I haven’t mentioned it before but I’ve been riding with half a windshield. Since Anchorage! I’ll see if I can post a picture of the bike on here before I finish the blog.
Over the years when it was close to Sturgis Rally time, I would see a lot of Harley riders on the way to Sturgis on I70 and it always amazed me the number of riders without windshields. I just could not imagine riding on a highway for any distance at all without a windshield. I always thought those riders were part animal.
Well now I’m even more amazed with what they were doing and I’ve been riding with a full face helmet. Most of the riders I saw were riding with beanie helmets. The wind noise without a full face helmet must be incredible because it is almost unbearable to me with a full face helmet and ear plugs. If I had tried to ride with the broken windshield and my full face helmet but without the ear plugs, I would have been totally deaf by the time I got home. As it was, there was still a lot of ear pain due to wind noise.
Let’s face it, I would not hold out when water boarded!
The ride from the Canadian border down to Great Falls, Montana is not very interesting. It’s on I15 and it’s your basic freeway ride. The land around the freeway is rolling low hills with nothing out there. It’s a lot like the land from Wichita, Kansas up to Kansas City on I35. Nothing much to see.
At Great Falls, Garmin Girl sends us off onto Hwy 87 south. This goes through an almost desert type terrain. Pretty dry but a nice highway without excessive traffic. We were able to move along at a pretty good clip here. Lyle later said we passed two LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers) going the opposite direction while on this highway but I didn’t see any myself. I must have been looking another direction when they went by.
I’ve always felt that the traction on the actual yellow line of a highway is less than the actual roadway and that was proved again on this highway. The highway was in excellent condition and actually looked like it had been repaved within the last year. It was that good looking.
I was going around a curve to the right and I happened to “wander” a little to the left and went over the yellow line in the middle of the road. I wasn’t leaning over a lot but when I hit that yellow line the rear tire just slide over to the left about two inches and caught again. While this doesn’t disturb your turn much at all, it certainly causes your heart to beat fast for a few seconds. Mainly because you’re thinking, “what if it was more like twelve inches or more”? Now THAT would be exciting!
Anyway, I made it a point to stay away from the center line after that. To me, the coefficient of friction for any lines painted on a highway should actually be higher than the coefficient of friction for the main road itself. That way, running over a line would have no affect on your vehicle at all. But noooooo, they seem to do the exact opposite when they work on a highway.
Hwy 87 runs southeast down towards Billings, Montana. It meets up with hwy 191 which was the road being worked on when we traveled through here on the way to Alaska a few weeks ago. Well, they were still working on the highway and they still had the sign our that said, “Motorcycle rider warning. Road construction ahead. Alternate route suggested”. Having just been to Alaska and seen the worst “road construction” in the Northern Hemisphere, I was not worried and just headed down Hwy 191 towards Billings.
We came to the construction area and it had a couple of different detours that were gravel roads and we just went down them like we were in L.A. cruising down Sunset Boulevard. It’s amazing what a little dirt road riding experience can do for a GS rider’s confidence. I was thinking Lyle and I were getting so good we should think about entering the Portugal – Dakar Rally next year. And then I remembered Tim Hall from Missouri who actually ran in it in 2007. He ended up having to be helicoptered to the nearest large “spanish speaking” city in the Canary Islands from North Africa so he could spend a lot of time healing himself before he was able to fly back to the U.S. on a commercial jet. You can read one persons interesting impression of what the 1998 rally was like, here: http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Downs/1382/html/pdrally98.html
If you’ve never heard of it, it is one WILD race. Just to finish the race on a motorcycle would be something special for most riders. A LOT of the entrants don’t even finish! The year Tim ran in it a rider from South Africa was killed. I believe he was only 29 years old. It is one tough race.
Highway 191 then connects with highway 12 which then connects to highway 3 and runs down to Billings. Coming into Billings on highway 3 is an interesting trip. You’re up high near the airport and looking down over cliffs at Billings which appears to be down in a hole. It looks like you can see the whole city from up there. I’d like to spend some time in Billings some day. It is really an interesting layout for a city.
We eventually connected up with I90 and headed for Wyoming and our next destination, Sheridan.
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