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Published: June 10th 2018
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I have been a member of the illustrious Adventure rider forum for a couple of years no, before I left I posted a thread asking for help with a nice route as to get the biggest bang for my bucks, I got a lot of info and this has served me well to find some good spots.
I also got invited to one member, Jeff’s house and also for a little spin, we went out into the wide open, on roads that I probably could find but really would not dare to go out on on my own, you’d never know where they end up.
I left Idaho falls after having paid through the nose and other orifices as well, but WTF.
I got to Jeff’s house and got rid of my panniers, and thus lightened by some 35 kg or so we set off, it’s remarkable how big it is out in this neck of the woods, the sky is immense and the horizon is really far away, Wyoming and Montana are very sparsely populated so there long way between the farms and homesteads once you leave the beaten track, ie the highways.
Gravel riding is
not my forte but going at a, sometimes , sedate pace made it enjoyable.
I was still up in the high plains of the Rocky Mountains, at bout 2000 m or so and I’d been there now since I entered Utah, it’s not very warm as such but the sun is strong and it feels hotter than it is, especially when not moving and dressed in black from toe to neck, my helmet is white.
The nature is very nice indeed, not many animals but there’s the odd deer and some chip munks and birds.
It was a good day out in the open and back at Jeff’s house I cooked a curry with the spices I have been carrying around since Argentina, they have travelled wide and far.
Jeff showed me some pics what his house looked like after the last snow that came in April(!), wow there was like 2 m in front of his garage door.
Rather them than me and it can get very cold in winter, down to-40C.
I slept like a dead, not a sound, totally quiet and I awoke to a thunderstorm and rain beating
on the roof.
After some breakfast and coffee I bade my host a fare the well and set off towards New York, some 3500 km east.
I went through Yellowstone again and marvelled at how bad drivers they are in the Land of the free.
They just stop in the middle of the road to look at some animals and with the amount of people travelling around in the park the queues form up quickly,, being bold and brash I pass the on the verge.
I stopped on to look at some more seismic activities and it’s quite interesting to see the vents blowing out stem and pools shimmering with minerals and heat loving bacteria.
I passed the caldera of the famous Yellowstone volcano who had once spewed out a 1000 km3 , yes cubic kilometers of rock in an eruption.
According to legend if the volcano blows again it might part the US in two, or even worse.
Getting further down there were quite a lot of buffalos and and I also saw three bears, yes bears not beers they came later.
I left the park and went up to the
famous Beartooth pass, 11000 feet more or less and lots of snow up there.
There were a few snow mobiles around and that in June.
Parts of the road up to the pass were not in the best of nick and there the Harley riders slowed down to a crawl.
Some of the states don’t have an obligatory helmet law and you see the Harley riders riding around without any thing at all to protect them from a crash, tank tops and tattoo’s won’t get you home when you have a crash.
Darwin’s survival of the fittest theories might weed out some of these idiots.
The do have loud pipes so you can hear them from afar.
Cody a small town on the way going west was a 100% dedicated to get as much money out of tourism as was humanely possible so nothing really positive about that.
The walls of the motel were thinner than rice paper so that you could hear your neighbour breathe.
On my way west I stopped for a cup of coffee and spoke to the guy in the bar and he told me that their county
was the size of Scotland and half the Midlands in England and they had 6000 inhabitants.
You pass through a village and the sign telling the name of the place and how may inhabitants, in this case 10.
The horizon is very far away and the skies are limitless, Wyoming and Montana are very nice as well
From Cody started my trek towards the east and ended up in Sundance, the place from whence the infamous Sundance kid came, ie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Sundance is a very small quaint little town, but it has a couple of restaurants and a bar so that was ok.
The next morning I went to see the Devils Tower a big monolith, quite nice and then to Mount Rushmore that has the faces of some presidents chiseled out of the rock.
Somehow I imagined that they would be bigger, quite a job any way to make that.
I was going to stay the night in Sturgis, a place where they have a massive big rally every year, but I did not like it at all so I went back to Sundance, a slight detour
but the again, rather the devil you know.
I changed motel and told them if they wanted me to rent a room to remove some plastic/ rubber thing on the mattress , very nasty and very hot.
Tomorrow is the start of my, most probably very boring slog over the prairie.
I’ll stop in between here and South Bend Indiana in some small towns to rest my weary body and bored mind.
So far I’ve been dry as a bone, the shit weather from last year going up to Alaska has yet to be repeated.
But sooner or later it will, piss down that is but now I have better gear and so i will not be as bad, i hope.
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