The rest of the road was pretty uneventful, especially with no luggage. Though I did have a nice buck stop right in the middle of the road in front of me. Perfectly broadside, probably 50 yards away and of course I didn't have my camera on. Oddly enough, though he dropped downhill a bit, he paralleled us for a bit before heading further downhill. Pretty cool.
Rather than take the road all the way down to Ellensburg, which would quickly turn into pavement, we short-circuited and took 9712 to Blewitt Summit and then US 97 back to US 2 and Leavenworth. It was a great day’s ride. Lot’s of silly back and forth, but we had nothing but time and none of the roads were hard including the slides, which I had worried a bit prior to the trip. We got back to Bill’s house and quickly changed into our swimming trunks for a dip in the Wenatchee River.
It runs pretty swift, but there’s a nice little beach by his house so we’d walk upstream, dive in, float down a bit, then get out and do it all again. Boy did that feel nice!
Then we took showers, put stuff in the wash, then went with Bill to the Bavarian Bistro where each of us had a different kind of Schnitzel. A nice evening of great food, fun conversation, and I got to watch the three of them go through a German beer sampler trying to see which they like best. I can’t stand the taste of alcohol so I enjoyed the conversation.
Never knew my brother was so knowledgable about German beer. After dinner we went back to Bill’s house for the night and made plans for the next day, packing the bikes and doing a little maintenance.I attempted to take some of the slack out of my chain, which caused problems later on.
But staying with Bill for two nights was one of the highlights of the week for all of us.
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.
