Well, today was our last day of the trip and it was a heck of a ride, that's for sure. There were no curvy roads, not much for fabulous scenery, no small animal encounters and no unexpected nice surprises. What we did have was all interstate driving and the fun of fighting heavy winds for the entire day.
When we started out in the morning it was partly sunny through Indiana and didn't look like too bad of a day. It was windy and there was a lot of traffic all the way up until we hit Indianapolis, but it was in the 70's and fairly decent weather.
We headed West at Indianapolis and rode about 50 more miles with Dad before he peeled off to head North to Valparaiso. By that time the clouds were really thickening and there were no more sun spots peeking out anywhere. The temperature was also dropping and we all added some layers to get us through.
Steve and I continued on and crossed in to Illinois. We stopped for lunch and a little break in Urbana and then got back on the road to punch through the rest of our miles. We continued fighting the wind the entire day. It was so strong and consistent that it knocked 10mpg off of my fuel consumption. Geesh! I actually started running out of gas and had to flip to reserve to make it to the next gas station. Also, the further we traveled the darker the clouds got and the more the temperature dropped. It was about 55-60 degrees out and getting pretty darn chilly. We bundled up as much as we could and tried to out run the very dark clouds to our immediate left. We were able to pass the first one that looked like it was dumping rain on the farms in the distance, but as we came up on the second dark cloud we weren't so lucky. We were traveling on the very edge of it and I thought we might make it, but then we started to get some light rain. Steve pulled us off on the next exit and I thought we were going to put on our rain suits but instead we turned East away from the storm and spent the last 60 miles or so working our way home on country roads. So smart! We managed to stay dry for the rest of the ride in, though it did add some additional miles and time to our trip.
We pulled in to Steve's around 8pm and high-fived each other for our great job at not getting wet with so many rain clouds around us. We warmed up inside for awhile before unpacking our bikes and going to get gyros at Uncle Nicks. Yum! Memory meat! We checked in with Dad to make sure he arrived at his destination safely and we are all officially "safe and sound" after another motorcycle adventure. We put a total of 2247 miles on the bikes in 7 days. Not too shabby :)
Not many pictures from today, but you can click here to see them.
Well folks, that's it! Thanks for reading along with us and we'll be sure to let you know about next years trip.
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