Day-2 Jul-9-09

Well, today was our first full day on the bike. We traveled about 380 miles from Maumee OH, Davenport Iowa. It was a pretty easy ride, about 5 and 1/2 hours of actual riding time, about 7 hours with gas and lunch stops.

Traveling through the Chicago area was easier than we thought, but that is mostly due to the fact that we stayed on Rt 80 to Davenport, rather than heading north toward Rockford Il. We only had 1 toll booth stop near Chicago taking this route. Toll booths are always horrible for bike stops, because there is ALWAYS a thick oil slick right where you need to put your right foot down. Wearing boots with nice lug soles is better than tennis shoes to help keep you and the 900 pound bike upright! Dropping the bike on its side while stopped at a toll booth would be pretty embarrassing.

We managed to stay dry for the day, but there were some pretty bad storms to the West of us. In Sioux Falls SD (which is where we are headed on Friday), had storms with grapefruit sized hail, and winds hitting 70-90 mph. The winds actually blew 2 semi-truck onto their sides right on the highway.

It's Friday morning as I type, and there are more storms heading our way. It looks like we might sit tight for another hour before hitting the road, and let one of the storms pass through. However, there is a second cell that we will probably hit while on the road. Here is a radar image of what we can expect for the day...

We are in the lower right area at Davenport.

The weather channels says that the cell on the right has produced over 20,000 lightning strikes in the last hour !!!!

No photos from Thurdays ride, since it was nothing more than trucking along at 70 mph on the highway.

Friday night we should hit Sioux Falls SD, then Saturday we will start to see a few sights. We will hit the Corn Palace in Mitchell SD, the Badlands, and Wall Drug, then on to Sturgis for the night.

Wish us some dry weather.