Departure

Not a lot to report from today. We had..uhm…a bit of a late start you could say. There really isn’t any need to dwell on WHY we had a late start, so let’s just move on, shall we? Once we did get moving, we hit the Badlands again for a few more loops and pics.

From the beginning of this trip, our itinerary has been very loosely assembled, as we generally just fly by the seat of our bikes. As such (and having seen everything in the Sturgis area that we’d set out to), we had no problem with starting our return trip a bit early (our original plan was to start heading back tomorrow, Saturday). That decision being made, we pointed our tires Eastward and left the amazing scenery to fade slowly in our side mirrors.

We sliced along Rte 44 through the desolate plains leading away from the Badlands and picked up Rte 83, down to Rte 20 and we hammered things hard. We were making good time (and making up some lost time), and actually made it to our ‘scheduled’ first layover location; Neligh, NE. And we found ourselves with a two-fold dilemma;
A) Neligh, Nebraska is basically a non-town. If I’d had to guess, I would say the population of Neligh, Nebraska is teetering at about 15 poor souls.
B) We weren’t ready to stop yet. Hey, those of you that ride, know what I’m talking about. When you’ve got some serious throttle twisting going on, it’s tough to bring things back down when there’s still daylight left to burn.

So we kept right on blasting. Oh yeah; since Nebraska is one of the dumb-ass states which requires you to wear helmets, we figured it’d be worth a shot to see if we could tear right on through to the border, into Iowa, so we could lose the lids again. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite make it, but we have landed in Omaha. We can pretty much see Iowa from here…ok, so it’s too dark outside to see much of anything. But it if were sunny out, I’m sure we could see it just fine. 461 miles on the day - not too shabby for not having gotten onto the highways until about noontime.

For those of you keeping track at home; we're more than a full day ahead of schedule. We weren't supposed to leave until tomorrow, and we were only thinking of going as far as Neligh. Well, we left today, and we pushed about 130 miles beyond that non-town. So Olean; get ready. If we don't come up with a plan to kill some of this extra time, we're going to be landing in your backyard sooner than expected. (But we'll call ahead.)

We located another KOA for the night and have just unloaded our stuff. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but the signal here seems to be pretty strong so I’m going to cross my fingers and see if I might be able to get some PICS loaded!! (Loud roars of applause from the audience.)

That wraps up today’s events. Now on to see if I can post some of the pics…

Ride Hard, Take Chances