2021-08-22-Sunday-Dave's Solo Trip Back to Vermont-2000 miles

 Dave and I left Laramie the same morning and split up in Cheyenne where I headed  back to Bisbee (about 1000 miles and Dave headed back to Vernon. He mixed interstate & secondary roads all the way back. He put in 400+ mile days for the most parts and made me proud staying in sketchy motels. The last night sounded like the worst motel (pictures below). Your first tip off is that there are no cars in the driveway (even though they said only one room left on the app).

The last day he hustled to beat Hurricane Henri back to VT, and sound like he got just a little rain that last day. He also rode with a guy from Casper WY who was heading for Maine and  the guy noticed his back tire was soft. Dave checked it and sure enough it was way down in pressure so who knows how long it had been slow leaking. Any way, thanks to the guy from Casper.

Anyway, we both made it home safe and sound, road a bunch of miles over the 3 weeks (John = 6291, Dave = 6343), met some great people, drank a lot of coffee, laughed a lot, and got lost a lot. We are not getting any younger so we gotta do these trips as long as we can swing a leg over a motorcycle seat.

Dave's return trip city list:

 2021-08-18-Wednesday-Laramie WY to Kearney NE

2021-08-19-Thursday-Kearney NE to Hannibal MO

2021-08-20-Friday-Hannibal MO to Springfield OH 

2021-08-21-Saturday Springfield OH to Bradford PA

2021-08-22-Sunday Bradford PA to Vernon VT

Dave's ride back to Vernon VT

No cars but only one room left, hmmmm..

DIY buffet when it's too sketchy to find a restaurant

Basketball anyone??

Or maybe a quick dip in the pool

2021-08-19-Thursday-Albuquerque NM to Bisbee AZ-431 miles

The hotel was very nice inside the room, clean, attention to detail (toilet paper folded into a little arrow, etc) but it looks like a Soviet gulag outside. I woke up at 5:30, checked the sunrise (6:15) so the plan was to be on the road at sunrise, which I was. No way I was chancing the breakfast at the hotel, so I stopped 30 minutes south of ABQ and got a big cup of coffee and an egg sandwich thingie. 

Easy plan today, take 25 south to Hatch and then a small shortcut road to Deming NM then Rt10 to the turn south on old Rt80, then to Bisbee (aka home). Since I did a big mile day yesterday, and there is not much traffic down here, it was a fairly easy day with my old noise cancelling earbuds playing music all day.

Now Hatch is a "must go back to" town. First it has not one but two muffler men, which I assume is rare. The first guy is holding an RV of some kind and the second guy is holding an ice cream cone. You get the picture.

 These fiberglass guys are all over the US and were created for a muffler shop chain that I assume went out of business and the muffler men all had to find new jobs.

Hatch also is the home of Hatch chilies which pop up on menus a lot down here. There are lots of business selling anything you can think of having to do with chilies.

There also seem to be lots of sculpture folks, like welded sculptures of most anything you can think of. Yup gotta make it back to Hatch when my butt doesn't hurt so much.

I called my brother Dave and he is in Hannibal MO tonight (map below(mixing some interstate and side roads. He did not mention rain so that storm behind him is too slow. He is putting 400+ miles per day in. His bike is made for that. Stay tuned..

The nicest site today was coming into Cochise County on old Rt80. It has rained so much while I was gone that everything is bright green and the sky is blue with lots of big clouds. I did a lap up over the divide just to drink in the green sites that are brown the rest of the year.

It's great to be back home!

Odometer: 7266-6835=431 miles

John's route

Dave route

2021-08-18-Wednesday-Laramie WY to Albuquerque NM-619 miles

 

Well we broke up the act this morning. Packed up and the coffee was bad so we decided to ride to Cheyenne WY, an hour away and have some  real coffee and head out own ways. But first we chatted with a Harley guy who was from Virginia, on the road since June, probably in his 70's. Same stories about amazingly friendly folks all over the country. He was heading to Colorado next to wait out the incoming weather.

We got a pretty early start and it was a bit nippy (lower 60's?). By the time we got to Cheyenne, it had warmed up.. Some jerk pulled in on a Harley (and tats to match) and made some disparaging comfort assessments about our bikes. Oh, well, everybody's different..

Dave is going to try to spend some time on old highway 30 which runs near interstate 80. The interstate is a safe, easy way to go but the old roads are much more interesting.

I was thinking of going south west through the Rockies, but there was some weather there that is parking in the Rockies for a couple days. So bee line down Rt 25. Well the temperature was great, and no rain, and no wind, so I just kept going. Got lost in Denver (yucky 5 lane aggressive traffic with construction going on) but the nice Google lady got it all straightened out. The entire stretch from Fort Collins to south of Denver seems like one huge city now. Yuck.

I hit the New Mexico border and it was still early so I thought I could make it to Las Vegas NM which has hotels (I have stayed there before), but I got to Las Vegas pretty early and decided to stay in Santa Fe, but no hotels available there (???) so check the sunset and decided to go to Albuquerque arriving 45 minutes before the sunset. Well the thing I did not check was the weather app and I got rained on in Santa Fe. I was lazy (bad John) and did not put my booties on thinking it might be a little sprinkle but no, I had to stop again and do it correctly. (bad lazy John). I got into Albuquerque just as the sun set and the hotel was pretty dumpy outside, but ok inside the rooms. Walked across the street to and Appleby's and had a nice chat over dinner at the bar with a guy who puts in grocery stores (2 Albertson stores in ABQ).

Back to the dumpy motel and crash. Maybe home tomorrow night??

Odometer:6835-6216=619 miles

John's Adventure

Dave's Adventure

2021-08-17-Tuesday-Worland WY to Laramie WY-323 miles

 

Breakfast at the very tidy, but expensive Days Inn in Worland WY, chat with a young family from South Dakota (their car looked like it hit all the grasshoppers in Montana that we missed), then figure out where to go. Deb sent me an article on the Wind River Range and sure enough it was one of the three ways to go this morning. The Wyoming county roads gave us more wonderfulness today. We weaved around a bit then found Rt 20 East (an old coast to coast road), and sure enough it funneled us through a long canyon with a fresh stream, just beautiful, especially after spending the last few days on the hot flat eastern Montana plains. We had to go through three small tunnels to get out of the end of the canyon, then a dam with a large state park where you can bring your RV and your boat. 

We did see an enormous number of wind turbines today, not bad for a coal state. And I saw two NRG Systems TallTowers (the company I used to work for makes towers for measuring the wind to figure out where to put wind turbines).

Then back to the hot flat nothingness as we took a combination of roads to Casper (not much to write home about) and then south on the endless flat Rt 437. There is no gas on these roads so fill up whenever you can. We found gas in Medicine Box (85 octane only), then finished up in Laramie WY. Dinner at a truck stop diner place (no beer) then back to the skanky motel to crash.

Odometer:6216-5893=323 miles

2021-08-16-Monday-Billings MT to Worland WY-271 miles

 

Beartooth Pass (with smoke)

Really good motel last night with upstanding citizens aplenty (not the usual crowd). Upstanding breakfast which should hold us until tonight (it did).

We got out of way too busy Billings and headed for Red Lodge which is a tourist town (with lots of real estate for sale it seems" and on up Beartooth Pass. This is my third time over and Dave was here in the 80's with his kids, but it is always a treat to climb all those switchbacks with wonderful views. We needed to use our imaginations a bit since it was pretty smokey, especially down below. The top of the pass is about 10,000 feet and then down the other side to the intersection with Chief Joseph's Highway. I have never

been on Chief Joseph's and was taken aback at how great the views were down this side. The temperatures up on the mountain was mid 60's to 70 and the temperature by the time we got back down to Cody WY was mid 90's. 

You cross from Montana into Wyoming way up on the pass and you can tell which state you are in by how poorly it is paved (Montana does a nice job).

Gooseberry Badlands

Coffee in Cody and decide where to go next. Looks like Worland WY has hotels and is about the right distance so gas and go. The temperature kept inching up and just when Dave verified it was 98 degrees, it started to rain. So pull over, on with the rain stuff (remember it's in the 90's now) and back on the road.

Remember those plastic bags you used to put turkeys into to cook in the oven to keep all the juice in so the turkey came out all steamy, hot and tasty? Well we were plenty moist in those turkey bags we call rain gear. 

When I was in high school I was on the wrestling team, and being a chubby farm boy, I wrestled the 177 class. The class after 177 is the unlimited class which means the monster guys. So if you didn't meet you weight, the coach put you in a turkey bag (non-porous sweat suit) and you ran laps until your sneakers squished from the resulting sweat, then weighed you again, rinse and repeat until you made your weight. In those days if you died of heat stroke they buried you down behind the gym with the freshman archery kids who agreed to hold the targets. These days your would just wrestle unlimited (and lose). But I digress..

So normally you put rain gear on and it does not rain, but today it did and the temperature dropped to the upper 80's for the next 30 minutes or so. So off with the rain gear and the temperature climbed to 100 degrees by the time we pulled into Worland. 

Another surprise off county road 431 was the Gooseberry Badlands. We think it is BLM land but it was really beautiful. Surprised it's not a park or something.

Another nice motel with free ice cream and a nice couple on motorcycles from Washington state. Walked down the street for dinner and back to soak up some air conditioning.

Odometer:5893-5622=271 miles

2021-08-15-Sunday-Great Falls MT to Billings MT-296 miles

 

Smokier and smokier..

Well there are two reasons now to wear a mask. Delta covid and the smoke from the western fires. More and more places are following the CDC recommendation for everyone, vax or no vax to use masks inside which is no big deal because we automatically carry them anyway. The sun last night was bright red and this morning it was even redder. When we ask it seems that a few days ago it rained and that helped clear the air of smoke somewhat but they are predicting more smoke until it rains again a few days from now. We saw a sign for free meals for the firefighters and the Forest Service folks have been sent of to fight fires.

We left Great Falls, which is actually a pretty busy, vibrant town, and found Rt 87 south toward Billings. We decided not to do Lolo Pass because of the smoke and we decided to end the trip and head home. It's just getting a little creepy out here.

We had a nice quiet ride down Rt 87 then Rt 191 (the Canada to Mexico road Deb & I want to drive), then Rt 12 then Rt 2. When you approach Billings this way you first see it from the top of a wall so you look down on the entire city, like coming in on a plane. But we could barely see the buildings with all the smoke.

We took a break then headed to Pompey's Pillar. This is an unusual rock formation that Clark found on the return trip in 1806 and he scratched his name and date on the side of. It is now a national monument so those nice BLM folks gives talks and have volunteers answering questions. It is on the Yellowstone River and the reason Clark stopped here in 1806 because it is a natural buffalo and elk river crossing (so wagons

Billings through the smoke

could cross here as well), and it easily identified (big conspicuous rock), and he thought it was a natural place for the Native Americans to already trade. We heard a talk about the wildlife balance here, then climbed the stairs to see the place where Clark wrote his name. A guy there regaled us with Clark tidbits, which filled in a lot of holes for us. We love these National Park/BLM/Monument people.

We booked a room in Billings. All the hotels in Billings are twice the price as anywhere else, which we can't understand. So I used some credit card points and got a free stay for tonight.

Odometer: 5622-5326=296 miles

2021-08-14-Saturday-Havre MT to Great Falls MT-128 miles

Pretty ok breakfast at the hotel and chatted with the three older Harley guys who stayed in the same place we stayed last night as well. I didn't hear any trains, but I'm hard of hearing. The hotel seems to be used by the train crews since Dave saw a railroad signup sheet of some kind and there were a couple trains "parked" out back. Pretty nice place with a sauna and pool so we assume this is the place to go when it's 40 below zero, the tractor won't start and the kids are driving you crazy.

It was kinda smokey again so the sun is sorta brown & orange. We decided to take a short riding day and spend more time in Great Falls where the USDA Forest Service has a really nice Lewis & Clark place. More wheat fields but we suspect that we should have been able to see the Rockies if the air was clear. The air got worse the closer we got to Great Falls.

We took a break at a nice overlook of the Missouri River. From all the informational signs we are getting a picture of how busy it was here. Fort Benton was the final stop on the Missouri for the riverboats in the mid 1800's which owned all the shipping until the railroads came in the late 1800's and put the riverboats out of business. From here manufactured goods were shipped all over western Canada and the northwest US via wagons, oxen and horses, and all the furs were shipped back on steamboats. It was hopping up here shortly after L&C came through.

Into Great Falls, quick coffee stop and then off to the L&C Interpretive Center.

This place did a great job pulling all the pieces together of the entire trip. Relations with the Native Americans, How things had already changed before L&C got there (Horses & Guns), all the in-fighting between tribes, timing of smallpox, etc. Now this is kinda nerdy, but I saw the chronometer (aka clock) they carried, which was the most expensive thing they had. Longitude can really only be determined if you know what time it is, and so you need a clock that can keep accurate time for a year or two. The English had a big competition in the early to mid 1700's to help ship captains determine longitude because they kept crashing British ships because they did not know where they were. A guy names Harrison solved it by perfecting a clock that kept time on a rolling ship (those pendulums suck in a storm at sea).

Anyway, they had a reproduction of Lewis & Clarks clock. I told you it was nerdy.

So we found a hotel earlier because there isn't enough time to end up anywhere interesting and we are kinda beat after 2 weeks of non-stop riding. Tomorrow we gotta look into this smoke & fire thing, and Covid is getting ugly here too with mandatory masks and closed lobbies. The Nice USDA Forest Service person said they had 13 of 15 staff off fighting fires and a whole bunch of them got Covid. Kinda creepy..

Odometer:5326-5198=128 miles

 

2021-08-13-Friday-Williston ND to Havre MT-322 miles

 

Eastern Montana is really really really flat and dry!

Great breakfast at Quality Inn this morning. We have been eating something for breakfast, skipping lunch and then find a local place for dinner and chatting. Not exactly getting a lot of exercise other than doing squats on the bikes all day to keep the knees from locking up. So far so good, same belt loop..

Dave found a local shop to do his oil change. It was a Kawasaki shop, but Dave had the filter, crush washer (ask a motorcycle geek) and also the special oil filter wrench you need for his beemer. Awesome shop, did a great job and were very friendly folks. We were on the road by 10:30 and today we only had to drive west on Rt 2. There is actually a lot of crops being grown but it is not that healthy. Corn is kinda brown,

soy is kinda scrawny, the wheat looked really beautiful ("amber waves of grain.."), but as we found out tonight from the locals, they are in drought all this year (no snow pack and no rain) so things are hurting. We did see combines harvesting the wheat. The wheat is only a foot high, but how do I know how high it is supposed to get??

Temperatures got to only about 90 so that was great. There was a little wind today, but nothing like the beating we took yesterday. Found a hotel in Havre tonight and walked down the street to a steak place for really good burgers (hey, it's chopped steak, ok!!).

Tomorrow it's Great Falls where there is a bunch of Lewis & Clark stuff. Dry blog post on a dry day..

Odometer: 5198-4876=322 miles

2021-08-12-Thursday-Mandan ND to Williston ND-240 miles

 

Mandan Village day! (And then go get beat up by the wind day..).

Dave picked a great hotel in Mandan last night and the built in restaurant was good enough to not leave the hotel.

We think the actual Mandan village is not in Mandan, but 40 miles north. There is a Lincoln State Park that has some kind of reconstruction, but we opted for the real deal (we hope).

Very little traffic going north on 83, and we found the Mandan village which is an interpretive center with a lot of artifacts, maps, journals, buffalo heads, etc. It brought to our attention that another guy, Prince Maximilian. He traveled after Lewis & Clark and captured the Native American culture just as it was being destroyed by the huge movement of Europeans in the early to mid 1800's. Beautiful paintings and a highly regarded book. 

This makes you realize the breathtaking rate that the US was changing in this period.

The fort was reproduced a couple miles away right on the river bank (the current river bank since the river has moved all over in the last 200 years). The actual fort remnants they think is under the current river bed.

I always think forts are going to be big Hollywood set type things, but this one was built just big enough to house the 40 men and have a blacksmith shop and a storage room with walls all the way around and gates you can close. So pretty small, made out of cottonwood with a chimney and 2 rooms for about 8 enlisted men men, and a couple rooms for the officers and interpreter.

They burned cottonwood for heat and cooking and the temperatures were recorded down to 40 below zero.

Interpretation was fascinating. Lewis & Clark spoke  English, The French trapper, Sacajawea's husband, translated to French, Sacajawea translated to Shoshone which was a common language for Native Americans, and they usually hired someone in the tribe that spoke the local language and Shoshone. Wow. There is also a sign language the Native Americans used for trading that was universal so that was used some times, but it was a trading language so not too useful for diplomacy.

Then on our way north west and the wind was already really bad. We got the crap knocked out of us all afternoon by the wind. We ended up slowing down to 50 which helped somewhat. Sometimes it hit us head on and sometimes from the side which was hard because your bike ends up weaving back and forth in the road. Really annoying, and really tiring.

We took a couple roadside breaks but other than that we kept at it. On the plus side, the temperature never got above 80 all day, which was a nice break from the previous hot days. Dave said he would rather do the hot thing than the wind thing.

As we approached Williston the oil wells started which is what I remember from a previous trip. And we saw wheat fields being harvested by those giant combines. That's a lot of Wheaties!!

Dave got a hotel (clean and cheap) and we rode down to a local BBQ place the ice cream after.

Odometer:4876-4636=240 miles

2021-08-11-Wednesday-Pierre SD to Mandan ND - 271 miles

Nothing says North Dakota like a cowboy riding a fish. We found this in Mobridge SD this morning. 

We left Pierre after an actually pretty ok Hotel breakfast. One of the few  well run, well looked after Days Inn. It's a crap shoot when you reserve these places. Trip Advisor helps and Google Maps will give you a rating, but sometimes it's a pretty crappy place, but not last night.

We tried to get as close to the river all day, which turned out to be easy. We found a small 2 lane road with no traffic (really, like almost none) called Rt1804 on the east side of the river and a companion Rt1806 on the west side. We stayed on the east side all day. What a treat. Some corn and soy and sorghum, but also a lot of sunflowers being grown. Huge fields of beautiful bright yellow sunflowers and a nice sunny day to go with it.

We noticed that the smoke was gone so we must be out of the way up here of the Canadian fires we keep hearing about. And the temperatures today were about 10 degrees cooler than yesterday. The only tough thing was the last two hours when we picked up a pretty heavy breeze from the west which made for noisy helmets and threw us around on the road quite a bit. And wore us out. Again tonight we are not sore, but just tired. But no crazy hot stuff.

At Mobridge we snacked on the venison sausage that Greg gave us yesterday. Looks like that's our lunch the next couple days. Thanks Greg!!

We got to Bismark around 3:00 and decided to call it quits for the day. Lots of Hotels so we booked one (it's so easy these days), and then went searching for the elusive throttle lock for Dave's bike. We went to 3 different shops with no luck. But we met some great folks and kicked some tires so maybe we just have a good excuse to talk to motorcycle folks.

It took us back when the address of the hotel was Mandan ND. Lewis & Clark stayed the first winter in Mandan Village. There is a great interpretative center nearby that we will stop at tomorrow.

OK, another pretty darn good day.

Oh yea, the reason the route numbers are Rt1804 and Rt1806 is because the state named then after the years that Lewis and Clark traveled through here. Pretty cool!!

Odometer: 4636-4365=271 miles

2021-08-10 Yankton SD to Pierre SD - 266 miles

It wasn't supposed to be 100 degrees today, especially since we are going north, but it did, at the end of the day, when we pulled into Pierre SD tonight. But it did not seem as humid so as long as we kept moving, it was ok.

First job this morning was to see if one of the three bike shops in town had a throttle lock like the one I have. Dave borrowed mine and now had throttle lock envy. 

We had some time in the hotel to get all the electronics unraveled and working again. We had a mess yesterday but we think it is under control now. 

We did not find a throttle lock, but we did find the person who helped answer a bunch of questions we ave had like, where does all the corn and soy go. When do they harvest it all. The woman in the last shop grew up on a farm and explained everything. More corn, soy and hay than ever before, farms are getting bigger and bigger, corn and hay feed beef animals which used to graze. more feedlots now. I guess things change. But she didn't have the throttle lock..

Next stop was Lake Andes where our cousin Greg and his newly retired wife Charlie live. We texted him to warn him we were coming and arrived a couple hours later in his yard. We did not realize that the lake in front of their house is actually connected to the Missouri River so were in effect standing next to the river. He said you could take a boat 100 miles up the river from the lake. We caught up for a couple hours (thank you Greg & Charlie) and pointed ourselves north to stay as close as possible to the river. Charlie had showed us a picture of the statue of a Native American woman they had put up where interstate 90 crosses the river. We found it and it is amazingly beautiful (see picture above), and huge. We hydrated at the L&C interpretation center next to the statue

and then took the smaller roads on the east side of the river to keep going north. This goes through Indian reservations and is pretty much untouched and very rolling with the river to the west. The river is really wide up here (and due to get wider tomorrow), I assume because there are dams that hold the water back into reservoirs. And no traffic to speak of, but the temperature rose all afternoon.

Lots of hotels so collapsed into air conditioned wonderfulness for an hour, then walked next door to Subway, because it is just too hot to go anywhere else.

Maybe North Dakota tomorrow night. 

Oh yea, Dave claims he said a sign on a motel that claimed "289 days homicide free!!" I am skeptical..

Odometer: 4365-4099=266 miles

2021-08-09 St Jospeh MO to Yankton SD - 302 miles

Boy it was hot this afternoon. We are headed north so hopefully we will miss the heat wave projected for this next week. it hit about 99 degrees as we ended the day and anything above 95 with protective gear on gets toasty, and wears us out.

The new thing with motels is the "Grab-N-Go" breakfast due to Covid. We are starting to see things close up again because of all the un-vaccinated folks filling hospitals. Add the ever present smoke everywhere, and this trip will be memorable, maybe not in a good way. The drive-thru businesses are booming.

The closest we could get to the river for most of the day was Rt29 which was easy, quick, and pretty devoid of traffic. Again soy and corn everywhere, even in South Dakota. It's all efficient big ag these days. We would love to come through when they are harvesting everything.

We met a guy coming back from Sturgis (he only stayed a day). He is South African but moved to Florida a few years ago. He bought Harley's latest bike, which looks quite impressive. We kept getting asked if we were going to Sturgis, and no, that is the last place we want to be.

He had done a challenge when he was riding BMW GS's called the Hoka Hay. Florida to Alaska, 10K miles in 10 days. Nut-so stuff. We did 300 or so today..

We had fun with bluetooth today. My headset kept picking up Dave's GPS and I could not get my navigation to connect, or rather it did but it was so low volume, I could barely hear it. The intercom work so we turned most everything off and just used the intercom. Too much @#$% technology.

The big stop today was the Sgt Floyd Monument in Sioux City. Lewis & Clark only lost one man, Sgt Floyd, when they think his appendix burst and they did not have the knowledge or expertise to save him. They buried him near Sioux City and they later erected the monument to him, but mostly to the expedition.

It hit 99 as we pulled into Yankton but the hotel AC was blasting and there was a good Mexican Restaurant across the street with cold beer and AC.

Odometer:4099-3797=302 miles

2021-08-08 Jefferson City MO to St Joseph MO - 253 miles

 

Another day on the Missouri River. Overcast all day but we appreciated the temperatures staying in the 80's most of the day. We ran with rain gear most of the afternoon and got wet a couple times. We had breakfast, a short walk away, then on the road by 8:00. All the roads next to the river are curvy and complicated. I can't get my Google Maps to work with the new intercom system so we used Dave's Garmin most of the day. We got lost a few times, or at least confused. We ended up on the riverbank at the end of a dead end road in Lupus MO, but it turned out to be a fun/weird stop with a good riverside park and cactus (???) growing. Cactus?? L&C were here around June 5th, 1804

In Boonville we met the nicest, most enthusiastic 90 year old who was showing off the electric bike he built from a kit. Local boy who farmed back in the day. Didn't catch his name, but I hope I'm that excited when I'm 90. L$C were in Boonville June 8th, 1804 or so.

We saw the aftermath of a car accident with police, fire guys, the whole works. The car missed a turn and ended up upside down against a tree on fire. The police were nice and they finally let us go through when the fire guys started clearing the road of their hoses.

The roads her are a lot like back in Vermont with lots of tricky corners. I have had a stereotype of Missouri as hot, muggy and flat, but it is really beautiful in this part.

As we got closer to Kansas City, the clouds got dark so it was on with the suits. The temps dropped a bit so all our rain stuff with upper 70's weather was ok. It started raining off and on for a couple hours and then clear as we went north.

Traffic got busier around Independence so we headed north and ended the day in St Joseph MO. L&C were here around July 6th or 7th. Cold beer and dinner next door then back to the hotel. Another full day.

Odometer: 3797-3544=253