Adventures are not just pony rides in May sunshine.

The weather turned cold and wet as we set off from Cody on Saturday, our day of adventures.

A flat tire on the trailer as we rolled into Tensleep* was the first trouble.  It had shredded on the downhill grade into town.  Fortunately AAA is available in small western towns as the wrench provided with the spare was inadequate.  We also were happy to see that we had pulled over next to the espresso shop and bakery.

Next adventure was crossing the mountains of the Bighorn National Forest in the SNOW at about 9600 feet with hairpin turns and steep grades.

The cold pouring rain and the delay in Tensleep made us decide not to stop at Devil's Tower but to push on to our reserved site at Custer state park near Mt. Rushmore.

It was dark and rainy, the various GPS devices kept giving conflicting routes and the paper maps we had were unhelpful.

We went for the shortest and seemingly fastest route.  This adventure was pulling the trailer up and down the Black Hills in the rain with no clear idea of where we were going, but we finally found the park entrance.

That's when things got really interesting.  It was 10 at night and all the park offices were closed.  We had no map.  The roads were wet and unlighted. 

We followed the signs to our campgrounds and suddenly were brought up short by the warning sign that ahead were low narrow tunnels that the trailer would not get through.

We didn't know if we would turn off before any of these tunnels.  The next 4 miles were quite stressful as we negotiated more hairpin turns on a narrow road with very few places where we could turn around.

Well we did make our turnoff before the tunnels and found our campsite in the dark.  The last excitement was that there was no way to back into our site so we just pulled straight in and went to bed, leaving that problem til morning light.

*Tensleep is where in 1980 our friend's bus broke down on a school trip.  The class spent 4 days there and never made it to Yellowstone.
Tensleep is also at a longitude similar to where we had mechanical trouble on last year's trip.