Saturday, June 12
Whew! Well, we made it to Winnipeg! The weather didn't cooperate, we had our first situation with an animal and we didn't get started as early as we wanted, but we did it - day 1. Yeah! We hoped to leave at 6:30 a.m., but didn't actually get going until 7 a.m. (I'm sure you agree with me that you can't leave any laundry dirty, no dishes dirty, the house not exactly as I want it and a stool or two that needed another going through.) So, 7 a.m. we headed to the wild blue yonder - more literally than we wanted.
Made it to Sioux Falls (Tea, SD, actually) and had to make a pit stop already (no it wasn't Duane, it was me). Duane said we'd better hurry because rain was coming in. So, I tried to hurry. That's no easy feat for a girl with rain gear on - let's see, first you need to take the rain coat, the leather jacket and the heated liner off before you can even get to anything. Then you have to somehow get the jeans, leather chaps and rain pants down and then, finally, you can take care of business - and don't forget the little purse that's hanging around your neck because it can't get wet and there's no room for it anywhere else (at least as long as it rains). So, after my "fast" bathroom break, we hit the road in, you guessed it, rain. It rained, and often poured, from Sioux Falls to Grand Forks, North Dakota. Duane tells me we had 320 miles of straight rain today and intermittent the rest of the time. Thank goodness for rain gear, full face helmets and heated liner for me (and a motorcycle we can just plug it into).
All in all, it really was a pretty good day, believe it or not. The rain isn't so bad as long as you don't have dumb wind along with it and we probably only had "bad" wind for about 1-1/2 hours out of an 8-hour day on the bike. I never really got "tired butt" - just kind of didn't know how to sit after about 6-1/2 hours, but then we put in gas, walked around a couple of minutes and were ready to go again.
We arrived in Winnepeg at 5:30 p.m. Staying at a Quality Inn - had a Subway across the street, so, for all my "foodie friends," nothing exciting to report on that right now, unless you call a great bowl of beef barley soup in a casino in Sisseton, SD exciting.
The dude at the border crossing was crabby! I would have laughed out loud at him when he asked us, in as serious a manner as possible, "How many people in your vehicle?" (Let's see, two of us with matching helmets on one motorcycle - I guess that makes 3?) I could tell that laughing at him would not have gone well - it would definitely have delayed our arrival in Winnepeg. What did we see today? Oh, that's easy - flat land that goes on forever. Yup, that's pretty much it - flat land.
The incident with the animal happened already in LeMars. A psychotic squirrel dashed in front of us on the motorcycle, got so ticked off when we got in his way that he chased us down the road a few feet and then, took a wrong turn and almost got under the wheel. That's when he decided we were too big for him. We cheered and laughed - yeah, we had our first incident with an animal and we won!
So, all in all, it went well despite the weather, but, it would be accurate to say, I'm pooped! So, to bed soon and we'll do this all over again tomorrow - except I hope not the rain.
Thanks for all of you who are checking in and saying a prayer for us.
Gayle - from BOTB ("Back of the Bike")