My Pilgrimage to Sturgis Part III

“My Pilgrimage to Sturgis” is a multi-part story chronicling my trip to the 75^th Annual Sturgis Motorcycle Week.

Part III - A Day in Sturgis:

On our first full day in The Black Hills, the wife and I forayed into Sturgis, SD.  Sturgis, after all, was the official reason for the trip.  It stood to reason that it’s the first place we’d go.  We left Custer State Park somewhere between 6:30 AM and 7:00 AM. On our way out of Custer, there was a light fog rising from the roadside creek and fields, and we passed a small group of Pronghorn Antelope standing on the shoulder of the road.  After the hour-long ride, we arrived in Sturgis between 7:30 AM and 8:00 AM.  We were on vacation, so we didn’t keep close track of the time.

Despite the fact that we got to Sturgis early in the morning, Main Street was completely filled with motorcycles, and it took us about 30 minutes to find a parking space.  In the end, we decided that it was more convenient to pay for a parking spot a couple of blocks away from the main drag than it was to search for free parking.  No big deal.  In fact, I kind of expected it.

After parking, we walked to the aforementioned Main Street.  This is the point where I should mention that Sturgis was effectively another tourist trap.  I expected this, but not to the extent I experienced.  Even the Sturgis Harley dealership was nothing but T-shirts.  It didn’t have a single bike on display.  Main Street was nothing but souvenir shops, with nothing to really differentiate one from another, and the occasional bar thrown in for good measure.  Strips of road that served as alleys during the off season were converted into temporary stores for the rally.  The streets were lined with awesome, beautiful, ugly, abused motorcycles.  (This part I expected.)  But the bikes did not appear to be owned by biker gang members or hot biker chicks.  Judging by the people walking the streets and flooding the shops, these bikes were owned by 40-something and 50-something middle-aged men and women, like my wife and me, who were also there to see what the fuss was about, and to check an item off of their respective bucket lists.  I stopped into one of the bars to drown my disillusionment.

My wife and I spent the next couple of hours fulfilling our duty as tourists, looking for just the right memorabilia for ourselves and to take home to our family.  I bought a sleeveless button down shirt that demonstrated that I was, indeed, in Sturgis for the 75^th Annual Bike Week, and a patch for my biker jacket proclaiming “I rode mine.”  It took several hours for us to find everything we were looking for.

I don’t want to paint this as strictly a tourist trap, or as a disappointment.  That’s not the case.  As I mentioned, there were thousands of bikes on the main drag.  Many of these bikes were remarkable.  There was one that was completely covered in cow hide and leather.  (By cow hide, I mean that it still had the fur.)  There was another (trike) that looked like a Cadillac.  Another one was decked out to pay homage to John Deere.  Alas, though, there were no bare titties bouncing their way down Main Street.  The closest we came to seeing that was a young woman in a lingerie store who wore a G-string and pasties for her work clothes, and another young woman who was scantily dressed as a she-devil.  But it wasn’t a drunken free-for-all.  In fact it was pretty sedate.

But after four or five hours, we decided that we’d had enough, and we headed back to camp.  On the way out, we discovered that our decision to go to Sturgis early was the right one.  As we left, we saw that traffic was backed up from Main Street all the way to the I-90 freeway exit.  Those poor bastards had a long wait in store to get to Downtown Sturgis.

A few pics from Sturgis...