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 | Route 66 Deluxe | Sturgis and the Old West | Self-Guided Tours | Rental |

Sturgis … or more accurately ‘the Black Hills Motorcycle Rally’, the world’s most famous Harley-Davidson bike rally. Once a year all the reincarnated warriors, kings and cowboys gather for a peaceful party on ancient American Indian land of the Sioux warrior tribe. Sturgis is a quarter million gleaming Harley-Davidsons of every model and year in one place at one time in an atmosphere of great fun and revelry. This is the apex of the American biker scene where every kind of Harley aficionado from the down and dirty to rich urban bikers meet with friendship and good will for the express purpose of having the world's greatest party! Don’t miss this 11-day round trip from Denver to Sturgis and back, featuring the world’s wildest annual biker party.

But our tour is much more than just a ‘pilgrimage’ to Sturgis. We want to show you a little bit of America, to offer an experience beyond compare. Spectacular mountains, open grasslands, historic monuments, pioneer trails - we’ll take you through the unmistakeable cattle country of the Old West, the amazingly beautiful Rocky Mountains, Mt Rushmore National Monument and many more sights and sounds to remember. And what better way to enjoy this than with a group of like-minded Harley lovers – a holiday you’ll never forget!

Highlights

• Stanley Hotel
• Sturgis Rally
• Mt Rushmore
• Baldands NP
• Deadwood
• Devil’s Tower
• Rocky Mountain NP

Itinerary

DAY 1  Fly to Denver, from London direct with British Airways. We’ll meet at the check-in desks at 1 pm to get the formalities out of the way. We will give you your flight tickets then, so please don’t go hunting for them in your tour pack. On arrival in Denver we’ll be met at the airport and escorted to our tour hotel, one of Denver’s finest, in the early evening. At the welcome dinner you will meet your road crew. Oxford Hotel.

DAY 2 Denver – Cheyenne (175 miles. After breakfast we go to collect our Harleys. Our rental location is shared with a local custom bike manufacturer’s showroom, so there’s lots of glistening V-twin iron to stare at, priced at a very respectable $30-40,000, while we get you and your bikes sorted (and a chance to buy a couple more t-shirts!). Having picked up our Harleys we head north-west out of Denver to get a taste of excellent motorcycle riding possibilities in the Rocky Mountains. Past the famous Flat Irons of Boulder and into the mountains, lovely sweeping roads rising to over 7000’ for the next 75 or so miles until our lunch stop. This is no ordinary lunch stop, it is the 5* hotel that inspired Stephen King to write ‘The Shining.

We then change direction and head north-east, down and out of the mountains to our destination, Cheyenne. On the way we’ll stop at the Thunder Mountain Harley-Davidson in Loveland, Colorado’s largest H-D dealership, and if time permits, their factory in Ft Collins. The mountain vistas make way to open grassland this afternoon - the land west of Cheyenne was the setting for the original ‘Virginian’ stories. Cheyenne is the capital and largest city of Wyoming State, founded in 1867 with the arrival of the railway. It now has a population of 55,000. With a fair wind there should be time to see the golden domed State Capitol, and the Frontier Days Old West Museum, a must for those of you interested in the days of the Old West with it’s collection of horse-drawn vehicles, Indian costumes, rodeo mementoes and even a rustic saloon. Holiday Inn Cheyenne.

DAY 3 Cheyenne – Rapid City (240 miles). Today’s ride will lead us to Black Hills National Park on back roads. We’ll stop at Fort Laramie, founded in 1854 and the oldest and most important garrisoned outpost in Wyoming. Now a national historic site, 22 original structures remain. Nearby is Register Cliff, a days hike down the trail, where pioneers ‘signed in’ on the sandstone walls of the cliff; and the Oregon Trail Ruts, where the pioneer wagons have carved deep ruts for several hundred yards in the soft sandstone above the North Platte River. We then continue north towards Thunder Basin National Grassland, following the old stagecoach route, and then head into South Dakota and pick up the interstate for our ride into Rapid City in the early evening. Country Inn & Suites.

DAYS 4-7 Rapid City. For the next 4 days we have time to get into the sights, sounds and feel of the world’s biggest Harley event in all its glory. In this time you can come on organised ride-outs with our knowledgeable crew to Deadwood, Spearfish Canyon, Mt Rushmore and through the Black Hills. And we’ll also take you to some of the events happening like Thunder Road or the drag racing. Or you can do exactly as you please and find your own way around. The choice is yours! Country Inn & Suites.

DAY 8 Rapid City – Casper (300 miles). Today we leave Sturgis behind and ride the historic trails of General Custer and his men who came into this area in 1874 as the first organized white group. We’ll detour to the Devil’s Tower National Monument, important in the legends of native Americans and a landmark for the pioneers, rising 1280 ft above the valley floor, and the first ever national monument in the USA. And if it looks familiar, it was used as the site where the spaceships landed in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. We then head southwest past the largest coal mining region in the USA at Gillette and across the plains to Casper. If we’re lucky we can follow Custer’s footsteps (not too closely!) and find a little gold here, watch out for some Sioux warriors! Casper, our stop for the night, was a major settlement in the 19^th century, and our Holiday Inn on the River is situated by the North Platte River AND has served as the home-away-from-home for celebrities and dignitaries such as John Wayne, President George W. Bush, and Casper's very-own Vice President Dick Cheney. This is the crossroads of the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail and the Pony Express. Casper’s wealth is founded on uranium, bentonite (used as drilling mud in oil and gas wells, but also as a health drink!) and oil and the city has a mineralogical museum with some fascinating fossils, and the famous Nicolaysen Art Museum. We’ll also hopefully have time to visit Deluxe Harley-Davidson in Casper, Wyoming’s largest dealership.

In the early 1800s, the Platte River served as a hunting trail and water source for Native Americans, mountain men and trappers that helped shape the Old West. In the mid- to late-1800s, the river served as a national highway system for the Oregon, California and Mormon Trail immigrants as well as the Pony Express. The westward movement started with the North Platte River in St. Louis, Missouri, and over 300,000 settlers and adventurers crossed this exact destination. Today, the river still serves as a destination for people seeking adventure. Holiday Inn.

DAY 9 Casper - Steamboat Springs (285 miles). As we head south the Rocky Mountains Massif looms ever larger. We continue southwest to Rawlins, a major cattle town. Once infamous as an outlaw town, 120 years ago the locals lynched and skinned the region’s most notorious outlaw, ‘Big Nose’ George Parrot. So don’t get caught speeding! Views and scenery don’t seem to end today, and our final hour or so along the Snowy Range Scenic Byway with curve after curve gets us to our destination, the winter ski resort of Steamboat Springs in the heart of the mountains. Sheraton Resort.

DAY 10 Steamboat Springs – Denver (215 miles). Our final leg of this tour presents us with fantastic motorcycle roads through the mountains. The Colorado River Headwaters Scenic Byway takes us to the unspoilt town of Kremmling. TheMoose café will give you a real slice of hometown Colorado. We can then either head south along a great, empty road to Interstate 70 at the ‘new town’ of Silverthorne, which is quite a strange sight after the great emptiness of the Rockies. Or we continue up the Colorado River valley to Hot Sulphur Springs, with its 22 thermal pools and quaint local museum, and then head south to Idaho Springs. If you thought Interstates are boring, the mountain section of the I-70 will dispel that idea. If weather allows, we can take a ride to Mt Evans, at 14,126 ft the highest paved road in America. The road starts at Idaho Springs and climb to the park entrance at Echo Lake at over 10,000’. If the weather isn’t clear (and it often isn’t), there’s time for a drink at the lodge, where you will see hummingbirds feeding from special drink dispensers hanging from the roof. If the road is open, be prepared for some spectacular riding on very twisting roads to the top. The air is very thin here, so remember to breathe deep. The ride down into Denver via Squaw Pass offers great views of the vast flatness of eastern Colorado before we return to ‘civilisation’ and the city traffic.

DAY 11 Depart Denver. There’s time for some last minute shopping and relaxing. Denver’s 16^th St Mall, just a block from the hotel, is a must – the equivalent of London’s Oxford St, but with a free shuttle bus running its entire length. The Oxford Hotel offers a complimentary limo service around town, so if there’s anywhere else you want to go, just ask the concierge. For those of you wanting more great custom bikes, we may be able to arrange a visit to the Mountain Thunder factory in Ft Collins about an hour out of Denver. And on the way to the airport we’ll try and allow for time at Mile High Harley-Davidson before catching the plane home with some amazing memories. Check in at Denver International Airport for our BA flight home is 5 pm. Don’t be late!

DAY 12 Arrive home. Our flight lands at Heathrow just after midday and the adventure is truly over … but the memories will remain!

Total mileage  c. 1600 miles

Ready to book? Please click here

Price includes: direct return economy flights from London, local transfers in Denver, 3-4* hotel accommodation throughout, 9 days all-inclusive Harley-Davidson hire, guide on motorcycle, support/luggage vehicle with spare bike ; luggage storage; National Park, State Park and National Monument entrance fees, biker’s rucsac; Harley-Davidson gifts.

H-D models available: Electraglide Classic, Street Glide, Road Glide, Road King, Heritage Softail, Fatboy, Low Rider, 883 Sportster. Please see our rental information for more details

Price excludes: meals, drinks, fuel, sundries and flight upgrades.

Optional extras: Please ask at time of booking: flight upgrades, regional airport flight connections within the UK, travel insurance (most policies exclude medical and repatriation cover while riding, ours of course doesn’t!), preflight accommodation or airport parking in the UK. If you wish to make your own flight arrangements, please deduct £750/p from the tour price, but please note our airport transfers in Chicago and Los Angeles are timed to meet our flights.

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Sturgis & the Old West tour       Date Rider Passenger Sgl rm suppl. EVIP+SLI 09 Aug – 20 Aug 2010 £5,545.00 £2,345.00 £995.00 incl. Aug 2010, TBA £5,545.00 £2,345.00 £995.00 incl.

| Wild West | Route 66 | Rocky Mountain High | Florida Coast | Daytona Bike Week |
 | Route 66 Deluxe | Sturgis and the Old West | Self-Guided Tours | Rental |

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