Downtown Rapid City, South Dakota

After 10 straight days of driving either Nessie or Gus we decided to take the trolley into downtown "Rapid" as the locals call it, and see what we could see.

The trolley loop goes to a number of the museums, parks, and points of interest around the city.  We didn't know it, but by one account Rapid City is known as "Dinosaur City", in fact, here comes one now….

We hopped off in downtown and cruised the shops for awhile, paying our tourist dues as we went!  Lunch was at the Rapid City Firehouse.

The "outdoor" tables were in the remodeled fire wagon building next door to the firehouse building.  The fire wagon space is the dark garage-looking thing in the photo above. The owners have kept a lot of the early memorabilia from the early days of firefighting.

Re: the lunch.  Donna had a "Bison and Blue",  a buffalo burger sprinkled with blue cheese.  I ordered a "Cricket" burger with cream cheese and jalapeños.  Great!  Downtown is a nice, clean area, filled with a variety of great shops (read shoes), restaurants and galleries, and includes some 10 blocks of refurbished old buildings.

Thursday night is downtown music night (tonight the theme is Hawaiian music), and the streets were slowly being closed in the late afternoon.  Our trolley only ran until 4, so we hadda make a quick return trip and we're ready for a quiet evening at "home".

P.S. So much for the quiet evening at home. As I write this, 9:24 pm MDT, we've just survived one of the most intense thunderstorms we've ever seen.  Constant lightning, heavy rain, and thunder that shook the motorhome. Golf ball size hail at one time, nickel size hail for about 1/2 hour.  The local news says that we had 70 mph wind gusts just a few miles from the rv park. Rainfall has been about a two inches in the last hour.  The cell is moving off to the northeast toward the plains, so we should be ok until tomorrow evening, when, if patterns hold, we'll get to enjoy this type of activity again.  Oh Boy!