Today was a travel day. Unfortunately, our time in Rapid City had come to an end for this year. We broke down our stuff, crammed it in the trailer and departed from the Happy Holidays RV Park. It was a very nice park – quiet, full hookups, good wifi and spacious sites. We headed back to US-79 and turned south. We arrived in South Dakota from Nebraska a week ago on this same road. We continued south for about 50 miles until we got to Hot Springs where we turned west on US-18 through the southern flank of the Black Hills. We climbed up to around 4000 feet a couple times before starting a long descent into Wyoming.
The terrain flattened out a bit as we left the Hills but didn’t really get Kansas-flat. At a place called Mule Creek Junction, US-18 turns abruptly south and we followed it to a tiny town called Lusk. There, we pulled into BJ’s RV Park which is located in a nice middle-class neighborhood. As far as we can tell, there is not much going on in Lusk. We tried to get a pizza delivered from the only pizza joint in town but we were unable to get the operators to answer the phone. We cooked in instead. Fortunately, Lusk is very quiet and about the only thing we could hear was a distant train passing every so often.