The last night of our little holiday in South Dakota’s Black Hills we rolled into Rapid City late in the enening. Rapid City is one of the biggest cities in South Dakota, with a population of 70,000. Being a Saturday, it was tricky finding a motel with vacancies. After doing a couple of laps downtown we came across the Imperial Hotel.When we pulled into the car park there was a domestic argument in full swing; a large Mexican woman in her 50s was yelling in Spanish from her second-story window at a little Mexican guy in the carpark.
Ron and Martin went into the office to enquire about some rooms - they had a couple available. The guys got our keys and directions to the rooms. We followed them through a bar. There weren’t many in there, just a couple of guys at the bar shoving each other and another little Mexican guy singing Ground Patrol To Major Tom on the karaoke machine. We went through one locked door, up a flight of stairs and through another locked door that led into a communal kitchen area at one end of our floor. We walked past a bunch of 20-somethings sitting around a table drinking and smoking cigars. Above them on the wall was a sign “No Smoking in Hallways”.
We found our rooms opposite each other, half way down the corridor. Given my first impressions, I was pleasantly surprised by the room with the exception of the duress alarm in the toilet; it was quite spacious, pretty clean, plus tonight it was just me and Ron in the room (the previous two nights in Deadwood we slept four in a double - I ended up sleeping with a 6-6 Swedish man).
After a false start, the Imperial Hotel had just about proved my initial assumptions wrong until I was woken in the early hours of the morning by a middle-aged couple checking into our room. Turns out the guy at reception had mistakenly given them a set of our keys. I think they were more surprised than I was when a very groggy James greeted them at the door in boxer shorts with a “what the hell’s going on”.
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