Day 39 Memorial

It didn’t take very long to meet my first memorable people, Katja from Norway had ridden her motorcycle around the world and Steve from Florida had flown crop dusters, they had done so much more and were so cool that I wanted to be them or to have been there then. My memories are duller and I’m glad that my little journey took me to the rest area outside Orin Wyoming (pop 46) where Katja asked me something in Italian because she had clocked the strange licence plate on the Guzzi and knew a fair bit about motorcycles. She had stopped for the trophy photograph at the Golden Gate Bridge and returned 36 years later to recreate it.

I’ll have to go back.

The weather was the story today, perhaps something that I’d like to forget, skirting thunder storms and enduring the drizzle turned into driving rain by my velocity. She held up, I’d relocated some of the wiring harness connections higher up, sprayed everything liberally with WD40 and put some ‘gaffa’ tape around the gaping gap below the distributor cap. Stopping frequently to shelter and stretch whenever the opportunity presented, at one I watched for two minutes while a train passed a crossing, I’ll spare you the video for now but here are the locos.

At another stop, this time in a fast food outlet where I shamelessly blagged WIFI over an iced coffee, Vernon from Virginia, the first Moto Guzzi owner that I have met in the wild, came over and was pleased to see the bike and chat with me about England and shipping bikes, he plans to visit. I’d already enjoyed a fantastic burger in a ‘drive-in’ roadside place along the way where I met more ‘snowbirds’ from Florida surprised by the weather.

At Gordon, by a memorial, I met a true hero, Mac, who was cycling across in to other direction in aid of ‘St Judes’ we chatted and I made a note to engage with social media to go look up his journey. Here are the bikes, pointing in their respective directions.

Where the road was low the fields on either side were flooded, when high they disappeared into the low cloud that at times restricted visibility to 100 yards and made me fear for my and the wildlife’s chances, it’s a numbers game. Ours didn’t come up today and Valentine Nebraska found us tired and wet but housed in a motel and fed and watered in the ‘Bunkhouse Restaurant and Saloon’, excellent steak.