Day 10 - Sundance to Deadwood

Had a sleep in and then breakfast at the hotel. It was still raining this morning but the forecast is for it to stop raining tonight and then be a fine weekend.

The Sundance Kid did actually come from this town so it is famous for that reason. I packed the car and drove the 30 mile distance to Deadwood where I would be for the rest of the day. On the way I stopped at the town of Sturgis which is famous for its yearly motorbike rally that brings hundreds of thousands of bike enthusiasts to the town for a week in August. In 2015 there were estimated to be 739,000 people attend the week for the 75th annual event.

I checked out the gift shops and the Knuckle Brewery in town before driving into Deadwood.

Deadwood was is famous wild west town in the 1800’s. It was a gold mining town and is famous in some way for being the place where Wild Bill Hickok was killed. It’s other famous/infamous resident was Martha Jane Burke better known as Calamity Jane. They are actually buried next to each other in the towns cemetery. 

I drove through the town to see the layout before coming back through and parking in the carpark of the Thin Lissie casino. I walked through the casino to get to the Starbucks but could not get any reception on their Wi-Fi. So left to try to find some. I was trying to contact my good friend Robert Fondren.

Robert with his wife Ann and other friends James and Jane Wolf are travelling from the east coast to go to the CANvention in Portland the same as I am. They left home last week and while they are travelling are also visiting museums and Breweries. Robert came to Australia in January for our annual beer collecting show. Just before then he had visited over 2000 breweries .

I finally got in touch with them and we had some lunch together and chatted for a while. Afterwards they left to go to the next town called Lead to visit another brewery. 

I was then able to go casino chip collecting from the 12 casinos in town that had $5.00 casino chips at gaming tables. This took me 12 hours to do. I had a few wins but more losses on the day.

During the day they have reinactment gunfights on the main street of town. They close off the street for approx 15 minutes and give a quick storey of  the town and then discribe the lead up to the gunfight. This one was after a card gamd where the winner was accused of cheating. They gunfight is over when the winning card player shoots and kills the other two involved.

At the last casino at The Lodge at Deadwood I lost at the tables and had no money left so I went to the ATM to get some for the next day. Right near the front door was a machine that I had never played so I decided to play it before heading off. I played for about half an hour on the same money and was in front about 100 dollars and then got a very big pay of just over $1,400.

This as I know from previous experience locks the machine and requires a casino employee to have to come verify the win and then fill out a form for US tax purposes. All winning of over $1,200 on slot machines in the USA require the person to pay tax on the winnings. Which is sorted out at tax time with the form that they get from the casino.

Unfortunately being a foreigner without a US tax file number the casino is required to take the 30% tax money out of the winnings before I receive it. So they took that and I ended up with just over $1000. If you are a Canadian or UK Resident you can actually claim this back when you go home to your country. 

After receiving the money I drove to the Walmart in Spearfish and joined the other overnighters and set the mattress and the curtains up in the back of the van and went to sleep.

Todays chips - the last photo are chips from the same casino. For a while they did a series of annual chips. I could not get the 2003 chip.