Day 18
June 1st, 2004
This did not appear to be a nice day weather-wise... It appeared to be a GREAT day! The hotel I was staying at didn't have the Weather Channel, but the local morning news was saying that it was great to finally see the sun again.
As I went outside to start loading up the bike, the temperature was still crisp, maybe 8 degrees or so, but the sun was out and there was not a cloud to be seen in the sky. This was great!
So great in fact, that I decided to scrap the planning that I had done last night. That plan was to simply interstate it on I-90 all day. No, the weather was so nice that I decided to take some secondary highways a bit to the North. On the map there seemed to be a lot of towns along the way, so it would be much slower going.
One of the problems I was facing was that if the secondary highway sucked, there was no easy way to change my mind and go back on the Interstate without making a significant detour. Oh well, with this weather, who cares?
The roads in South Dakota are FLAT. Happily all the dots on the map rarely represented an actual town, so I was able to maintain good speed. This was clearly a very agricultural area and the only traffic was the rare farmer in his pickup truck. Everybody wears a cowboy hat in these parts... no police were seen at all in SD.
This is what I was hoping to be able to report as what my day looked like.
Unfortnately, after I crested one "hill", I caught up with what I'd been into for the last few days...
At first we were just talking about showers, but the farther East I got, the more constant the rain got. After a while, I could not see different clouds, the whole sky was just a dismal wet, grey blanket, with occasional downpours of quasi-biblical proportion thrown in for amusement.
The temperature was also on the 'cool' side, only venturing up to a cautious 12 degrees as a maximum for the day. My electric vest stayed in the 'on' position. If I wasn't on vacation, I would have called this a miserable day, as this is probably the most rain that I've seen so far on this trip, with about 700 km of it in the rain.
But I'm on vacation, and it's been a great experience despite the weather, so I took it all in stride. On the plus side, my Aerostitch is watertight.
This weather also put me in a reflective mood, nothing too serious, just thinking about this trip, about if I had to do it again would I make different choices. I think I wouldn't change the destinations, except that if this wasn't a 4-corners tour I would scrap Florida completely. There's just way too much people in too small a place. The rest of the States was really cool. I'm not even minding the Midwest. Everywhere I go, I only meet nice people. It's true that I don't go out after dark though... I think the least 'friendly' experience was with the service manager at that first motorcycle shop I stopped at in Calgary.
In terms of rating the quality of my packing for the trip, I'm pretty happy with what I brought. The computer is big and bulky (I have a whole soft bag devoted entirely to computer and other electronic gizmos), but I really appreciate having it along. I'm finding it indispensable for plotting the next day's itinerary. Microsoft Streets & Trips is a great piece of software for this, as it will tell me how much distance is involved between places and will choose a route according to my road preferences.
Tonight I'm writing this report from the hotel restaurant on my Palm, well actually it's more of a pub-type place, called "Old Chicago Pizza-Pasta". They claim to be famous for their Calzone, so I'm trying the artichoke and spinach one. Not bad...
I decided to stop in St. Cloud not because I could pray to the weather gods, but because I'm not sure what I'm doing tomorrow. I'm supposed to make it to Sault Ste-Marie and I'm debating to do it via the States or via Thunder Bay. This place is sort of the 'fork in the road' for that leg and I needed to crunch numbers before making that call. I finished today fairly early, despite losing an hour by switching to the Central TZ. I had time for a little 20 minute nap before taking a shower and heading to the restaurant.
Well, that's enough blather for tonight, my meal is done and I've got some number crunching to do.
Day Stats:
Total Distance: 911 km (Spearfish, SD to St. Cloud, MN)
Total Time: 8 h 34 minutes
Overall Average: 103.5 km / h