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Well, I was able to stay in Deadwood, but was not really that impressed. My wife had been out of town for the last week and a half, visiting family. I flew out to Minneapolis and proceeded to drive with her and our kids to Watertown, SD. My mother in law is from a small town near Watertown and the town was having a centennial celebration. Once the festivities were over, we continued west until we hit Deadwood. Due to it being the Fourth of July Weekend, and given that we hadn't booked a hotel room, we had to go for the only one available at The First Gold Casino. It was a decent sized room, a bit expensive and we had two young children staying in the room with us who both were suffering from colds. The casino part was as depressing as most casinos not in Vegas are, filled with cigarette smoke and sad elderly people sitting in front of slot machines. We had to try and get a bite to eat before putting the kids to bed so we hit the only restaurant the casino offered. There wasn't much of a menu selection and a damn fly that kept trying to land on my son's food. The waitress was pretty slow and inattentive as well.

After the family went to bed, I ventured down to the casino again, part of my quest to have a shot of whiskey and gamble in the famous town of Deadwood. After 8 hours of driving, though, I wasn't really in the mood, so I sat down at a 5 cents slot machine. Slot machines are such a scam, poker is really my game, but all this casino offered was something called 3 card poker. Evidently 3 card poker is similar to a game my friends and I used to play called "Son of a Bitch", where you only have three cards but straights and flushes still count. I was playing a "Jacks or Better" poker slot machine, which at least gives you more of a chance than the standard slot machine. Somehow I ended up with 4 of a kind, but since I bet only the minimum in an attempt to make this "gambling" last as long as possible and to lose the lowest amount of money possible, I only won 80 nickels. My goal was to get a couple of free drinks while sitting at the machine, but I was only able to get one whiskey sour before the nickels ran out.

The next day we checked out a few of the sights in Deadwood from the driver and passenger seats of the van, since we didn't want to take the kids out and had a long drive ahead of us. The trek continued through Wyoming, where I wanted to maybe hit Devil's Tower (of Close Encounters of the Third Kind fame), but it would have added four hours onto an already long trip. Man, Wyoming is a desolate place. We drove for over 80 miles with nothing, no towns, no houses, until we hit Lusk. It was almost as bad as Utah, where we once had a stretch of 120 miles with nothing, no exits, but probably lots of Mormons lurking in the hills. More on Mormons next time...

The Fourth brought some fun in the form of a neighborhood barbeque, complete with a torrential downpour and talk of neighborhood husbands getting "fixed". Such a thought terrifies me since I have heard tales of things going bad during and after this procedure ...