Sunday, September 19, 2021
Like yesterday, we got on the bikes by 7am, headed over for breakfast at a place called Granny's, got gas, then headed out of town about 8am. This day was marked by high winds. All. Day. Long. We took a lot more breaks than normal because the crosswinds really tire you out. I thought those 20 minutes in Montana was bad. This was all day! We rode through Meeteetse, Thermopolis, Shoshoni, Riverton, Jeffrey City, and then stopped at Three Forks, Wyoming ("Muddy Gap"). We had stopped there before heading north seven years earlier.
We were taking a break just chatting when we heard a girl yell "let go of me" and promptly fell out of the cab of a pickup truck about 100 feet away. We all rose to our feet, but she said she was okay. A guy got out of the cab, stomped away toward the highway, stopped, turned around yelling at her something like "what's your problem now?!" He walked to the highway and started walking down the road. She got into the truck and started off toward him and we thought she'd stop for him, but just kept going. Good for her! Who knows what became of that drama, but we were headed in the opposite direction so we never found out.
US Highway 287 took us to Rawlins where we had to endure another 23 miles of freeway (I-80) before turning south on to state route 789 which would take us into Baggs. You can see from the flags picture that the wind never stops down here. I don't know if we ever had any wind actually at our backs the whole day. We eventually rolled into Baggs at about 4pm and we were completely worn out. Baggs is a funny little town and I have no idea what keeps it afloat. We were staying at the Cowboy Inn which was a little seedy, but clean enough for us.
It was also for sale - the motel, that is.
They gave us two connecting rooms for the price of one which was very nice. The "parking lot" looks like tumbleweeds blow through on a regular bases and it doesn't get enough traffic to keep the weeds down. One plus is that they have a decent little restaurant which we had dinner at and they served breakfast starting at 6am! Before we lost daylight, we did some
maintenance on our bikes, cleaning chains and for Dave and I, swapping out our 15 tooth front sprocket for a 14 tooth one to lower our gearing a bit. Dave and Tim did one last communal laundry run while I tried to have a phone call with my wife. Today we did 343 miles.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
