Experiment. An international team of 1,000 scientists and engineers from more than 30 countries are building the most advanced neutrino experiment in the world, which could change our understanding of the universe. Groundbreaking was in July of 2017. By the numbers: 1 Nobel Prize won in physics, 4,850 feet of rock shields experiments at Sanford Lab, More than 200 international institutions conduct research at Sanford Lab. When finished, Neutrinos will travel through Earth from Fermilab in Illinois to
The hoist building for Homestake mine
This is one of the entrances for the Homestake Mineunderground detectors at Sanford Lab in South Dakota.
This was a very simplistic and short overview of what is going on there now. Again, if you have an interest in the science of it, Google!
Lead was formerly a booming and bustling gold town. Lead was once home to the Homestake Mining Company, the largest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. It was the second deepest mine in the world at over 8,000 feet deep when it quit production. It was owned by George Hurst and on his death went to Phoebe Apperson Hurst. She was a philanthropist, an education advocate, and a leader. She had many advanced ideas for the time and wasn’t afraid to go after what she wanted. Again—a Google search of her life would be most interesting.
From Lead, we went to its sister city, Deadwood. We just drove through this town which was VERY charming but quite busy. I think I remember that when we traveled through here many years ago with Larry and Rhonda that John lost $20 on playing a card game, and you all won a nice little chunk of change! Deadwood is a much more affluent and appealing
looking town than is Lead by the way, even though Deadwood is smaller in population than Lead. As you can tell by the pictures, it is a very nice historical area and we give part of the credit to the casinos for the more successful look of the town. A lot of hotel and motel development is there at the edges. John says for everyone not to forget that Wild Bill Hickok was killed in this town and is buried there. This is another factoid to Google—a lot of Wild West history is here in this area. Since the streets were busy and it was fairly hot, we chose to drive on to Sturgis.
We have decided that we haven’t lost anything in Sturgis. I am sure it will be impressive when the bikers arrive here in a few weeks, but there was nothing there to slow us down today, so we headed on to Spearfish, SD. During the 10 day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally the small town’s population will have attendees of between 600 and 700 thousand people!! WOW!! We don’t understand where they all come from and where they go.
Before going to our campground, we (of
course!) stopped in at a Fort Wally World to replenish supplies—the temperature clocked in at a cool 88 degrees! After completing our stop there, we headed to the Spearfish City Campground...note...you “can’t get there from here” using the GPS. It sends you all over town and if you follow it, you will likely be circling Spearfish for several days. Instead, we followed the instructions on the city website, and eventually found our way here. Pulling into camp at 4:15 we were shortly situated on our site. They say there is WiFi, but I think it is just a wish on their part. We will try to get this out tomorrow at a McDonalds (channeling Ed and Betty!) if possible. If not, it will be after we leave as we plan to be here for two nights.
We drove 81 miles today.
PS—I LOVE libraries!! Always be glad for your tax dollars that go to them! We are now sitting in the Spearfish Library WITH 5G internet...I may cry!! At any rate, I am now working on getting yesterday’s blog out. You will likely get today’s sometime tomorrow. Hope it is worth the wait!
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Double Crip
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Just saying hi
We've been in that area, and I failed to see how a zillion motorcycles could possibly fit into that little town - but I was glad we were there when they were not, ha!