This turned out to be quite lengthy. But I promise you interesting reading if you stick with me. Thanks! -John-
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| Above is the map of our Great Westward Journey of 2012. The flags represent various stops as I will explain in my chronicles. |
.As most of you know by my Facebook posts, Emily 'n I embarked on a great westward motorcycle journey that took us from Akron, Ohio down to Springdale, Arkansas (D flag) to visit 2 of my cousins I have not seen since the mid-90's.
Next we were going to travel further west through Oklahoma then north to Wichita (E flag) to visit my nephew, David, stationed at the air base there. Then we were going to roll home from there.
This whole trek covered roughly ~1200+ miles, one way, give or take and included some interesting and not so interesting side adventures. A couple of which we would like to forget. The over all trip would have been roughly 2200 miles. All by motorcycle!! 4x the longest trip Emily and I have ever taken by motorcycle, one way, before which was to my sister' place in southern Pennsylvania.
We were up for the challenge despite Emily injuring herself on Memorial Day weekend climbing down a ladder at a zip-line course down in Hocking. She was limping, sore but the doctor gave her the thumbs up with our promises that we'd take it easy, take extra breaks and ice and elevate her knee as often as possible.
We left Wednesday, June 6th and rolled onto I-77 north at precisely 3:55pm with our first stop for the night being Indianapolis, Indiana (B flag) about 300 miles, and about 5 hours away.
We did pretty good on the road down I-77S to Columbus, then skirted our way around it via I-270s, then to I-70 west towards Dayton. Fortunately on I-270 the crappy traffic was going in the opposite direction! "Suckers!!" I thought as I saw the line of cars 3-4 miles long heading north.
We stopped once for food & gas and made it into our hotel close to 10:30pm that night. Not a bad journey considering poor Emily had a bad knee. I'll take a 5 hour trip in 6.5 hours any day. Traffic was pretty good considering we hit Columbus rush hour.
I quickly unpacked our gear while Emily limped into the hotel to check in. We were both pretty tired and knew we had big day tomorrow so we pretty much just cleaned the road off of us, watched some tv & quickly fell asleep.
We had a 6+ hour ride today. I figured if we got rolling by 10:00am, breaks, food, gas, we'd get to our next stop, Cuba, Missouri (C flag) by dinner time. I figured about 8+ hours for a 6 hour journey.
We had a very nice continental breakfast courtesy of the hotel. Now personally I see nothing wrong with them. Some people snub them. I like them. Emily and I both made waffles, cut some bananas up on them and covered them in syrup. Apple juice, milk and we were ready to roll.
I repacked the gear, rechecked my map for our next stop of Cuba, Missouri and we were rolling down the road about 9:30am. Great! Ahead of schedule!
When we rolled through St. Louis....let's just say the inner-city highway traffic may as well have been rush hour. Fortunately we kept up to speed but good grief...it was busy, busy traffic!
I wanted to get outside of St. Louis' crazy traffic & get off somewhere so we could hydrate and give Emily' knee a rest. Which we did. About 15 minutes outside the city limits. Emily went into get us some drinks and asked the clerk how far to Cuba & she said it's about 90 minutes. I was checking GPS along the route and it confirmed the clerks estimation. By this time it was roughly 3:00pm or so. "Wow!! We are making GREAT time!!" We were way ahead of schedule & I figured we'd get to the hotel no later then 4:45pm or so. This would give us a early evening to just relax, watch some tv and enjoy the atmosphere. I was really more concerned with Emily' knee. It was really starting to bother her and she had no complaints all day up to that point. She said 90 minutes is no big deal and was looking forward to icing it elevating it for the evening.
So we saddled up again for our ~90 minute ride to complete an early day.
Little did I realize how far I was from that "early day".
(to be continued...)
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