The day started early…around 5:30 or so, I began loading the bike. I had done some re-arranging of my gear to make it fit a bit better on the bike and allow easier access to rain gear should the need arise. By about 6:15 or so, we checked out of the hotel and headed across the street to iHop for breakfast. Knowing that lunch was going to be later in the day, we loaded up on eggs and pancakes and were out of there by 7:00.

Our direction would take us north out of Amarillo up 287 pretty much the entire way until we hit I-70. Coming out of Amarillo, the weather was overcast and cool – mid-60’s. Perfect riding weather. A little windy, but the wind was out of the south and since we were going north, we had a perfect tail-wind. Traffic was light on the highway and we were making decent time. About then is when we smelled it.

Imagine the most god-awful stink you can think of…ok, now multiply that by 10 and you have just smelled a cattle yard. Initially, we didn’t even see it and the smell just hit us. Yikes, was it bad. For those of you not familiar with this area of Texas, Amarillo and some of the surrounding cities are known for their cattle yards and processing of meat. That’s how it makes it to your local grocery store. After about a mile, the smell dissipated and we were back to driving.

About 45 minutes down the road, we decided to make a pit stop in Dumas to top off and take care of some “business” post-breakfast. Now don’t get me started on the Dumas / “DumbAss” jokes. We tried to not snicker too much, but when we saw the Dumas police roll by, we did snicker a little. This proved to be fateful as I will explain later…

On northward through the panhandle of Texas some of the rolling nature of the land began to flatten and we were able to see miles and miles of prairie land. Nothing followed by more nothing-ness. We did run across a wind farm that we estimated had over 200 of those large electric generating windmills. Each blade is probably 100ft long. Amazing machines.

The wind was doing great initially being exactly at our backs, but then it shifted and began coming in over our left rear quarter. Wind speed was probably 30-40 mph. For those of you that have not ridden motorcycles, let me explain how this works. In a perfectly calm day, all choices of direction of travel are made by the driver. To steer the motorcycle, the driver pushes the handle bar in the opposite direction of how they want to go. It is called counter-steering. Huh? That make no sense! Sure it does, think of it like this. When the wheels are spinning they are creating a gyroscopic effect that causes the bike to remain upright. That’s what keeps it upright even at low speed. Without getting into too much of the physics behind it, that spinning wheel does not want to change direction and any turning of the wheel causes it to “fall” in the opposite direction. Turn the spinning wheel right and it wants to fall left to maintain the balance of the mass.

As I said, turn the wheel right and the bike falls left. This along with the shape of the motorcycle tire, allows the bike to actually make a left turn. Too prevent too much “fall”, the driver has to balance it with turns back in the opposite direction. It’s this constant balancing act that allow the driver the steer the bike through a corner. So what does this have to do with wind coming off the left rear of the bike?

Riding along with a wind coming in from the left pushes the bike to the right. Because the bike only has too wheels, it is much more sensitive to cross-winds than cars. If a driver maintains a straight up line and a wind comes along from the left, it will push the driver right. We were constantly fighting this wind by steering right, “falling” left and keeping the bike in a somewhat straight line. So basically, we were trying to steer into oncoming traffic to keep the bike on the road. Nice… What’s worse is that on-coming traffic would create a vacuum where there was no wind and it would pull the bike right into the other lane. Seriously not fun!

We continued this fight for about 180 miles over all. We found that by going faster, it helped somewhat with the balance, but also just the mental hope that we would be out of it soon. We were traveling anywhere between 85-105mph to try and get through it quickly. Unfortunately, we rolled by an Oklahoma Highway Patrol doing 87. And while he understood our plight, gave us tickets anyway for 75 in a 65. Me, I think it was somewhat worth it to try and get through the madness as quickly as possible.

We stopped for gas and a rest in Lamar CO. Nice little town. Ate some beef jerky and drank most of a gatorade. By the way, the nothing-ness, continued all the way through eastern CO until we started heading toward Denver on I-70. We did stop in Limon as well to take care of some more “business” and hit the gift shop. I bought a patch that says “The Rockies” on it. I’m not really a fan of CO and their liberal ways so no state flags or anything like that.

Once we were on I-70 about 50 miles outside of Denver, we caught a glimpse of Pikes Peak. Just beautiful. A little hazy so it wasn’t perfectly clear, but gorgeous none the less. We didn’t see mountains again until we were about 20 or so miles from Denver. That finally gave us something to look at besides the flatness of Texas, OK and CO.

My buddy has a friend that lives in Aurora so we stopped to have lunch with them at a Chili’s. We topped off the fuel tanks and from there headed up the toll-way on to I-25. As we were traveling north, I kept glancing at the mountains. I imagined that they were calling out to me to come dance along their twisty roads which I desperately desired to do after the last 2 days of riding flat, mostly straight roads. Patience however. I will get there soon enough and then it will be time to play.

I-25 north from Denver thru Fort Collins sucks!! Traffic on a Saturday late afternoon was horrendous. The worst traffic we been in for the entire trip. Add to that, the temperature was around 91. Surprisingly hot. We could not wait to get through that. As we had just crossed over into Wyoming, a van comes hauling ass driving past us. We estimated that they were doing 110 or more as we were doing about 85 (the speed limit was 75 here, not 65). As we got closer to Cheyenne, we saw a WY highway patrol coming the opposite direction, make a hasty u-turn and flew past us doing probably 120-130. Presumably to go catch that van. We never did see what happened as the exit to our hotel came up too soon.

Made our way to the hotel, a Holiday Inn Express. Cleaned up and went to dinner at a restaurant called Shadow. It’s an old train depot and supposedly one of the most important pieces of western architecture from the late 1800’s. Cool place; was recommended by a friend and I’m glad we went. Water, beer, whiskey, chips and salsa, pulled pork with sweet potato fries (in that order) was enough for me. Made it back to the hotel, to the room and crashed.

Mileage report:
Morning odo reading: 2796
Evening odo reading: 3317
Miles for the day: 521

Trip start odo reading: 2417

Total miles thus far: 900

Day 2 map:

Day 1 is done…in the books so to speak. Over 350+ miles today primarily on 287. I’ve also just discovered that the camera I was using to take some cool pics on the road uses a memory stick and not an SD card. Argh!! I don’t have the adapter with me for the memory stick so no pics tonight.

In terms of the trip, the traffic was fairly light and we were able to make good time. Pretty much the 6 hours that google maps suggested it would take. I left my house at 7:02am and we rolled into the hotel parking lot around 1:30. This included a couple of stops for lunch and one for gas. That is fairly uncommon for us as we normally stop about every 100-120 miles. Today we pushed that to close to 160-180 miles before stopping. Basically 7:20-9:30 straight driving.

Lunch was at the Dairy Queen in Childress. This particular DQ had plenty of senior citizens partaking of the DQ offerings. Nothing wrong with that. A few other travelers also stopped in for a quick bite before getting back out on the rode. We knew they were travelers because we ended up passing them later on down the road.

Once we got to west Texas, the scenery definitely flattened out. You can see for miles out here. We saw one windmill farm churning out electricity and an entire new set of high voltage wiring being setup. We also saw about 3 coal trains. A coal train is exactly what it sounds like. Cars full of coal being pulled south. Not sure where they come from or where they were going, but each of them was anywhere between 1/2 and 3/4 of a mile long. Very long trains!!

We also saw plenty of highway patrol although we did not get the opportunity to meet any of them in person. Thankfully the radar detector was working and saved us a couple of times.

Our average speed today was up around 82-87 mph. Speed limits out here are 75, so we pushed it a little to get past trucks and other slow moving traffic.

Once we got to Amarillo, we unloaded the bikes and sat down for a bit. We then decided to go see the movie Star Trek Into Darkness in iMax 3D. The picture and sound were incredible. When explosions occurred, the seat actually rumbled from the volume of low bass the sound system was pumping out. Great movie!! Better than the first one (relative term as the first one is actually number 11).

After the movie, we made our way over to the Big Texan to eat steak. Although I did consider the 72oz steak challenge, I decided that the better course would be to order a small rib-eye. Yummy, good choice. After that, headed back to the hotel, showered and am ready for tomorrow. We leave early so updates when I can!!

Here is a map for day 1:

Getting fuel in chilllicothe at the allsupss. 193 miles from home.

Heading out shortly this morning for the big trip!  We are leaving a bit earlier than planned in hopes of avoiding major thunderstorms in Amarillo later this afternoon.  More posts and pics from along the way later this morning.

Well, we are about 6 days out from our big trip to Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone.  All the gear is bought, a little bit more left to do to get it ready and then we leave next Friday.  Here’s our agenda:

Day 1 – Home to Amarillo

Day 2 – Amarillo to Cheyenne

Day 3 – Cheyenne to Lead SD

Day 4 – Touring Mount Rushmore, Badlands, Devils Tower

Day 5 – More touring

Day 6 – Lead SD to Cody WY through the Bighorn National Forest

Day 7 – Cody to Teton Village through Yellowstone

Day 8 – Touring Yellowstone

Day 9 – Touring Yellowstone

Day 10 – Teton Village to Frisco CO

Day 11 – Frisco CO to Amarillo

Day 12 – Amarillo to Home

Can’t wait!!!  I will try to be more diligent about getting some posts up every day of the trip.  No promises though.

Day 4 was pretty uneventful.  Just traveling home.  The roads were great, the weather was perfect and we generally had a great time.  About the only thing that was interesting was that I was almost killed!!!

I know you’ve seen Turkey Buzzards right?  These are those big black birds that you see eating carcasses of this or that dead animal.  Or you will see them flying around in packs around something dead.  We came across a bunch of packs of these guys eating dead animals throughout the day.  The general rule when you see them is to slow way down, maybe flash your lights and honk your horn.  They will then fly off.  You have to be careful though because they take to flight fairly slowly since they are so big and you don’t know which direction their pea brains has decided to send them.

No worries then right?  Right…

Except when one is sitting in a tree right next to the road and as I’m zipping by at about 82 mph he decides to fly across the road!!!  My buddy says that he missed my head by about 3 feet and I damn well believe him.  I ducked and very luckily I managed to not hit it.  If I had, I’m sure I would definitely have gone down and probably with a broken neck.

It was one of those freak things that can occur.  I made it out alive on that one.

My buddy being sympathetic said that I should have had a GoPro running.  If I had caught that on video it would have gone viral quickly!!

Take care out there and don’t forget to duck!!

We left early that morning to head out to a couple of roads called the “Twisted Sisters”.  These are basically ranch roads in the middle of Texas that are fun as…well just about as fun as anything.  To find them, do a Google search for a town called Leakey, Texas.  Then trace look for Ranch Roads 335 and 336.  Both run north and south and are full of twists, curves and elevation changes.

Our day started by heading south on 16 towards Kerrville.  We stopped for gas and then breakfast at the iHop.  The iHop had a senior citizens convention going on in there so we fell right in with the group.  Our waitress was nice and efficient and soon we were full of protein and carbs ready to hit the road.

Continuing south on 16 gets into some pretty cool twists and turns.  Take your time and enjoy the scenery.  It’s nothing like what I’m used to up in north Texas.  South on 16 to Medina and then hang a right on 337.  I actually think that 337 can be just as fun as the other two mentioned above.  Once you hit Vanderpool take a bit of a jog north and then left back onto 337 out to Leakey.

On our way to Leakey, we passed tons of cruisers of both the Harley and non-Harley variety.  We also ran by a few patrol cars so be care of your speed.  We were not being too careful, but with the radar detector and dumb luck we made it through with no incident.

Ok, I know you are giggling each time I write the word Leakey.  Some say it should be pronounced more like Lakee.  I prefer the Leaky version myself.  If you need gas, about a half a mile south on TX83 is a great Texaco convenience store, subway sandwhich shop and of course gas.  Lots of bikers pull in there.

Continue west on 337 to Camp Wood, then turn north on 55.  As we were going north on 55, we passed a road named after one of the guys I was riding with.  We had to stop and take a picture.

After a very short trip on 55, you will find the first of the twisted sisters 335.  We headed north on this road and had a great time with zipping around the turns.  At the north end, hang a right on 41 to head east.  It was at this point that my other riding buddy announced he was getting low on gas.  Unfortunately, we were no where near a gas station.  This area of Texas is pretty barren.  It’s owned by some large ranches and there is basically nothing out there.

We continued on and turned south on 336 the second of the twisted sisters.  This road was nice, but there were some issues to be very aware of.  Whomever owns this or the state of Texas, not sure which, has decided to flatten the turns.  There is very little banking so be careful!  And, just to make it interesting, they decided it would be a good idea to leave some gravel laying around in the turns too just to heighten the adrenalin of us bikers.  Yes, leaned over in a flat corner and then hitting gravel will get you excited.

336 takes you back to Leakey and we went immediately to the gas station mentioned above.  After we were gassed we decided to hit the other major attraction in Leakey, the Hog Pen.  They make great BBQ and one of the gals that works there is nice to look at.  After a beer, some food, a couple of conversations with other bikers and a couple of sneak peeks at the aforementioned gal, we were ready to roll.  Oh, one other thought, the typical biker that goes there is more of the hard core Harley riding variety.  You will find lots of leather, bandanna’s and extremely tan arms littered with tattoos.

We then headed back east on 337 to Vanderpool.  Dang that 337 is a fun road.  Once in Vanderpool, we headed north on 187.  About a mile or so before the Lost Maples State Park, you will find the Lone Star Motorcycle Museum on the left.  The parking lot was basically empty except for a lone car and a loaded down bicycle. We decided to stop anyway just to see if it was open.  It was and after $10 each we headed in.  Inside you will find a bunch of old Indians, Nortons, BMWs and a few Harley’s.  They were very cool to look at.  I was amazed at the few I saw where their backstory included speeds up to 150-160 mph.  Amazing bikes that were very old.  Worth the stop.

They also have a nice front porch to sit on so we availed ourselves of the amenities and sat there for a bit.  As we sat there for a bit a sudden realization came over us.  It was quite out here.  No, no, I mean REALLY quite.  No road noise, no background airplane noise, no noise of any kind.  About the only thing we heard were some grasshoppers or crickets out in the field.  Other than the occasional car or pack of bikes going by, that was it.  Very relaxing.

After a bit though, that noise was broken by a group of bikes.  When I pulled in, it was a big empty lot and I just sort of parked the bike in the middle in such a way that would make it easy to depart.  My riding buddies lined up along side.  That started the big line as this gaggle of bikes did basically the same thing.  Here’s a picture of us getting ready to roll after our visit to the museum.

What about the loaded down bicycle?  That guy?  He was crazy.  He had a bicycle fitted with saddle bags on the back and on the front.  He was carrying a huge amount of equipment including a gallon of water on the back.  He said he was traveling around Texas just camping.  That’s very ambitious of him and I’m impressed he would do it.

On up 187 to 39 back towards Kerrville.  This is a very nice road and goes along the Guadalupe river.  Some very nice properties along this ride.  In addition, it was somewhere in here were we saw the bike accident.  Well, we saw the aftermath of the bike accident.  By the time we rolled through, the Sheriff and another county vehicle were still there waiting on the tow truck.  One cruiser type bike was down in the ditch and a crotch rocket was leaning against a sign post.  Someone definitely made a bad decision and ruined it for someone else as well.  You’ve got to be careful when your out there.

After sitting through all of the traffic in Kerrvile, we finally made our way back to Fredericksburg.  Back home we had a beer or two and just sat on the front porch enjoying the weather.  We argued about where to go for dinner for about 30 minutes or so and when we couldn’t decide we ended up just ordering pizza for delivery.  This turned out to be a wise decision for two reasons – one, the pizza was awesome.  Some of the best I’ve had in a while.  And, two, it allowed us to meet Tina and Julie [ Names changed to protect the innocent ].

WHAT?  Who are Tina and Julie and what do they have to do with motorcycling in Fredericksburg?

Well, being that we were full of pizza and beverages, we were just sitting on the front porch minding our own business, yucking it up to this wise crack or another and just generally having a good time.  We saw these two come bicycling down the road.  Being from Texas and right neighborly of me,  I yelled out – “Howdy, ya’ll want a beer?”  They initially declined and kept riding.  Pretty soon they were back and asked if we could take their picture.  Certainly and one of my buddies went out to take the shot with their camera.  We convinced them to come on up on the porch and hang out for a bit.

We offered them some beverages and one of them decided she would partake and the other declined.  Apparently they had been at some festival and were still fairly intoxicated from the days sampling of wines.  They were from north Texas like us and we just sat there continuing to yuck it up.  We did convince one of them to go harass our other buddy who had gone to bed.  He was a party pooper and while we had a good time, he was having nothing to do with it.

Soon it got dark and as they decided to head out, one of them thought it would be a good idea to run with her bike.  It wasn’t and before she knew it, she was feet up, butt down in the gutter.  Luckily, and like most drunks that fall down, she wasn’t hurt any more than her pride.  We laughed some more, helped her up and this time they took it a bit more slowly finding their way home.

We too decided it was time to retire after a long day of riding and having fun.  Day 3 was great!!

For day two of our trip to Fredericksburg in central Texas, we decided to take it a bit easy and wait for the weather to warm up a bit more before pursuing further adventures on our 2-wheeled machines.  This also gave us a chance to catch up with the wives and see some of the cultural offerings of Fredericksburg.

After a slow start to the morning, we finally are out the door around 10am or so to head to the Nimitz World War II museum.  If you have never been, I highly encourage you to go.  The museum alone is worth the trip to Fredericksburg.  The museum is actually an old hotel that has since been added onto and converted to support the thousands and thousands of visitors that go through the museum each year.  Here is a link that will take you to the website for the museum so that you can get a sense of what it looks like from the outside.  http://www.pacificwarmuseum.org/index.asp

Once you go into the museum and start looking around, you quickly realize this is something special.  The hotel section of the museum is just part of what is available.  There is an entire courtyard with plaques commemorating ships, officers and a special section for each of the presidents that served in WWII.  Here are a couple of pictures of what you find outside.

Once we were finished with the courtyard, we made our way into the second building.  This is where the real surprise came.  In this second building you will find multiple airplanes as well as tanks, guns, jeeps and even a submarine from WWII.  It is just amazing.  About the best advice I can give someone planning on going to the museum is go early and plan to be there awhile.  There is so much to see that we were not able to get through all of it.  You could definitely spend the entire day looking at what the museum has to offer.

After the museum, we headed over to Auslander for lunch.  Authentic German food which was very good.  I had the pepper sausage and sauerkraut.  Of course my stomach didn’t like it later, but my tongue was happy with it at the time.  German beer was excellent and after a late lunch, we headed back to the house.  At least the guys did.  The girls were off to go shopping.

At home, we assembled our gear and went for a quick ride on the bikes just so that we could say we rode every day.  As you can tell from the pictures above, the weather was perfect and being out in the sun on the bike was much wanted after the dark, drizzly day we encountered coming down to Fredericksburg.

We took a leisurely jaunt up 965 towards the Enchanted Rock and then on over to 16.  From there we turned south, did the Willow City Loop and back to 16.  Turned north to go back up to 965 and took that the other direction towards Fredericksburg.  We stopped in at Enchanted Rock and took a few pictures.  Yes, those are people standing way up there on top.  We decided not to venture that far as we were more anxious to get back to riding.  The rock is apparently a big piece of granite coming up out of the middle of Texas and as it comes up, it continues to slough off pieces of itself.  Very strange to see and reminds me of the big rock in Georgia – Stone Mountain – that basically does the same thing.  Here’s a picture of Enchanted Rock.

After visiting the rock, we finally made our way back to Fredericksburg.  Was a great day seeing the sights.

We rode down to Fredericksburg, Texas, from Dallas yesterday.  The weather was not pleasant – that’s an understatement.  The weather was downright crappy.  Cold with temps in the 40’s, windy with gusts at 20-35mph and the occasional drizzle mixed in just for fun.  We left around 9:15 and got in around 3:30 which is really not too bad for time wise.

Oh, and by the way, if you update the firmware in your Sena headset, be ready to re-pair all of your devices and the intercom with your buddy.  What I thought would be a simple connection, wasn’t.  I had a difficult time understanding the instruction manual (pdf on the iPad) and when to press which button.  On the side of the road with your mates waiting on you in the cold wind created too high of a level of performance anxiety and I had to give it up.  I was able to get it accomplished the next morning with little trouble.

The wind was ferocious.  Given that the wind was out of the north-west and we were generally heading south or south-west, it was either at our backs or coming on strong over our right shoulder.  Several times we would be going around a curve in the road to the right and the wind would almost push us into the other lane.  That definitely caused some sphincter constriction.  Add to the wind the light drizzle and all of a sudden you have some significant worry about whether or not the bike is going to slide out from under you.

We came through Fort Worth to get to 377 to Grandbury. From there, we turned south down to Glen Rose then on to Hico for lunch at the Koffee Kup and yes that’s how they spell it. It’s great food – chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes both covered in cream gravy, a small salad and for dessert, we had coconut pie. Yummy! I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) eat all of mine, but the taste was awesome. There’s nothing like home cooking.

[side note on the Koffee Kup – all of the waitresses in there are older. They have to be at least in their 50’s and look liike they have been doing that job for a long time. They are great – nothing wrong with them at all. But what was funny is they had another woman who was clearing and cleaning the tables – “bus girl”. She was younger. I imagined that she just wasn’t old enough to wait tables even though she was in her 40’s.]

From Hico, down to Hamilton to Goldwaithe to Fredericksburg. If you have never traveled down TX 16, it is well worth it. The flowers yesterday were just beautiful. This time of year brings out the best in Texas flora. I probably should have stopped to take a picture or two, but we had been on the bike for over an hour and had drank too much coffee and water. That combination with the cold and drizzle…well, you get the idea.

But with all of that, we made it.  Looking forward to Day 2.  May do a brief ride this morning and then hit the museum and some shopping around town. The big ride will be on day 3 and then headed home on day 4.