Tuesday, 5/26

Dana here again! My second blog entry! Neither of us have felt like writing an update the past couple of nights, so I’m taking the opportunity while doing laundry this morning.

We woke up at 6am due to an errant alarm clock, made even worse because we were in a new time zone – so it was really 5am. Good grief! We took the morning hours to re-plot our route in order to avoid lengthy freeway miles. We also downloaded Vinnie Moore’s (a favorite rock guitarist) new CD – that took much longer than anticipated but Brian HAD to have it.

Our lodging is a bed & breakfast that is a very nice log home made from fire salvage logs. It faces the Bitterroot Mountains and the view is breathtaking. Breakfast at 8am was very good – fresh fruit, waffles, eggs, bacon, OJ, yum! We were finally ready to go at about 10:30. We were parked on the gravel drive, and as I rolled off the center stand, I dropped my bike. Danged thing is HEAVY – especially with all the bags of stuff loaded on it! No real harm done, just a couple of scratches on the right side. We just picked it up, and hit the road!

We stopped at Stanley for gas and lunch. What a beautiful ride! Brian saw 3 big horn sheep, but I missed them. I looked in earnest, but only saw big horn rocks!

A couple of hours later, we stopped again for gas. (Note: we stop for gas more often then necessary because I have to pee!) As I was leaving the building, a guy that seemed to be drunk stopped me and demanded, “What the hell are you? Some sort of racer or somethin’?” I said, “Yeah, somethin’” and kept walking. He just followed me, yammering about how he was a champion racer or some such nonsense. Brian took over so I wouldn’t have to kill the guy. He finally drove off after displaying his scars and telling Brian “You have now idea how bad-ass I am” and how he had promised his momma that he would never ride a street machine. Whatever.

So we climbed on and went to take off and then Brian was rolling across the gas station. His clutch had engaged when he didn’t expect it to! We were smarter this time and took the heaviest of the luggage off before attempting to pick the bike up. Dang those things are heavy! Again, only a couple of scratches and injured pride. The biggest problem was the Autocom (communication system) wire got pulled apart, so we had to resort to old fashioned hand signals to communicate until we could replace the wire. More on that later.

We arrived in Blackfoot, Idaho around 6pm in good spirits after 326.4 miles. We saw a paltry 27 bikes, 2 deer, 3 big horn sheep, and a nutria or something. We got an astounding 51.1 mpg, got up to about 8700’ altitude, with temperatures ranging 58 to 79 degrees. Very comfortable! This Best Western wasn’t the best, but we sat out back in the shade looking at a little park & lake drinking beer and wine and eating cheese and crackers. What a great way to end the day!