Travel to Rapid City South Dakota

We planned this trip to South Dakota and Americas Mailbox in Rapid City back in April when our house first had a sale contract.  The closing date for the house was then to be May 22nd.   Little did we know that we would still be waiting on the closing date for the house on this trip to SD.  The plan we made then was to clean out the house first, done, take stuff to Indiana, done, and move temporarily in to the beach rental house we rent each season, done.  Next, sign up for a mail forwarding service in South Dakota as part of demonstrating our residency, done.  We picked SD some time ago for it's lack of a state income tax, low 3% tax when purchasing our truck and 5th wheel and low vehicle insurance rates. A SD requirement to get  drivers licenses is to stay one night and show the receipt at the DMV.  While here we also want to register to vote and do a little site seeing.

We picked  Americas Mailbox as our mail forwarding service for a few reasons. They are competitively priced and owned/operated by full-time RVers.  They also specialize is helping you get you Drivers license and  registering your vehicles.  All things considered, for us, they were the best deal.

Since our flight was at 6:00 am Monday morning, we stayed near the Newark airport last night, Sunday.  We bought the stay and park package at the Ramada for $125 that lets us park for 7 days.  We were up at 3:30 am and down for the bus shuttle at 4:00 am! Our travel consisted of 2 flights, first 2.5 hours to Chicago, layover of a little over an hour and then a 2 hour flight to Rapid City.  With the 2 hour time difference, we arrived in Rapid City Airport at 10:00 am.

Sign in the airport

 Just recently Americas Mailbox added a small RV park and 4 hotel type rooms to their property so we rented room number 2 for 3 nights.  We are actually staying at our new mail forwarding address. Americas Mailbox is located in Box Elder just outside Rapid City about 9 miles from the airport.  The rooms are very nice, but the campground is just some very close sites in an open field.  Not something we would be likely to stay at in the future.

This is our new address for the mail forwarding.

The small RV park at Americas Mailbox

Our room door at Americas Mailbox

We checked in and were given a guided tour of our room from a woman who just started full-time RVing this year.  With check in we were also given a map to the DMV, which is just 5 miles away, and a check list for the documents we will need in the morning for getting our SD drivers licenses.  We were very tired after the early start so we went out to get a quick lunch, picked up some wine for the room and took a 2 hour nap.  We had lunch at a BBQ restaurant that was actually cooking the stuff outside.

Out back "Jake" was smoking all of the meat

After our 2 hour nap we decided to eat at a near by restaurant, the Dakotah.  They had Walleye and Buffalo on the menu.  I had both Buffalo and the Walleye and Patty had the Walleye.

The buffalo in front of the Dakotah

Tomorrow we will give up our NJ drivers licenses and get brand new SD ones with our new SD address. Everybody has told us that the SD DMV process will take less than an hour.  We will let you know.

Stay tuned!