Blast Off! Day 1

We're off! Day one is now under our wheels and it was a great day!

As we left our morning worship service, our good friend Tim M. came up to us and said that a group of people were out at our bike waiting for us and that they had been there for quite a while, "If you don't hurry up, they are going to start praying for rain!"

So Dawn and I went straight to the parking lot where we found a bunch of our friends gathered at the bike and they, of course, had to start heckling us - again! "Check out the back of the bike," they say. And these posters are what we found. Cute. Truth be told, we really liked them and even got a few thumbs ups and smiles as we zipped down the road.

After a great word of prayer by our pastor and many hugs and blessings, a warm good-bye to Jackie and Adam, and saddling up, we were ready to blast off. Some of our friends had pointed out that the sky looked really weird - and it truly did; like a violent, rolling, upside down ocean. Hmmm... might run into rain after all... naw, we will just skirt it as we head for Cleveland. Fifteen minutes later we were rolling up Rt 11 in Ohio in a pretty heavy rain - "Thanks Tim!" The good part was that it only lasted about 5 minutes because I gambled and didn't stop to put on any rain gear or rain covers on our baggage.

Great advice Steve; he suggested running the interstate highways to Kansas to jump out to a good start and get out to where we wanted to start seeing the new stuff. Because of that, we were able to log 385 miles today. Not bad at all! In fact, if we needed to, we could have put in another hour or so but we didn't want to overdo it the first day out the gate. Just more evidence that the right combo of bike, seat and rider makes all the difference - we could never have made this run on our old 84 Goldwing! We were grateful many times over that we were on our new bike.

I ran into a couple guys who were out on a run together, a father and son who said that running together was pretty special. Not many dad's can say they spend that kind of time with their grown son, but of course, I was able to share that joy with him since Adam and I do the same. And yes, it is a real blessing! In fact, the son said it was time to get a touring cruiser because his Harley cruiser (sorry, don't know what model he was running) was nice for short trips around town, but no where near comfortable enough for long trips.

It was at that stop that Dawn got a picture of this thing. Can you guess what it is? Scary! Just plain scary!

So we ran into a little rain, a pretty stout headwind for a while, stiff cross winds at a few stretches, some sunny portions and some overcast with temps in the low to mid 70's. Perfect day I would say! We made it well into the flatlands and are ready to jump into the second leg tomorrow. We may run some secondary roads since we are running ahead of schedule and enjoy some of rural America - you know, look at some more fields growing stuff. If Will was with us, he could tell us what all that stuff is! Maybe the next trip.

The big surprise on the day was our mileage. We only averaged 38 mpg. Many of you know that we are riding an '03 Yamaha Midnight Venture. There is no doubt that we are loaded to the hilt! In fact we are running with a combination weight that well exceeds the manufacturers suggested load and we certainly weren't letting any moss grow under our wheels. Nonetheless, that mileage is nowhere close to what our old Goldwing was able to pull (which was a consistent 45-50 mpg - though that may be an unfair comparison because we never ran it this loaded or this fast for anywhere close to the same distance) Don't worry Mom, I'm being careful and not going overboard! And Mom... the wind didn't even come close to blowing us off the road so you can rest at ease! haha

Forecast for tomorrow: 50% chance of thundershowers - yippeee! Praying that we can skirt those too!

Until tomorrow, TTFN! [Opps! There is a man rule against signing off with that phrase! Sorry guys, it won't happen again. Honest!]