Day Two
Day Two
How do you describe exhaustion? I changed my schedule close to the last minute on Thursday when I decided to add a hundred miles to the first day. At the end of this day I am really happy I made the change!!
It was a long day today and there are a number of lessons that I take from the day. The first is it pays to be prepared. I packed as much as I could on the bike and with the exception of one article I brought every stitch of riding gear I own. I used all but one article today as I traveled through temperatures starting down in the low 50’s, peaking in the 80’s and dropping into the 50’s and 60’s with .........
How tired was I? So tired I could not keep my eyes open long enough to complete that last sentence. So, Here I am at the end of day three catching up on the posting that should have gone out yesterday. There are no photos for the day so this posting will be all words.
I left Marshall, Illinois at 4:30 am on the long haul across the prairies. The temperature was in the low 60’s so I put on a couple of pairs of socks and figured that plus my jacket would be enough to keep me warm but after about 10 miles on the road I had to get off and pull a sweater out of the large center luggage bag. With my heated seat and heated grips turned on I shivered my way through Illinois and made it to Saint Louis a little after sunrise. It was kind of neat to cross the great Mississippi River as well as the Missouri River within a few minutes of each other. Neither was that wide this far upstream but they were impressive nonetheless.
Breakfast was a quick meal at Cracker Barrel just north of Saint Louis and on finishing breakfast I came out to see that the sun had finally poked out from behind the clouds in the east. The weather site had promised temperatures in the high eighties to low nineties for my trek through Missouri. It was still rather nippy so I kept the layers on, hoping to have to stop soon to take them off. I filled the tank at close to $2.50 for premium – the lowest I have seen so far and got back on the freeway.
Pretty soon I was out of the greater Saint Louis metropolitan area and into what I though would be the plains. Instead I rode through gently rolling hills that provided some relief to the road with gentle undulations but though there were dips and climbs there was not enough to provide any scenery worth remark.
Other than the opportunity to hang on the tail of a nice fast group of cars hell bent for the Kansas border there was really nothing much to report on the Missouri crossing. Oh, wait, hold on, yes there was. There is some team in Missouri whose mascot must be a tiger, or, at the very least has a striped tail. I cannot tell you how many vehicles I passed with a tiger tail hanging out of the trunk!! There must have been an away game that put all of them on the freeway. I saw a couple of cars with “Mizzu” scrawled on their windows so that my have had something to do with the tails.
About an hour east of Kansas City I was getting sick of cold toes so I stopped at a rest stop to put on my heated socks and vest. At that stop I met a couple of bikers on their way to Kansas City for an event at the Harley Davidson dealership. Here I was putting on my rain and heated gear and they said, “Nah, we will wait until the next rest stop.” I wondered if I was just a worry wart but I put my gear on anyway because I was going further than them plus it was forecast to be raining and in the 50’s at my destination. In addition, the sky to the west looked pretty dark and my estimate was that the rain was no more than a couple of miles off.
I got out of there about ten minutes after they left and not even two miles down the road the drops started to come down. And, yup, there they were, under an overpass struggling into their rain gear. At least they waved as I passed. I rained on and off for a couple of hours – nothing really heavy.
One of the lessons of the day came in Kansas City. As I approached the city, the bike computer was measuring 30-some miles to empty and with the mileage markers showing something in the mid-teens to the city I figured I was fine to wait until I was on the other side to gas up because my initial plan was to make one stop, combining gas and lunch. Well, the Missouri side of Kansas City had shopping areas and gas stations at each of the many exits so I assumed that the Kansas side would be the same.
WRONG!!! The west side of Kansas City is very industrial and the exits are a little further apart. When my bike computer flipped to 9 miles I got off on the very next exit and wouldn’t you know it – not gas stations, shops, nothing!! It seemed like major road so I figured that if I just followed that north I would run into a gas station at the first intersection. I went up three miles, now with only six miles to empty when I gave up on what I thought was a main street and turned on another street where to my great relief there was a rather dilapidated BP station. I filled her up and made a beeline for the freeway. What should have been a ten minute stop turned into a half hour ordeal.
The lesson learned from that stop was, when traveling to unfamiliar places, always make sure you have plenty of gas in the tank ...... AND ......... if your gut tells you it is time to gas up ........ fill that sucker all the way to the brim!
Westward on! The slightly rolling terrain continued until Salina Kansas after which it really became flat. Just outside of Salina I stopped for lunch at a toll road service plaza. As I wandered around inside I must have looked lost because a truck driver asked me if I needed some help. Then he asked me if that was my bike and I said yes. He complimented the bike and wished me a safe trip.
After filling up on Mexican food I got back on the road and a couple of hours later when I pulled over into a rest stop I ran into the same trucker again. He came over and we chatted about bikes, long distance driving and the rain that was expected down the road. He told me that they have a limited number of hours they are supposed to drive in a day but he drives until he gets tired and some days he will do 1,500 miles in a day which would be about two and a half to three days worth and then stop in an interesting town and look around for a couple of days and that is what makes his job really interesting. He said that most of his counterparts spend their rest time in rest stops other than the road, that is all they really get to see of the country.
The sun did come out but it was nowhere near as warm as they said it would get. The weather site said that my entire trip across Kansas would be wet. I made it half way across without anything to bad but after Salina the sky decided that the weatherman had to be correct today. The skies opened up to a torrential rain that lasted a good hour and some. All my rain gear worked well with the exception of the gloves. Now, these gloves did well on my training ride to Pennsylvania (in order to be prudent, I bought a spray that is supposed to waterproof leather and treated them with it for double protection) but on this ride my fingers got wet and the gloves became a little soggy. Lesson there – leave well enough alone!! I kept the gloves on after the rain so that the air rushing over them would dry them.
By the time I was done with Kansas they were dry.
Flat!!! I thought I had seen flat but you have not seen flat land until you have driven through western Kansas!!! I was going to take a picture of it just for the posting but all you would see would be a line of green and then a whole bunch of sky.
Finally, crossing into Colorado the scenery begins to roll again. The western sky is clouding up to the north and I am hoping to be able to beat any rain to my destination. As I am approaching Limon, Colorado I can see a huge storm that is about 50 miles across at its base and the cumulonimbus thunderheads above stretch up tens of thousands of feet. The close I get the more violent the storm looks. Somehow it seems to be blowing south and this appears to have turned into a race between me and the rain. The freeways in Colorado are posted at 75 MPH so I set my cruise at 85 – it is great to be doing 85 without having to worry about the police!! I am caught by surprise by a State Trooper in a good hiding place and he does not even blink an eye – YAY!!!
The skies darkened and when I was 15 miles outside of Limon the winds really picked up and I had to lean the bike to the side in order to stay on the road and steer into the gusts. I speeded up so that I could beat the storm so I am doing close to 90. I falls dark suddenly and I sure I am going to get seriously rained on. All of a sudden I the lights catch a large object coming straight at me about ten yards out (which at that speed is less than a second). I ducked behind the windshield and I was able to identify it as a bird of some sort. It hit the windshield and left a trail of blood and a couple of feathers. Not a mile further I hit another one but I did not see this one coming until just before impact. This one must have tried to pull up because it’s smear was all bird poop. A third bird less than a minute later hit the right mirror.
Now I was spooked and just wanted to get off the highway. Unfortunately there were three exits to Limon. I got off on the first one, no hotel. I got off on the second and decided to ask at the gas station and they told me one more exit. Back on the freeway, in a crouch behind the windshield I belted down to the next exit, and just as I go off the freeway the first drops of rain started. I got into the hotel entrance overhang before anything serious came down.
We must have been on the very edge of the storm because it never really rained. The lady at the front desk was super nice and let me park the bike outside her window in the no parking area under a light. Once I was unpacked, I scooted over to Denny’s for dinner and after a rather miserable chicken dinner I decided I was sick of chain restaurant food for the trip. I also realized that had either of the first two birds hit me I would be in some major pain.
After dinner I went back to the hotel and tried to write about the day but sleep and fatigue got the better of me. A little over 904 miles and over 14 hours on the road - wow, what a day, what a day indeed!! That was yesterday; I am rather tired now so I will write about today’s ride in the morning but I think I will post some photos from today so that there is something to look at before the tome.
How do you describe exhaustion? I changed my schedule close to the last minute on Thursday when I decided to add a hundred miles to the first day. At the end of this day I am really happy I made the change!!
It was a long day today and there are a number of lessons that I take from the day. The first is it pays to be prepared. I packed as much as I could on the bike and with the exception of one article I brought every stitch of riding gear I own. I used all but one article today as I traveled through temperatures starting down in the low 50’s, peaking in the 80’s and dropping into the 50’s and 60’s with .........
How tired was I? So tired I could not keep my eyes open long enough to complete that last sentence. So, Here I am at the end of day three catching up on the posting that should have gone out yesterday. There are no photos for the day so this posting will be all words.
I left Marshall, Illinois at 4:30 am on the long haul across the prairies. The temperature was in the low 60’s so I put on a couple of pairs of socks and figured that plus my jacket would be enough to keep me warm but after about 10 miles on the road I had to get off and pull a sweater out of the large center luggage bag. With my heated seat and heated grips turned on I shivered my way through Illinois and made it to Saint Louis a little after sunrise. It was kind of neat to cross the great Mississippi River as well as the Missouri River within a few minutes of each other. Neither was that wide this far upstream but they were impressive nonetheless.
Breakfast was a quick meal at Cracker Barrel just north of Saint Louis and on finishing breakfast I came out to see that the sun had finally poked out from behind the clouds in the east. The weather site had promised temperatures in the high eighties to low nineties for my trek through Missouri. It was still rather nippy so I kept the layers on, hoping to have to stop soon to take them off. I filled the tank at close to $2.50 for premium – the lowest I have seen so far and got back on the freeway.
Pretty soon I was out of the greater Saint Louis metropolitan area and into what I though would be the plains. Instead I rode through gently rolling hills that provided some relief to the road with gentle undulations but though there were dips and climbs there was not enough to provide any scenery worth remark.
Other than the opportunity to hang on the tail of a nice fast group of cars hell bent for the Kansas border there was really nothing much to report on the Missouri crossing. Oh, wait, hold on, yes there was. There is some team in Missouri whose mascot must be a tiger, or, at the very least has a striped tail. I cannot tell you how many vehicles I passed with a tiger tail hanging out of the trunk!! There must have been an away game that put all of them on the freeway. I saw a couple of cars with “Mizzu” scrawled on their windows so that my have had something to do with the tails.
About an hour east of Kansas City I was getting sick of cold toes so I stopped at a rest stop to put on my heated socks and vest. At that stop I met a couple of bikers on their way to Kansas City for an event at the Harley Davidson dealership. Here I was putting on my rain and heated gear and they said, “Nah, we will wait until the next rest stop.” I wondered if I was just a worry wart but I put my gear on anyway because I was going further than them plus it was forecast to be raining and in the 50’s at my destination. In addition, the sky to the west looked pretty dark and my estimate was that the rain was no more than a couple of miles off.
I got out of there about ten minutes after they left and not even two miles down the road the drops started to come down. And, yup, there they were, under an overpass struggling into their rain gear. At least they waved as I passed. I rained on and off for a couple of hours – nothing really heavy.
One of the lessons of the day came in Kansas City. As I approached the city, the bike computer was measuring 30-some miles to empty and with the mileage markers showing something in the mid-teens to the city I figured I was fine to wait until I was on the other side to gas up because my initial plan was to make one stop, combining gas and lunch. Well, the Missouri side of Kansas City had shopping areas and gas stations at each of the many exits so I assumed that the Kansas side would be the same.
WRONG!!! The west side of Kansas City is very industrial and the exits are a little further apart. When my bike computer flipped to 9 miles I got off on the very next exit and wouldn’t you know it – not gas stations, shops, nothing!! It seemed like major road so I figured that if I just followed that north I would run into a gas station at the first intersection. I went up three miles, now with only six miles to empty when I gave up on what I thought was a main street and turned on another street where to my great relief there was a rather dilapidated BP station. I filled her up and made a beeline for the freeway. What should have been a ten minute stop turned into a half hour ordeal.
The lesson learned from that stop was, when traveling to unfamiliar places, always make sure you have plenty of gas in the tank ...... AND ......... if your gut tells you it is time to gas up ........ fill that sucker all the way to the brim!
Westward on! The slightly rolling terrain continued until Salina Kansas after which it really became flat. Just outside of Salina I stopped for lunch at a toll road service plaza. As I wandered around inside I must have looked lost because a truck driver asked me if I needed some help. Then he asked me if that was my bike and I said yes. He complimented the bike and wished me a safe trip.
After filling up on Mexican food I got back on the road and a couple of hours later when I pulled over into a rest stop I ran into the same trucker again. He came over and we chatted about bikes, long distance driving and the rain that was expected down the road. He told me that they have a limited number of hours they are supposed to drive in a day but he drives until he gets tired and some days he will do 1,500 miles in a day which would be about two and a half to three days worth and then stop in an interesting town and look around for a couple of days and that is what makes his job really interesting. He said that most of his counterparts spend their rest time in rest stops other than the road, that is all they really get to see of the country.
The sun did come out but it was nowhere near as warm as they said it would get. The weather site said that my entire trip across Kansas would be wet. I made it half way across without anything to bad but after Salina the sky decided that the weatherman had to be correct today. The skies opened up to a torrential rain that lasted a good hour and some. All my rain gear worked well with the exception of the gloves. Now, these gloves did well on my training ride to Pennsylvania (in order to be prudent, I bought a spray that is supposed to waterproof leather and treated them with it for double protection) but on this ride my fingers got wet and the gloves became a little soggy. Lesson there – leave well enough alone!! I kept the gloves on after the rain so that the air rushing over them would dry them.
By the time I was done with Kansas they were dry.
Flat!!! I thought I had seen flat but you have not seen flat land until you have driven through western Kansas!!! I was going to take a picture of it just for the posting but all you would see would be a line of green and then a whole bunch of sky.
Finally, crossing into Colorado the scenery begins to roll again. The western sky is clouding up to the north and I am hoping to be able to beat any rain to my destination. As I am approaching Limon, Colorado I can see a huge storm that is about 50 miles across at its base and the cumulonimbus thunderheads above stretch up tens of thousands of feet. The close I get the more violent the storm looks. Somehow it seems to be blowing south and this appears to have turned into a race between me and the rain. The freeways in Colorado are posted at 75 MPH so I set my cruise at 85 – it is great to be doing 85 without having to worry about the police!! I am caught by surprise by a State Trooper in a good hiding place and he does not even blink an eye – YAY!!!
The skies darkened and when I was 15 miles outside of Limon the winds really picked up and I had to lean the bike to the side in order to stay on the road and steer into the gusts. I speeded up so that I could beat the storm so I am doing close to 90. I falls dark suddenly and I sure I am going to get seriously rained on. All of a sudden I the lights catch a large object coming straight at me about ten yards out (which at that speed is less than a second). I ducked behind the windshield and I was able to identify it as a bird of some sort. It hit the windshield and left a trail of blood and a couple of feathers. Not a mile further I hit another one but I did not see this one coming until just before impact. This one must have tried to pull up because it’s smear was all bird poop. A third bird less than a minute later hit the right mirror.
Now I was spooked and just wanted to get off the highway. Unfortunately there were three exits to Limon. I got off on the first one, no hotel. I got off on the second and decided to ask at the gas station and they told me one more exit. Back on the freeway, in a crouch behind the windshield I belted down to the next exit, and just as I go off the freeway the first drops of rain started. I got into the hotel entrance overhang before anything serious came down.
We must have been on the very edge of the storm because it never really rained. The lady at the front desk was super nice and let me park the bike outside her window in the no parking area under a light. Once I was unpacked, I scooted over to Denny’s for dinner and after a rather miserable chicken dinner I decided I was sick of chain restaurant food for the trip. I also realized that had either of the first two birds hit me I would be in some major pain.
After dinner I went back to the hotel and tried to write about the day but sleep and fatigue got the better of me. A little over 904 miles and over 14 hours on the road - wow, what a day, what a day indeed!! That was yesterday; I am rather tired now so I will write about today’s ride in the morning but I think I will post some photos from today so that there is something to look at before the tome.
posted by Bongo | 11:06 PM
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