Day 22-23 Colby, KS to Lawrenceburg, KY - Kevin

One last ride.

Not much to say about the ride. It was nothing but fuel stops and grabbing snacks and 5 hour energys for 14+ hours and nearly 1,000 miles.
Summary of the trip:

1- 3 great weeks 24/7 with my wonderful wife.

2- Thousands of miles of back roads seeing America. I want to do this again when I retire with more time. We tried to travel the old US Highways, they are easy to recognize by being a posted number on a shield. These old roads were the original transit routes. They contain all the old stores, motels, gas stations, homes, churches and what I really liked was the old theaters. I could spend some serious time stopping and photographing all of these.

3- The people, we met amazing amount of friendly people. Except for the rude people in Great Falls, MT Walmart, then we realized we were at Walmart what did we expect. People seem to gravitate to a couple riding on loaded down motorcycles for some reason. It was rare for us to stop anywhere and not for someone or more to approach us and start chatting.

4- The National Parks. Glacier we want to return to spend some real quality time there. Beartooth Hwy would like to see in better weather, a thunderstorm and heavy rain would have been better than the conditions we went through. Poor timing on going through Yellowstone, Labor Day weekend. The waterfalls of Columbia River Gorge are plentiful and huge.

Lessons learned:

1- Pack warmer clothes and wear my leather jacket no the summer mesh jacket... dope!

2- Buy that heel toe shifter, top of my foot still hurting after 3 weeks of shifting.

3- Pack the small pocket camera. So many photos I wanted but on a motorcycle its a job to stop get off the bike, remove helmet, dig slr camera from saddle bag and then back again. I passed on so many shots because of this.

4- Don't plan a trip with a holiday in the middle.

5- Skip on the camping. I did enjoy the few nights we camped but after a day of riding its much easier to find a hotel than find a campground and then set up camp. Not to mention the shear bulk of the equipment. The price of cheap motel isn't a lot more than a campsite.