September 26
|
|
For some reason, I didn't take a single picture this day...sorry.
I was awake and up at 7:30. Our dinner of peanuts had not sat well with Eric, and he had been up several times over the night with an upset stomach. I had slept through it all. We had breakfast in the hotel lobby and were on the road just before 9. Today’s plan was to ride some of the twisty back-roads of Arkansas, and position ourselves to be in Burwell, Nebraska the next day (more on that later).
We took back roads around the northwest side of Little Rock, and hooked up with AR-5 just on the other side of I-67. I had been told about this road by some folks on the Motorcycle Tourers Forum and did not want to miss it. It started out being choked with traffic and kind of boring, but it got better as we headed north…the traffic thinned and the scenery got much nicer. There was a beautiful view of a lake and valley around Heber Springs. Somewhere along the way a big river otter was sitting by the road. Around Mountain View we turned on to AR 14, headed for Omaha. As we were coming up a hill with a sweeping left hand turn, we found 5 deer standing in the middle of the road. I looked at the clock, it was 11:39 AM. Don’t these guys know they are supposed to be nocturnal? In some little town, the local Wal-Mart had it’s gas price advertised on a big LED sign…$3.25! Everybody else in town was $2.85 or cheaper, I don’t know what the Wal-Mart guys were so proud of.
I had heard a lot about Arkansas roads, and we were not disappointed. Lots of elevations change, plenty of twistys, and good scenery all around. We were really surprised by the lack of traffic…in a lot of areas where the turns were not too tight we were able to keep up interstate speeds! I was also surprised by the number of decreasing-radius turns. The Arkansas road engineers must be a bunch of sadists! But as much as I liked these roads, I still found that I liked the Smokies better. I never was able to pin down why, but that is the way it was.
By the time we got to Omaha we were hungry, but I knew that Branson wasn’t far, and there was bound to be plenty of good food in Branson. Well, wherever it was, I missed it, because we passed the four exits there without seeing anything that I wanted to stop for. Stomachs growling, we kept heading north over the rolling Missouri hills. South of Springfield I saw a sign for an Appleby’s and took the next exit. There was nothing at the exit but there was a town about two miles east, so we rode there. No Appleby’s. As a matter of fact, not much of anything. Then Eric spotted a Godfather’s Pizza in a strip mall. We rode up…closed. Moved, actually, and the sign didn’t say where. But a few seconds of rubbernecking led us to another Godfather’s sign, this one at the new location. They had a full pizza buffet and salad bar, and we ate until we were as full as ticks.
Up until this point, it had been a beautiful day…warm, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. As we passed through Branson it began to cloud up, the temperature dropped, and the wind picked up. I thought we might get some rain after lunch, but once we were done pigging out and headed north again, the sun came back out and it got warmer.
We were tooling up 65 and I noticed that we had over 100 miles on this tank of gas. Eric’s range varies from 125 to 150 miles, depending on how hard we have been running. I decided that I would stop at the next station that I saw. I noticed that Eric was following at a greater-than-usual distance, and then his headlight went out. Drat! He was out of fuel…not 100 yards from a Conoco station! We had come close to running him out of fuel before, but this was the first time we had actually done it. But this year, I was prepared. I pulled a turkey baster out of my bags, moved some fuel from my tank to his, and we were good to go.
I should mention that we had not been stopped on the side of the road for more than a couple of minutes when a guy in a pickup truck stopped to see if we needed help. Gotta love the folks in the Mid-West!
We skirted about the east side of Springfield, and saw a HUGE Honda dealership that I would have loved to have stopped at, but didn’t have the time. We can waste a lot of time in motorcycle dealerships! We took 31 to 7 to 71, all north-west, to Kansas City. I had just glanced at the map and thought that there was a loop numbered 429 around Kansas City. Wrong. The loop was numbered something else, so I ended up leading us right into the heart of KC on 71. Thankfully, riding through downtown was not that bad. We did have some congestion and traffic lights, but they did not last long and we got a good look at downtown. I hereby withdraw my comment about Kansas City that I made in my 2003 journal (“the most depressing place I have ever seen”). Seems I had been in EAST Kansas City, which is pretty crummy. But the downtown area is quite pretty.
We moved on to St. Joseph. It was Eric’s night to pick a hotel (we alternate), and he saw a Drury Inn that looked new. Neither of us had ever stayed at one, but they gained a couple of loyal customers that night. The had a bar set up, three free drinks apiece, nachos and popcorn, an hour of free long-distance, free sodas in the mini-bar, and a big hot breakfast! All for around $70 a night! We were in heaven. Sadly, they are mainly in the east, and we were headed west…we wouldn’t see another one the rest of the trip.
After knocking back our drinks, calling home, and checking email, we walked next door to a BBQ place called Bandana’s, and each got a chicken-and-beef combo. They had the best BBQ chicken either of us had ever eaten. We had a couple of beers apiece there, so were feeling no pain by the time dinner was over. Back at the room, we caught the last half of “I, Robot” on HBO. This was the second time that I had seen the second half of that movie, I never have seen the beginning!
We rode a little over 500 miles this day.