We made it home alive.

Looks like me made it back. Now it is time to do all of the maintenance that needs to be done on the bikes after a long trip.

The ride back was fairly uneventful The roads out there are nice, but nothing like what we have been on. Just pretty enough to keep you awake, but not wild that you have to spend a lot of time working on keeping the bike up. Turns out the whole trip , with the in town running around came up to about 1900 miles.

Here is the final map.


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Looks like the next trip will be a short one, The Hill country Classic Rally, in Luckenbach.

Till then, Keep the dirty side down....

Dave

The long road home.....

We rolled out of Yukon, OK about 9:00 this morning. The road rolled by fairly easily. Today was spent mostly on fairly flat and featureless roads, with only a few very small towns along the way. The best thing on that road is the bridge over the Red River with a big sign on the far side that says "Welcome to Texas!" I got a bad case of Road Butt, I am going to bed. Next update will be from home tomorrow evening. YAY!!!!!!


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Rollin home.....

Dave

Route 66 and the assorted kicks.......

The road out of Eureka Springs is just about as nice as the road in. Not quite as high on the pucker factor, but still something to experience first thing in the morning while you are still tired from the night before. We crossed into Oklahoma on US 62. The first thing we discover is that we are on the Trail of Tears. This road has got to be a hidden gem. We did not see another bike through the whole thing. There were a few nice switchbacks , one even came with a semi crowding the double stripe.

Once we got onto 66 everything smoothed out nicely. Not much in the way of curves, not much in the way of real anything. I think the interstate has finally killed off the small towns along 66 except for the big ones that also touch the interstate. Pretty much all there is now is abandoned buildings and Route 66 museums and gift shops. On top of that, it looked like someone carpet-bombed the highway and then set the speed limit to 65.

Remember the old childhood rhyme "Birdie birdie in the sky, why'd you do this in my eye?" I think this bird must have had some precision bombing training. The little sucker got me right in the visor, in front of my right eye, at 60 mph. I am also discovering that Oklahoma has one of the most amazing selections of bugs I have ever encountered. We actually had to stop one hour outside of OKC to clean my visor.

Tomorrow is the downhill run back to Texas. Thursday night at Kel's parents house, then back to Austin on Fri.

Here was the route for today. Total mileage so far 1100 miles.


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TTFN,

Dave

And God said...."Let there be roller coaster......"

And there was Arkansas SH-7, and it was GOOD! That was the most insane road I have seen in a long time. Think 2222 between Mopac and 360, only 200 miles long. There were sections where you lost so much elevation in a curve your ears popped. There was a series of four S-curves that were so tight they were marked at 20mph. The road turned into sensory overload a lot more quickly than I would have believed. After hitting 7, I have to believe God loves roller coasters. If you are going to ride this little slice of heaven, the big thing that I will tell you is that you have to trust your bike. Some of those curves, even as marked, the only thing getting you through them alive is your bike's sense of self preservation.

There were a few scenic turnouts along the way.....we took a couple. The pictures are at http://public.fotki.com/dave-d/hot-springs/.



The only real downer was the 10 miles we were caught behind a semi haling chickens....They were in open air cages, and the stench was unreal. The feathers were coming off of the truck and flowing back around us, so we got some souveniers to remind us of that joyful aroma.

A bit of trivia for the day, some butterflies can sly while they have sex. I saw two of them locked together flying across the road. In fact, they were still locked together when we stopped and I wiped them off of my visor. That was nasty.......

Here is the route, click on the "view larger" link to see the actual route.


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Oh well, tomorrow is the run down Route 66.

Ya'll have fun now, y'hear...

Dave

Killing off a day in Hot Springs....Later that evening.

We got to spend the day puttering around Hot Springs, it was fabulous. Wagner's is cool. Their shop is exactly that....a shop. Wagner's is not a showroom. Mike runs the place with Felicia. She handles the customer service, he makes the bikes go. Mike is an old flat track racer with the personality that is appropriate to them. He got a kick out of the Ural that is going solo, then he spent a lot of time going over Kel's bike examining the setup. We hung out, had coffee, got some spare parts (just in case), and headed for lunch.

Lunch was at this nice little restaurant in downtown Hot Springs. It was this little Cuban place called Renaldo's. It was awesome. 5 star food at Chilli's prices, and service that I have never seen before. When the server found out about my problems with onions, she took my plate back and informed us that one of the drizzles that the chef had used had onion in it, so she had him re-make it.

Then came the bath-house.......We went to the Arlington Bath-house. If you have never been to a bath-house, you gotta try it. Basically, they are going to pamper by force, if necessary.

First you go into the tub. The tub is about 3 feet deep by 4 feet wide, by 6 feet long. It is filled to the middle of your chest with hot mineral water. Then they turn on this turbine that looks like an outboard motor that hangs in the tub. Once you get good and poached, they pull you out of the tub and throw you into a hot room and let you bake for about 15 minutes. After pulling you out of the hot room, you are put on a table and covered with hot towels, then wrapped in a cold sheet. Once the towels cool off, you are put in a shower. The shower is called the "needle shower". After all of this, it is finally time for a 30 min massage with hot oil. All of this together takes about two hours and ran a shocking $60. You can't get a kind word from a massage therapist in Austin for $60.

Oh well, tomorrow is the run to Eureka Springs. Time for bed.

Wahoo....

Dave

Killing off a day in Hot Springs....

I have often told people that distance riding is "Brain Draino". After about 300 miles on a motorcycle, you have worked your way through all of the thoughts that have been percolating for weeks. Everything that needs to be sorted has been sorted, everything that should be pondered has been pondered. If 300 miles hasn't doen it, you do 300 more miles. Don't come back till it is stacked and sorted. I don't listen to music on the bike. It isn't that I think it is necessarily dangerous, I just don't like to add distractions during the sorting process. You really find out what you are made of when you are trapped inside a helmet for 6 hours with nothing but road noise and your own thoughts. After about an hour, you are in a groove with the bike, and there is not a lot of work that needs to be done to keep the bike up and rolling, except for the occasional curve. You just roll and think.

Today, we hit the hot springs and get a massage, I am really looking forward to this. After the full body overhaul, I am heading to Wagner's Cycles. Wagner's is the Ural dealer near Hot Springs. I want to check in and let everybody know I made it. Wag's is where I get parts for my bike, so I talk to them often but I have never actually met any of them. They all know I am the idiot that likes to do distance on a Ural, so they asked me to swing by if I got up their way. Well, I am gonna......

Keep the shiny side up....

Dave

310 miles of hell followed by 20 miles of heaven

So we start out this morning from Dallas, it is probably around 8:00. Its cool, 70 degrees or so. Fog is rolling off the fields across the road, so I get cold fog. The first couple hours were not that bad, long straightaways with a few gentle curves thrown in for variety. After Texarkana, the road was quite likely the most boring road I ever saw in my life. It was one of those concrete jobs with the very well defined seams in between the sections. Almost an hour of that and I am about to go crazy. The droning of the motor, the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the seams. Then it hits me, a grasshopper, right in the adam's apple. Talk about "the one with your name on it, that thing had my name, home address, phone number, and a sketch. Talk about leaving a mark, Kel saw my neck when we stopped and thought a bee had stung me. It was just a grasshopper, but it was not pleasant.

The thing that I love about long rides like these is there is so much time to think, and very little to think about. The problem that I always run into is that I never remember the incredible revelations that come on the road.

We got a preview of Ark Highway 7 today. It looks kild of like the willow city loop only with pine trees and a lake in the middle of it. If I can figure out how to do it, I will embed the route below If you hit the "View Larger map", you can actually see the route we took.

Have fun,

Dave


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Day 1 addendum.....

Kel is keeping a journal over on live journal.com. Here is the link...

http://iomeade.livejournal.com/

Day 1 Austin to Dallas

Well, our descent into madness has begun. The goal of this trip is "All back roads". We went up 79 to 77, then all the way to Dallas. All in all, it was a very nice ride. We ran the gamut from 65 degrees when we left at 6:30, to about 90 degrees when we got in. The two real bits of excitement on the way up. First, I caught a fire breathing dragonfly to the thumb on my clutch hand. I felt the impact all the way up to my elbow. I can honestly say that it was......exhilarating. The next was the 10 minutes following the line of cars behind the highway striping team. I know that we all joke about people in cars not paying attention, but the people behind the team were completely ignoring the flag man that was waving traffic around the team, just putting along at 3 MPH. I mean really people....AIR COOLED ENGINE.......this will not last long. Finally got around them after about 10 min, but I was definitely feeling the heat off of the engine for the rest of the ride.

The in-laws are having a big birthday thing on Saturday, so we will be taking off to Hot Springs Sunday morning about 7:00am. Wish us luck, here we go.......

So it begins.......

So I guess this is how it begins. I start to get ready for a road trip and figure, why not keep everybody who cares in the loop on the events du-jour. I set this up to keep a journal of my trips on the motorcycle. When I looked at setting this up, I saw that I had a choice......I could spend all of my time setting up the template and getting everything all pretty and interesting, or I could get on my bike and ride so I have something to write about. If you have a motorcycle, you understand why this is set up with a basic template. If you don't, no amount of explaining will cover it. Maybe I will make it prettier during the next ice-storm (in Texas......). Don't hold your breath.

Keep the shiny side up.....

Dave