Mon Sep 11, 2017 - McCook NE to Boulder CO

We FINALLY made it to the Rocky Mountains!! Just when I couldn't stand looking at another stalk of corn or whatever of soy (berries?). Last night we stayed in a Mantel, which is a motel but meant for men. It was like they took an old factory or car dealership and said, "what the heck, lets turn it into a motel."
It was actually pretty cool. Picture a large indoor room with giant steel beams everywhere. Add a swimming pool, then carpet the rest of the room. Now build a bunch of rooms that all have doors into the big room. Do not add curtains, but instead use cool plastic louvers that kinda work mostly. Then add a railroad yard outside to give the ambiance, maybe a little diesel smoke for mood. That's what I'm talking bout. A MANtel.

Bright beautiful sun this morning after our continental breakfast (we call it the Empire breakfast at MANtels). and our single mission was to follow Rt 34 until we hit the Rocky Mountains in Estes Park. It took an hour to hit the Colorado border and I begged Dave for a mid morning coffee stop since the MANtel coffee was obvious the train oil drained out back last night (yuck). We stopped in Wray CO, which was a surprisingly hopping town. The Wray Cafe was your classic small town coffee shop but none of the ambiance. Coffee was pretty good though.

Colorado marked the end of corn and soy and the beginning of feed yards with hundreds of beef cows being raised for hamburger. They all have that same distinctive smell. We kept seeing huge trucks with some kind of green chop which put their blinkers on at the feed lots so maybe that is what the sorghum was used for.
We stopped for gas in the town where Ward Bond from the 1957-1960 TV series Wagon Train grew up.
All was well until we starting hitting traffic in Greeley and then Rt 34 was closed all the way to Estes Park, but the good part is that the detour took us south and sent us to Estes Park up Rt 36 which is a beautiful canyon ride. First time we have had to lean the bikes in 4 days so very very welcome. And it cooled off and a storm was brewing to the west (big black ugly black thingie). A guy on a rebuilt crotch rocket talked us up and showed us the road rash from his latest accident. He wears sleeveless t-shirts and wonders why he has road rash?

We put on out rain gear and headed the back way to Boulder along the Peak to Peak Highway which is a 30 miles stretch of bliss. It did rain on us but we had our gear on so no biggie. Nederland is the turn to go down through Boulder Canyon and it was raining at the top of the 17 mile canyon, but cleared by the time we got to the bottom. We hit Boulder at rush hour so found a place to pull over and find a motel. We are staying at the same motel I stayed at last year which is cheap by downtown Boulder standards. We called Kerri (Dave's daughter who happened to be in town on her VStrom 650 and was staying a month or so in Boulder for work). She met us at the Dark Horse which is a tavern / burger place we could walk to and had a great chat about bikes and programming.

And it was our chance to check the bucket list box labeled "ate Rocky Mountain Oysters". and lets just leave it at "they are chewy".
Kerri met a guy who worked for the Butler map company that makes awesome motorcycle maps and he had an extra copy of the Colorado rides. We do not know where we are going tomorrow but it it might be back to Estes Park and then west from there on the same road Kerri road in on.

Sun Sep 10, 2017 - Councel Bluffs, IA to McCook, NE

It was all Nebraska all day. This is a really big state. Some time ago I came from west to east across northern Nebraska which was pretty much barren so I was expecting the same today going across southern Nebraska. Not so. It was corn, soy and sorghum all the way across (We are almost at the Colorado border tonight).
We started with black clouds this morning, so on with the rain gear, just in case, and immediately got lost due to the GPS not knowing about all the closed roads due to construction. We even headed east back across the Missouri River at one point, but turned around, ignored the GPS and just drove west. We ended up on a no-name road headed west and hit Rt 50 going north/south and went south. It was very rolling around Council Bluffs, probably due to the last who knows how many centuries of the Missouri River meandering. So rolling hills means no crops and some beef cows grazing and a little hay.

But once we got south west a bit, it flattened out again and the crops came back.
We saw lots of hawks sitting on power poles looking for a little snack and lots of raccoons (corn field = raccoon smorgasbord). I saw a condor yesterday having a raccoon buffet.

Buying fuel is really confusing out here. You can buy non-ethanol, 5% or 10% ethanol and some of the pumps have multiple hoses so you have to pick the right hose. Just don't pick the green diesel hose.
It hit the mid 90's today and we really felt it when we stopped. Oh yeah, it stopped raining mid-morning and the rest of the day was sunny.
It is actually very meditative out here and I listened to music most of the day. The headphone/radio worked fine but the cross wind (from the south) was brutal and pushed us all over the road. In addition, the cross wind made so much noise all we could hear on the headsets was wind noise. So meditate, or listen to Miranda Lambert.
Oddly I never got bored with the day after 300+ miles. We stopped for coffee a couple times which breaks it up, and our butts are getting hardened up nicely.
We ended the day in McCook which is half way between Lincoln NE and Denver so there is a rail yard and crews work out of here. The hotel is a local one with the rooms inside of a hanger sized room, kinda weird, but kinda cool. Like having an indoor park with rooms around the outside.

Dinner at the local popular restaurant where they have floor to ceiling cookie jars on every wall, each one different. The waitress said they had 1500 in all, including the ones in the basement. A hobby the owners started years ago and it kinda got out of control.

Sat Sep 9 Moline IN to Council Bluffs IA

Continental breakfast (from scratch omelettes), no rain today so just a single layer over since it is 60 or so this morning. Got kinda lost in Moline since there were closed streets (construction) and ended up at the airport. Quick huddle and we were following the river and nice farm land until we crossed the Mississippi at Muscatine, IA. Then 22 west  and first stop was Riverside, where Captain Kirk is going to be born on March 22, 2228. I assume it was mentioned on one of the earlier episodes of Star Trek and these guys have cashed in. All the lamp posts have one of the Star Trek characters on it and a catchy little phrase. The actual spot where he is yet to be born is behind the beauty shop.
Two other women were there taking pictures when we slid up the alley to the monument. They were going cross country from Mass to Calif and "had to stop". Now what happens when 2228 does roll around and March 22 is coming up, and the town is checking around to see who is expecting? Fun stuff.
Saw a local biker rally with 50 bikes or more with flags in remembrance of a local boy who died, we assume in one of the wars.

Chatted up a couple with Maryland plates. They grew up here and their daughter still lives here. They love it here but work in Maryland. They definitely have the local small toy proud thing going on. The rest of the day was spent on Rt 92 with a quick stop at a small Aviation Museum. It is the repository of a local mine owner who did well and started collecting old airplanes. He died and the town got together and took his collection and created a museum. Then they received all of the airplane type memorabilia from anyone in southwestern Iowa who was in the service during any war (WWI, WWII, Korean War,Vietnam, etc). We got the private tour from the typical friendly Iowa guy. And they have a huge library of books, videos, etc, all around the topic of aviation. The Wright Brothers had a farm 5 miles from here before they moved to Akron OH to open the bike shop.

A note about the landscape. The eastern end of Iowa is green with corn and soy everywhere, but it gets hilly in the middle and starts to get drier and drier as you go west. I assume this will continue into Nebraska tomorrow.

The guy at the museum explained more about harvesting the corn and soy. He says they will start in 4 weeks or so and it all happens pretty fast because the combines are huge (15-20 rows) and they travel 5 mph.
We are super beat tonight so hotel, Mexican joint and bed (and probably lots of typos).

Fri Sept 8 2017 - Kendallville IN to Moline IL

I think the rain gods finally gave up and gave us a half day of clear skies. Enough is enough. Continental breakfast, actually fairly decent, and then on with the rain gear as it was drizzling outside. The bikes were parked under the entrance (thanks nice motel lady) so everything was nice and dry when we packed the bikes up. Today we needed to get south a bit to avoid the vortex around Chicago that pulls all the roads north west.

It was a lot of jiggling and wiggling and random turns mixed with detours (they just close the road to work on it, no flagmen required) and detours around detours and somehow we put in a nice long day and ended up on the banks of the Mississippi River in Moline, IL.

Mid-day the rain let up and slowly but surely, the skies cleared and things warmed up and dried our. We removed layers as the day went on so by end of day, we both had our jeans and porous jackets and bright sun. Corn and soy were everywhere and we saw a few fields that had been cut, but most everything was still growing. It seems October is when the combines start harvesting everything, and it must be pretty exciting all over this middle part of the country. Every hundred miles or so is another big combine dealer and we had to pass a huge combine on Rt 17 which took a while. They are so big, they have to drive part on the road and part in the ditch. It raises the question of how they even get these combines here from wherever they make them. They are too big for a truck or train and too slow to drive here. Figure that one out for me..

And there are a ton of windmills here. We must have seen several hundred today all stuck in the middle of the corn and soy fields. Very majestic. Dave's bike wouldn't start after filling with gas and it turned out to be a simple battery terminal issue, which he figured out pretty quickly.
The roads were just for us for the most part and the towns on these little roads are not on the way to anything so we saw mostly nice healthy looking town towns with old brick buildings, sidewalks, trim lawns, etc. And somehow we put in 350 miles or so and we can throw a stone across the river to Iowa. One note is that there are no motels on these little roads and in these out of the way towns, so we went north toward Moline where the interstates all cross and found then all. Checked in and walked down the street for dinner.
My new favorite equipment are the Aerostitch rain gloves. Why I did not buy these ten years ago...

Thurs Sept 7 - Ashtabula OH to Kendallville IN

The Gods must be angry because we have not had a day without rain yet. The good news is our rain stuff keeps us nice and dry and the gooder news (is that a word) is that we have had nothing like we had the first day in NY, so easy-peasy.

We tried to stay on Rt 20 to re-enact what the folks back in the 40's and 50's would do driving west on Rt 20, but it's a little different now of course. A lot of Rt 20 is very pleasant with grapes and then eventually soy, but the closer to Cleveland we got, the slower and more congested it got. After crawling along in 2nd and 3rd gear for what seemed like an hour, we finally saw the Cleveland city skyline and realized the last thing we needed was to wade through another hour or two of this. A sign for 90 (interstate) came up and in about 5 minutes we were riding along at 65 mph again making up time (which we have plenty of BTW). The interstate is butt ugly but we stayed on it a half hour or so until it looked like we were out of the suburbs. We found Rt 20 again and once again were in rural Ohio. Each town is like a little surprise. What did they make here, How are they doing. Some with banners and flowers and trim lawns, some with boarded up storefronts and grass growing in the sidewalks. After each town is another 50 miles of farms, bigger and bigger as we head west.

I saw a guy closing the gate at the local John Deere dealer and pulled over and started firing questions which he happily answered (and more). The corn is either picked for the kernels and fed to chickens or used for ethanol, or it is chopped and fed to dairy cows (maybe ethanol?). The soy is made into meal and shipped all over, but a lot of it is fed to hogs for that crispy bacon in your BLT. He says they can chop about 12 rows of corn at a time these days. Our little chopper on the farm back in East Putney chopped two.

We decided to stay away from Toledo and took Rt 6 which is a 2-laner straight into Indiana. A fun detour (we were going south east at one point). We got rain in three stretches today and you can see them 15 minutes before you ride into them.

About 6pm we stopped in Kendallville where a golf tournament of some kind is going on, got a room and found a place we could walk to for a cold beer and dinner. Watch a little hurricane news and off to bed.

Weds Sep 6 - Geneva NY to Ashtabula OH

Slept like a baby (again) at Lynn's B&B (and BBQ). We insisted that we buy him breakfast so he took us to Waterloo where he is a regular at Connie's Diner. They have diners down over here in western NY. Bottomless coffee and good old eggs, home fries and toast for me. He took us on the scenic tour through both Geneva and Waterloo and these are two nice looking towns. Lots of flowers, banners, and tidy streets. Waterloo is the birthplace of Memorial Day when in 1866, right after the Civil War, the town declared a day of remembrance for the war dead, and it stuck and was adopted throughout the US.

We stopped at the Scythe Tree where a young farm boy hung his scythe each day, and left it there the day before he joined the army to go fight in the civil war. He never returned and they left his scythe in the tree as a memorial to him. The tree still stands and you can still see the tip of the scythe sticking out of the tree which enveloped it over the last 160 years. What an awful war.
We said out goodbyes and thank you's for putting us up and feeding us, and with black skies overhead, we got back on Rt 20 with full rain gear on.

It was not long before my trusty old beemer turned over 100,000 miles! This old girl has been with me 20 years and is still going strong despite a few rattles and squeaks. It's still got some heavy lifting to do in the next few weeks so she is not done yet.
Rt 20 was pretty calm but started to get busy when we got near Buffalo, as we expected it would. We dropped down to Rt 20A which bypassed most of the Buffalo sprawl and picked Rt 20 up again on the shore of Lake Erie. There are three roads that run parallel down the lake shore. Rt 90 is the interstate where most of the traffic goes now. Rt 20 is the old through road and has lots of the old businesses, factories and houses that made up the commerce belt along the shore. Rt 5 is a smaller road that hugs the water and is a bit less busy and surprisingly not built up. The shore of Lake Erie was much less built up than I had expected. While there were a few mega-mansions, they were the exception. Mostly it was old small town an camps scattered down the shore.
We got rained on briefly, but nothing like yesterday and once again, we had good gear. Lots of working farms growing corn and soy, but also a whole lot of grapes. The Lake must temper the climate because there were grapes growing everywhere. A few tasting rooms, but we suspect that these are grown for large production wine and/or other grape products (Welches?).
About 6:00 we decided to call it a a day in Ashtabula and there were several motels, none of them chains. We asked about and found the best of two Mexican restaurants in town and then back to the room to make some calls and fall asleep.

Tues Sep 5 - Vernon VT to Geneva NY

I slept like a baby in the Little Guy. Very comfy and very quiet. Dave and Rene keep it in the garage when they are not using it so my motel was in the garage. Dave had to wake me up around 7:30. We had a light breakfast of home fries, bacon, eggs and toast. The radar said rain so we suited up.. Down to Greenfield MA and then Rt 2 and then we stopped in Florida MA. Dave says there is a graveyard where some guy decided to install a parking meter instead of a headstone. Sure enough, some guy named Gordy (and his wife) decided that when he "expired", he wanted a parking meter that said "expired" for his stone. Wow, would I like to have talked to him before he passed away. 

Then off through the Berkshire Mountains and into NY. We crossed the Hudson River and found Rt 22 which we took until we found Rt 20. Rt 20 is one of the old roads that go cross country before the interstate was built. Presumably, you can stay on Rt 20 until you get to West Yellowstone.

The rain suits were doing their job keeping it from raining and by 2pm, I was pretty smug that this talk of rain was overblown. Then it started to rain, buckets. For about two hours it poured. 

We had to make Geneva by 5:30 so we could go the a nearby church to hear the bells at 6:00. We were running a little late so Dave called his brother in law Lynn and said we would meet him there. Dave had been there before and it is really amazing. Lynn had set up the bells and showed us around after we heard the 6:00 bells. The "bells" are actually electronic and are run by a computer that is programmed to play different chimes at different times. And the sound quality is amazing.

Lynn had offered to put us up for the night so we rode the 6 miles to his place in Genva. We had thought we would take him out for dinner, but he had already made BBQ burger and cole slaw which was very welcome. So a wonderful wet day followed by a warm kitchen and a long night of "catching up". Thank you Lynn.