Gremlin's Tall Stories

The alarm wakes me at 6.45am. Urgh, but the group leaves at 7.15am, so my bag needs to be in the van. I hit snooze nonetheless, and it disturbs me again. I hit snooze again, but then think I should probably check if the van is open and sure enough one of the doors is open, so I grab the bag. It’s all ready from last night and head downstairs and everyone is geared up ready to go. Bag in van, I head upstairs, back to bed.

The alarm wakes me at 8am. I need to pack, have some breakfast and head off. I hit snooze instead.

Well, I thought I hit snooze. I raise my head. The beside clock says 10.10am. Oops, now I really need to get cracking. Luckily, most hotels in the USA have an 11am check out time. I take about an hour to tidy up the remaining gear (breakfast is no longer an option) and leave the hotel, speaking briefly with GSA owner David again who is also off, to the Yukon I believe.

Near the edge of town I gas up, filling the tank as today is a big day, 350 miles (560km). I suspect it’s also going to be rather boring, as the roads look pretty straight. It doesn’t start brilliantly however, Karen the GPS again deciding to alter my nicely planned route. 4 mile length isn’t quite what I am after, but I read Ken’s book each night, so I knew what the route roughly was, and re-made it as I was heading out of town at 11.30am.

The temperature had been 34 degrees outside the hotel, but once moving in some open areas, the temperature dropped to 28 degrees.

South on 79, then 385, the road is two lane each way, divided, 65mph speed limit, boring but quite quick and I’m eating up the miles. Within 100km I’m heading back the way I came, then another U-turn. I passed a couple of bikers stopped in separate places and as I headed south I thought I couldn’t leave them without checking they were OK, so headed back.

The two were now in the same place (both Harleys of course), turns out they were together. One guy had his oil cap popping off from the pressure (don’t ask me the technicals, I just know my BMW definitely doesn’t have the oil cap “popping off”). He’d had it happen before, apparently it’s common if the gasket is put on wrong or something. In the end, he needed a way of keeping the cap on, they had some Harley tools but nothing else, so using some zip ties, we strapped the cap back on, hopefully anyway.

As they left, I thought I should have taken a picture, but oh well. It also proves that you can pretty much fix anything with tape and zip ties, and if you can’t, you’re probably screwed. I passed them shortly down the road, didn’t see them again, hopefully they made their destination safely. One more story to tell the rest of the boys though Somewhere around here I also passed from South Dakota to Nebraska, but we wouldn’t be in this state long at all.

From 385, turned onto 2, which became 71. I took some photos, but really, it was the typical USA I was expecting prior to the trip. Rolling hills, but reasonably flat, the road always stretching right into the distance. I stopped in Kimball around 3.30pm to have a late lunch and look for some gas, as I’d covered 400km. The pace had been good, moving average of 110kph, but the temperature had remained high, almost always in the low 30’s. It had topped out at 34.5 degrees.

Kimball was a bit of a mistake for lunch, almost resembling a ghost town in the centre (but the residential areas did look very nice) with very few people around and even fewer eating places. Stopped outside a bakery, de-geared, and only then found out it had already closed in the morning. I headed to the gas station instead, as nothing seemed to be available.

A meat roll and peach slushy served as lunch, chatting to a group of bikers heading to Sturgis for the weekend. I thought I was doing well sipping on the slushy which was really good, until I ended up with brain and gut freeze. Damn. Walking over to the pumps, I find they only have 87, 88 and 89 AKI gas, which Ken had warned me about with small town gas stations.

I prefer to fill with 91 AKI (RON + MON then divide by two), still need to look up what 91 AKI is in RON, but I seem to get awesome L/100km. Doing some math, I would cut it rather fine, but I should be able to reach Fort Collins without filling.

Running at 70-75mph definitely hadn’t helped the consumption, 110mph down one straight only adding to the drain on gas (just wanted to see what she could do). The Continental Trail Attacks fitted to the bike seem more nervous on straights, the bars constantly oscillating slightly, and proved this with the higher speed run. The Pilot Road/Road 2 had been more stable, so something to observe once I’ve done a few corners and scrubbed the tyres in properly.

I also believe the tyre has a sharper profile, tending to fall into corners faster, but then also staying leant over, requiring more effort to get the bike upright. Found it extremely unnerving, and I’ll put it down to new tyres until I’ve done some mileage (first set of the TA’s I’m running) and scrubbed them.

It was time to exit Nebraska, only a few 100km spent crossing it, and into Colorado, where we will spend a couple of days.

So, back to consumption, I rode as economically as possible through the rest of 71 and west on 14. On 71, I had approximately 30km spare to destination, on 14 and the Ranging function has screwed up again, telling me 70km when I had 100km to go. Fortunately, it’s done this before, so I waited until the km remaining suddenly rose and within a few kilometres I magically had another 30km left in the tank. I had the opportunity to fill in Ault, but chose to carry straight on, calculating 20km spare (a little over 1L of fuel). I did think it was probably not the best idea to be gambling like that, with gas stations few and far between in the area, with a lot of open road with nothing around, but hey, it was rather exciting (bearing in mind the temperature hadn’t dropped below 30 degrees all afternoon, so walking wouldn’t have been too fun).

The temperature topped out at 35.5 degrees, you could smell the heat, and it only dropped below 32 degrees when a thunderstorm threatened, with a few spots of rain on the visor. Thankfully, the rain stayed away, but I did think it would have cooled things down a bit. Once the sun came out, the temperature went back to 34-35 degrees.

The Best Western Inn was reasonably easy to find and I made it with 15-18km left. Not quite the closest I’ve managed, but this is a foreign country. Before checking in, I peered out looking for a gas station and found one 100m down the road. Guess I won’t be stupid enough to try and run it almost empty…

Everyone else had already arrived (pretty much a given since they left about 4 hours before I did – but apparently some did arrive within 30min of myself) and were settling down to some nibbles and beers. I dropped the bike gear and headed to the pool with retractable roof and paddled around a bit, the pool a perfect temperature. Jumped into the spa as well, oscillating jets, this really is a holiday of roughing it aye? Rolled straight from the spa back into the pool, boy, was that a bit of a shock.

Murray comes in, most are going to the Mongolian buffet, so I jump out, change and go with them. It was like Genghis Khan at home, but nice to mix up the menu a little, rather than having the same thing every night.

Bit of a chat to others before retiring for the night and a BMW K1300GT had parked next to me. Nice to see the standard of bikes being raised in the car park on occasion. I was going to be on a rollaway sharing with others, but the Inn couldn’t provide the rollaway they promised, so in my own room again.

Doc rings up, has a battery he wants to charge, and Murray has told him I have the capabilities!... Yes, alright, I have a NZ powerboard. We chuck his camera battery on to charge for the night.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/42pE4jwxd4UdJc1x7