Moments

In line to pay at a vendor booth at Cheyenne Frontier Days, I ended up in conversation with a newlywed couple who were excited to learn we were from the East Coast.  When I told him we had ridden our bikes, he said they saw the coolest thing near the main gate - a bike from Pennsylvania all rigged up for the road with handwritten directions on the gas tank.

Hello, nice to meet you.

They actually shook my hand.  You'd have thought I was Elvis.  Interestingly, they wouldn't be the only ones to think my magnetic tank bag was the coolest thing since, well, you know.  It's a little console / glove compartment thing that holds the stuff you need to get at and has a clear plastic pocket on the top for maps.  I ordered it out of a catalog.  Honestly.  They make all different kinds.

We're proud of our Iron Butt Association license plate frames that we earned for submitting documentation of our having ridden 1,000 miles in 24 hrs or less.  You don't see them very often.  We like parking side-by-side and looking at them as we walk up to the bikes.  At the Boondocks, the bizarre 50's / Hollywood place in the Black Hills, we pulled in and parked right next to a row of bikes that all had them.  In fact, every bike in the parking lot did.  We watched them notice ours when they left.  We thought that was pretty cool.

Donna went potty at 12,000 feet in Rocky Mountain National Park, and had cool air blow up her ass in the latrine.  She thought that was pretty cool.

It was great to see friends so far from home.

I washed my bike in a torrential lightning storm. In hindsight, that was pretty dumb.

We ate dinner in a whorehouse in Deadwood, SD.

We had Cherry Mash for breakfast one day.

In Crown Point, IN, we toured the jail that Dillinger escaped from.  He stole the sheriff's car to get away.  I got to tell the tour lady that I had just a week ago met the son of the guy who changed points in that car in Missouri.  Also, Donna stood in the exact cell Johnny Depp did when filming Public Enemies.  I still don't think she's quite recovered from that.

Leaving McCook, NE, we didn't get 10 miles out of town when we encountered a *large* deer standing in the middle of the road.  From a distance, I thought it was an ill-placed advertisement because it looked perfect and didn't move.  Donna wasn't expecting me to clamp on the binders, but it took off at the last moment and had no friends following him. 

10 miles later, two 30-lb turkeys were grazing on the left side of the road and decided way too late to lumber skyward on our approach.  The dumb one came right across my path and I nicked him with my windshield.  Donna missed me that time, too.

We waited for things to come in threes, but thankfully, they did not.

Wind turbine blade in transit on I-80