Can't find the earlier thread but Sturgis rides are everything advertised and makes the long trip worth it. Iron Mountain road, Needles Highway, Badlands and all of the small towns blocked off for bikes only was neat. Something that made us chuckle was the welcoming center for the Badlands had a sign out front selling hamburgers, bratts and BEER, havn't never seen that before.
Downtown Sturgis was commercialized and used highly attractive young women to attract business and even HD had 5 young ladies in orange and black small clothing outfront but have no complaints about the eye pleasing advertisement. Full Throttle was entertainmnent and anything could happen at anytime, witnessed alot of people having harmless fun and seen some things that pictures were highly needed. Never ran into beer/food prices that were out of bounds, beer was $3.50 at Easyriders in Sturgis and $3 at most places on the road, FTS was $5.50 after 7 pm but a Reds game was $7.75 so I can live with the FTS beer price.
The area weather could be difficult, black clouds and hail could pop up at anytime with our transport truck getting pounded by golf ball sized hail and my friends new trailer was ruined in 10 minutes during the arrival into Rapid City. Stayed in a motel in the MT Rushmore area and had a bad experiance of a tourist coming down the one way parking lot loop the wrong way and I was coming down the hill on the right path and caught the car out of the corner of my eye where the roads joined together with a hard braking on a wet black asphalt and went down, wife was slighty hurt and focused on her instead of the tourist and the police arrived in minutes so I couldn't confront the tourist. The good side is the wife jumped back on the bike and my buddy forgot about the hail damage after a day of riding so It goes to show that riding a Harley is theropy for bad situations.

Something that was neat was a large heard of Buffalo in Custer was next to the road with 2 mature bulls standing in the road and had to wait for them to clear the road before moving on, those animals are huge when close to them. Did see some bikers getting off the bikes and walking up to the bulls for pictures when they were in the road, not very smart.

 

Sounds like you had a good time. Also sounds like things are calming down a bit on the prices. I wonder what the "official" crowd number was this year. I hardly saw anyone heading up our interstate (540). Maybe 10-15 bikes total packed for the road this year. Previous years, like '05-'07, the interstate would be packed solid for a week before.