South Dakota!

This last week was spent almost entirely in South Dakota.  You're probably saying to yourself or your neighbor, "Why would anyone go to South Dakota?"  Well, the answer is simple.  To visit some family members!  More specifically, The Wife's grandparents.  They were going through some great-granddaughter-withdrawal and offered to let us come visit them for a week, and so the trip was planned!

I knew that my training would be taking a little break during this trip, as I would be without my bike and I assumed I wouldn't be able to find a lap pool.  The one thing I was planning on doing during this trip was running.  I was keeping in mind, though, that the point of this trip was to go visit family, so I wasn't planning on doing any major workouts...it was going to be more of a recovery week.

We flew in and got right to business.  From the day we were there to the day we left, we didn't really spend a whole lot of time just sitting around.  I know, there's actually stuff to do in South Dakota!  Here's a quick photo summary of some of the things we did and saw:

My daughter is on that train, at a HUGE free park called Storybook Island

My daughter playing on a bouncy thing at Storybook Island.

A group of baby bears at Bear Country

Those same baby bears climbing a tree...crazy!

A big bear sitting on a log, watching as we drove by in Bear Country.

Mount Rushmore

Another shot of Mount Rushmore

The historic 1880 train

Out tickets to ride that historic 1880 train

A group of pink motorcycles.  We went to Sturgis, and this was the week before the big biker rally.  There were already a ton of bikers in town for the rally.

Even with all of these pictures, I didn't include pictures of Old MacDonald's Farm, the Crazy Horse monument (similar to Mount Rushmore, but for Indians, and actually much larger than Mount Rushmore), or the winery that we visited.  Like I said, we kept ourselves quite busy.

As for my training during this trip.  I was able to squeeze in two runs.  My first run was on a very interesting treadmill in the condo's that we were staying in.  My second run almost didn't happen.

The Wife and I were going to run together during this second run, and we were planning on doing somewhere between 6-8 miles.  We arranged for our daughter to watch a movie after dinner over at the grandparent's place so we could do our run.  The only problem was that there was rain in the forecast.  We took a short nap in the afternoon and awoke to the sound of thunder...and rain.  We checked out the forecast and found that it was actually supposed to stop raining for about 2 hours.  Perfect!  We rushed to get ready and took our daughter over to the Great's place.  When we stepped outside, it was still semi-stormy looking, but we could see that the nasty clouds were moving away and we had a short window of opportunity.

Waving goodbye to our daughter and Grandpa

The view as we walked out the front door...not too stormy, but still a slight sprinkle.

The view back at the condo...very stormy, but moving away from us.

 The run was a very scenic run.  It's too bad that we had to be back eventually, because I probably could have run forever with path we took.  Everything was so green, and much more pleasant to look at than Arizona is.  We took a main road back over to Storybook Island and met up with a pretty awesome running/bike path. 

Sorry this one is blurry...it was an action photo.  No time to stop!

The best part of this path!  No motor-driven vehicles!

We ended up only running a small portion of the path, and it was still awesome.  We spent our whole run alongside a small creek/river and giant trees.  If I could find a place like this to run close to my house, I'd probably run every day...and enjoy it much more!

So the South Dakota trip was a success.  We had a lot of fun hanging out with The Wife's Grandparents, seeing all of the sights that are around The Black Hills, and even got in a few workouts!