We left Batesville, Indiana around nine am and headed for the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky; we got there in about four hours.

I’m not going to say too much about the museum due to so many people getting offended so easily, but it was definitely a place to go if you want to learn more about what other people believe.

We left the museum pretty quick and headed for home. I was very happy to see the Welcome to Wild and Wonderful WV sign!!!

We went through about five minutes of rain just outside of Charleston, but that didn’t slow us down very much. I got home around 5 pm to find a big welcome home party at my house!

7000 miles and 17 days later, we made it to Cali and back!

We headed out of the hotel at 11 am and hit the road to head for Cincinnati, Ohio (It’s about the only place around the creation museum to stay.) We passed through Illinois pretty early in the day, here are some “flash” pictures.

We stopped to get fuel and saw a really cool looking diner.. So, of course we stopped there LOL!

When we got near Springfield Illinois we saw a bunch of signs for the Abe Lincoln home and museum. We decided to stop by there and check it out. I got some really cool stuff from the gift store. They had a lot of replica stuff, like money, The Gettysburg Address, old money, etc. These pictures are of a replica of the neighborhood Lincoln lived in.

Here is Abe Lincoln’s house and the Dean’s house. Read the info on the Dean’s house if you can.. It’s a three hundred dollar house!!!

(Abes’ house)

After we watched a video and tour of the houses, we headed for Cincinati. Here is one of the state signs!!

That’s about all for now. I’ll post another blog when I get home tomorrow! Last one for the Cali or Bust blog!!!!

g’night

BTW, I am feeling better today. I have horrible allergies in my ripe old age now!!! I think I was allergic to the cotton wood trees?

Yesterday was pretty good. The KOA that we stayed at was awesome, I miss the log cabin already! I was trying to soak up every last minute I could at the cabin before we left! LOL!

We ate breakfast at the Ponderosa Restaurant on the campground; believe it or not, we had buffalo sausage links (they weren’t bad)!! After breakfast, we took off to Mount Rushmore. We didn’t pay to go in, we found some spots on the side of the road to take pictures. We went to Crazy Horse next, that is one massive work in progress. The nose on the face alone seems to be as big as Mount Rushmore all together!!! This picture might be able to help you understand the size of this monument, the guard gates in the picture are over 1/4 of a mile away!!!! The next picture is zoomed in as far as the camera would go!

Next up was Wall Drug, I thought that place was pretty neat.  There were people everywhere (yuck), a million different kind of shops to see, and just when you thought you had seen it all; you discover there is a “back yard” with dinosaurs and jackalopes and what not LOL!!! Here is a little map from Wall Drug’s website to give you a little idea of what there was.

I also got some souvenirs from there (yep, I’m bringing a jackalope home HEHEHEHE)

When we left Wall Drug, we headed to Amanda’s house in Nebraska, it was like 490 miles from there.. I didn’t think we were going to make it, but we did. We got there at like 12am! Amanda  (A.K.A. HyoHotMama) is a friend that I met from the ACD forum. She has the same bike that I have – I mean same color and everything – other than hers is two years older than mine. She let us crash at her house and hang out with her family, it was a good time.. She even made us home made spaghetti and crepes and eggs and everything! She has a dog named Ginger that absolutely loved us (I think she liked Rick a little more cause he rough housed with her LOL), I would have took her home in a heart beat!!!!  And incase you don’t know her, she served our country in the Navy!!!! This is Amanda.

We left Amanda’s house around noon today and decided to head for home, which was 940miles away; however, about 200 miles in, we decided to head towards Kentucky to the Creation Museum LOL.  We didn’t make it too far after that though, I started feeling really bad. My throat is so sore and swollen it hurts to even touch my neck. I don’t know what is going on but it hurts.. I’m going to try to make it a couple more days to get home to my doctor (don’t worry, I’ll be ok!!!) So Rick being the concerned caring person he is decided to find a nice hotel to stop at. Here are some pictures of my first Jacuzzi room hotel!!!!!!

That’s about all for today.. I’m going to go to bed early and get some rest.

Tomorrow we are heading to the creation museum, it’s about 511 miles from here.

The next day we are coming home, we will only be about 245 miles from home at the museum! That will probably put us home by 3 or 4pm.

By the way, for those interested.. We are at 6000 miles today!! by the time we get home we will probably be at 7,000 all together!!! We should have signed up with Iron Butt, we would have all kinds of stuff!!!!

Goodnight for now!

I’m pretty exhausted tonight, so I’m going to make this short for now and add more onto it tomorrow morning (just wanted to let you all know we are fine LOL).

We went from South Dakota to Nebraska today. We saw Mount Rushmore, Crazy horse, and wall drug.

Crazy Horse

Wall Drug (see the jackalopes and kangaroos there guys!!!!)

Some of Rick’s flash photography

Well, that’s about all I can put up right now.. I’ll add more onto it later!

g’night for now..

sarah

We left the hotel in Wyoming around 9am and headed for the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. As soon as we got there, we found out that a tour bus was heading to the dig sites in about five minutes, so we jumped on board! The crowd on the bus was kind of entertaining. Half of them were from Minnesota, the other half were from Texas; they were constantly bickering about presidents and accents and how everything was bigger or smaller in Texas LOL. When we got to the dig site about ten minutes later, we got to sit at some pic-nic tables and hear the history of the dig site we were about to see. Here are some pictures of the sites and the museum.

Here’s some of my goodies I got from the museum…. Geode’s, fossils, and an old shark’s’ tooth!

We took off from the Dinosaur Museum around 11, got gas, ate, and were back on the road by 12pm today. We went through the Big Horn Mountains and forest, it was absolutely beautiful, almost as pretty as the canyons we went through yesterday!

At the top of Big Horn Mountain, we were at about 10,000 feet!!!! There was snow all around us, it was pretty chilly!

This was at one of the scenic stops on the way over the mountain.

Here’s some going down the highway straight stretch flash photography for you….. (a lot of them didn’t show up for some reason??)

After we’d had all of the cow poop smells we could deal with, we finally made it into S. Dakota. We are at another KOA campground, the largest in the US actually. I wound up getting the cute little cabin that I had a fit over in California! Here are some pictures of the campground and the cabin!

Following new tradition, here is a picture of the pizza we got this evening at the campground!!! LOL (it was nowhere near as good as Woody’s Pizza LOL)

Tomorrow we are going to see Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, and Wall Drug!!!

More tomorrow!!!!

G’night for now

P.S. Dad, I found this for you today, thought you might like it!

We left Salt Lake City this morning around 9 am and headed for what we thought would be Nebraska. Along the way in Utah, there were some really beautiful scenic overlooks.

When we got into Wyoming, we decided to stop and eat at a Golden Coral.. But, before we could eat we had to get some gas.. Guess where we stopped?!

If you look at the signs.. Kum and Go, liquor, and a good times tavern…. What more do they need?! hehehe!!!

While we were eating at Golden Coral, we met a really cool guy that likes to tour on his motorcycle. He gave us some really good pointers on what to see and where to go… and that is where our route changed LOL! Instead of going to Scott’s Bluff Nebraska to the Agate Fossil Beds, we decided to go to the Wyoming Dinosaur Museum in a town called Thermopolis.

The scenery was absolutely beautiful going through Wyoming. We only ran into a little bit of rain, but it wasn’t a big deal since I had my Frog Togg suit! Here is some more of my flash photography and what not! (Check out the cool looking clouds in some of them. We were so high up in elevation, it looked like we could reach out and touch them!) In some of the pictures, you can see snow on the mountain tops to the left of us.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped at a place called the Red Canyon; it was a great view too!

When we got into Thermopolis, we had a really hard time finding a place to stay, everything was booked. To make a long story short, we found a really nice – cheap – odd ball hotel to stay at that is close to everything. Other than the Dinosaur Museum, there is also a wax and a veterans museum close by. The state park was absolutely beautiful, I could have stayed there all day. There were hot springs everywhere, bison viewing areas, places to fish… Anyway, I was very excited when I saw my first buffalo!!! It was awesome! All of the adults were very protective of the babies, I thought they were going to ram a car on its side when it got too close to them!

In this picture you can see glacier trails!

You can see the town that we are staying at in this picture.

Here’s some more animals that were in the park and also an old spring hole.

and, some blue flowers that I thought were really pretty!

Well, that’s all for now! Tomorrow we are going to the dinosaur, wax, and veterans museums, then heading to Rapid City South Dakota to camp in the black hills ( I probably won’t have Internet access to post).

Leave me some comments!!!!!

g ‘night!

The weather was really bad today, I even had my first encounter with golf ball sized hail today!  It rained (heavy rain) all the way from Ely Nevada until Salt Lake City Utah. All four layers of our clothing were completely soaked and we were really cold, so we stopped in Salt Lake City to get dried off and warmed back up. We decided to go to the huge Gateway Mall to see if we could find any more gear that we could wear in this kind of weather. Luckily, we found a two story Dick’s Sporting Goods Store where they had some Frog Tog suits and some warm gloves. So hopefully tomorrow we can really make some progress without having to deal with the weather so much.

This was at a rest stop in Utah, about an hour outside of Salt Lake City. There were storms all around us.

These were taken at the mall. The first is of a really cool hippie type store, the second is showing the mall itself. It’s an outside kind of mall with stores up and down the street two stories high, the third picture is of the snowflake fountain.

Straight ahead in this picture is Mormon Temple (kind of looks like a castle)

Autumn, here is your picture of our hotel LOL

My Hyosung picture fell off the back of the sissy bar, so I put my own sticker on it LOL

Here is the tracking map so far….

Here is the most current map…

ANNNNDDDDDDD!!!!! here is the map of where my bike has been after this trip is over!!! (can’t talk bad about my bike anymore after this!!)

All of that nice-ness only lasted about 40 miles, then it got nasty. Going through Nevada means constantly going up and down over mountains. Today it was pouring cold rain, around 40 degrees at the tops of the mountains (about 8000 feet) and about 50 degrees in the valleys. We had four layers of clothes on a piece (t shirt and shorts, liners, rain gear, and gear) plus gloves (two layers of those!). We were absolutely froze to death. Within four hours, all layers of our clothes were soaked and we were shivering cold. We decided we didn’t have any business being on the roads half frozen, so we got a hotel for the night in a town called Ely.

A little about the town..

We are about 110 miles from the Utah Border, about three and a half hours from Salt Lake City.

There is no wal-mart around here, it’s about three hours away.

Most everyone sounds Canadian “Ayyyyyyyyeeee”

After this town, there isn’t another town with amenities  for over 100 miles!

We decided to alter the map a bit. We are not heading to Denver, instead we are heading straight to South Dakota through Wyoming, and instead of Fort Leavenworth we are heading to a friends house in Omaha.

Didn’t take any pictures today, so all you have is my commentary! LOL

Tomorrow we are going to try and get as near as we can to the Agate Fossil Beds, it’s about 780 miles away

We traveled around town here for about 100 miles. We went to the Grimes Point Archeological Area where we saw petro glyphs and some hidden caves.

After that we headed to the Pony Express station and Desert observation area. There were lots of lizards there, I wanted to take them all home!

Today, other than being lazy; I washed all of our clothes, Rick checked the bikes out (adjusted his valves, fixed my exhaust, etc.), and I planned our route out for the next few days a little bit better. Here is what our map looks like, just kind of guessing where we are interested in going.

As of today, we are in Fallon, Nevada.

Day 10: Salt Lake City –Salt Lake and maybe go down to the Bonneville salt flats

Day 11: Denver Colorado (crossing the rocky mountains)

Day 12: Nebraska and South Dakota (Agate Fossil Beds, Crazy Horse, Mt Rushmore, Black Hills, Wall Drug, & Badlands)

Day 13: Fort Leavenworth?? (or somewhere on the Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and/or Nebraska state lines… or Hyo Mama’s yard in Omaha!)

Day 14: St Louis Missouri – The arch

Day 15: Home with two play days to spare!

All of those days are divided up into about 500 miles in between attractions, so it shouldn’t be any worse than what we have been riding.

FYI!!!! The tracking site won’t let us upload pictures as we go – it has been like that since the last two time zones. Maybe tomorrow it will let us post again?

@ HyoHotMama, To_Ashes, Connors Nanna, and B’sDarlin: thanks for following me and leaving the comments! Hyo mama I’ll email/call you when we get closer to Omaha! Do I have anymore ACD followers????!!!!!

I guess that’s all for now, hopefully more tomorrow from Salt Lake City! (Or wherever the Garmin takes us LOL)

G’nite

We left the KOA campground at noon today and headed for the beach.. Every beach that we came to was state park property and they wanted 8$ just to park there… So we drove around a bit and found a place to get to the beach for “free” LOL.. there was only 135 stairs and a half a block from where we parked to the beach LOL! The beach was beautiful so it was well worth the exercise!

After our long walk back, we decided to head towards the Golden Gate Bridge. On the way we traveled on highway 17, that was the best motorcycle road I have been on since Route 99 (Bolt Mountain)! The road was very curvy, but not the 90 degree angle kind of turns, very scenic, and not a whole lot of traffic.

We stopped at a vista point (scenic overlook kind of place) about 20 miles before the bridge, there was a nice view.

The Golden Gate Bridge was pretty cool (literally).. You can see Alcatraz in one of the pictures. We got to see the trolley/train system in San Francisco, that was pretty neat too.

I meant to take a picture sooner of Carls Jr.. That is the name of the restaurant from about Oklahoma over instead of Hardee’s. (I’ll try to take another picture later when the sun isn’t shining on the camera.)

Here is a picture of rush hour traffic on the interstate in between San Francisco and Sacramento.

On the way to Nevada, we crossed over the Sierra Mountains. There was snow every where around the top of the mountains (around 7000 ft elevation).

Here is the first casino in Nevada coming from 80 East.

The weather got pretty crappy after the snow on Sierra Mountain.. Hard, heavy, and cold rain came down for about an hour. We made it into Fallon, Nevada this evening. We are planning on going to Tonopah and Goldfield ghost towns tomorrow – it’s only a couple of hrs down the road.

more tomorrow

nite