Fort Thompson, SD July 14

Our luck seems to have returned, at least in terms of weather. Both yesterday and today the winds have shifted and are from the northwest, so we have been having a nice tailwind. Yesterday we made it to Pierre. We stayed on a picture perfect spot alongside a lake. Both the camping and the showers were free. We even found a church group giving out free food in the park! I found Pierre to be very quaint and enjoyed meeting people in the park. Today we rode to Ft. Thompson, about 75 miles.Turns out South Dakota has some of it's own mountains...we had 5 ginormous hills today that were on par with a certain stretch in Montana after Roger's pass. Ft Thompson is on one of the Indian reservations and we have already met some interesting people. We convinced the local grocery store to cook us a pizza so we had a nice picnic out behind the store for dinner tonight.
Now we are drinking a pre-birthday bottle of wine at the campsite waiting for the water to come back on. Yes, the water here stopped running right after we got here and we narrowly missed getting a shower. Hopefully this bit of bad luck is confined only to campsite luck and not on the weather. I'll take a tailwind anyday! I say that now but after this wine is gone, this might be a different story. Tomorrow we are headed into the middle of nowhere again. Our destination is some random recreation area about 75 miles away. In terms of other cyclists, we've met a few groups in the last few days. We met a couple from Wisconsin biking out to Oregon (and moving there as well), a group of high school students from St. Louis doing the Lewis and Clark trail from St. Louis to Seaside with their teacher, and an older couple jumping to national parks and doing the exact same tour they did last summer. We are getting excited for Sioux City and RAGBRAI! We estimate our Sioux City arrival on Monday. Thanks to my mom for typing in 14 text messages to the blog so we can be updated! Post by Andrea

From Mom- Happy Birthday to my favorite girl! 25 years old July 15!