Decided to take a little trip late last week around the Great Lakes. My buddy TriggerT did this ride a couple of years ago and I was going to go with him and had to cancel out. WheatonFJR and Airboss went to California this year and I canceled out on that one. Would I cancel out of this one? I kept reviewing my route, reviewing my gas stops, reviewing my routes, talking to TriggerT, worrying about riding in the dark dodging forest rats, worrying about anything else that I could think of. He finally said Griff, just f&*king do the ride. You have put way more planning into it than I did. So thats what I did, just f&*king did it.
Heres the route:
Since I live in northwest Indiana pretty close to I-80/94 I could get on the circle route pretty easily. The ride around the Great Lakes can be an Iron Butt ride, achieving a gold status if you do the ride (with the proper documentation) in under 50 hours. So that was my goal. Most people seem to take the route counter clockwise just because of the timing of riding in the Canadian boonies during the day time and avoiding Chicago rush hour traffic. I also planned the northern (TC-11) route in Canada, rather than the southern route (TC-17) due to the supposed reduction of tourist traffic on the northern route. Required receipts are required in Cleveland, Watertown, NY or the US/CA bridge crossing , North Bay or Sudbury ON, Thunder Bay, ON, Duluth, MN or Superior, WI and anywhere in IL. I planned to ride a little over 1000 miles the first day and stay in North Bay, ON. The second day would be 1400 miles in hopefully good weather and NO forest rat, moose (is that a forest elephant?) or bear encounters. It is difficul to ride this ride in daylight under 50 hours, so my route was planned to hopefully minimize night riding with the critters lurking. I have done several saddle sore rides and a bun burner gold, so I am familiar with long hours in the saddle, but was still not looking forward to the second day's ride in the dark through Wisconsin.
Took off Thursday morning from Crown Point at about 5:00 am. Here's what the GPS said for me to do today:
Leaving about this time would put me into North Bay at 11:00 at night. My night riding today would cover from Arnprior, ON (just west of Ottawa) to North Bay. Pretty uneventful riding through Indiana, Ohio (stopped on the east side of Cleveland for the required receipt) and was cruising pretty good UNTIL I reached western PA near Erie on I-90. The dreaded trail of brake lights ahead did not bode well. The construction sign said the construction was 2 miles away, but I was already in a parking lot, at a dead stop. The old FJR cooling fan was working to keep the bike cool, but not me. After about 15 minutes of slow moving and stops I decided to turn around and go back down the shoulder to the interchange that was only about ½ mile back. My GPS showed some side roads that seemed to be a pretty good alternative to the mess I was in. As I rode back down the shoulder I passed a bunch of Hardleys just sitting in the high speed lane, all off their bikes, just chillin. I put my hand in the air and circled to show them that I had a plan to go around this mess, but they seemed content to sit there on the highway. As it turned out, old Mr. Garmin did me right this time cause I got around the mess in a fairly timely fashion. I figured I lost a good 30 minutes to this fiasco. Smooth sailing through the rest of PA and NY on I-90, turning north at I-81 toward Canada. I should say if you dont have an electronic tollway transponder like IPass or EZTag or equivalent and you travel much from IL east on the interstates, GET ONE!!! It saves a bunch of time and aggravation. Indiana and Ohio got on board a couple years ago, so you dont need to haul around 50 pounds of change for toll booths. Where was I oh yeah. Stopped in Watertown, NY for a receipt and pretty much breezed through the US/CA border station. The Canadian border agent was very polite, but did ask me to kindly take off my helmet and sunglasses to compare me with my incredibly crappy passport photo. The only place where I had to use money was the bridge between US and Canada here.
Ohh, Canada or is it ehhh, Canada?
Changed the GPS display to metric so I wouldnt be going 100 mph in a 100 km/hr speed zone. Figured if I got tired enough in the evening that might be possible for me. Speaking of speed limits, the speed limits on the freeways near Ottawa was 100 km/hr, but on the Transcanada highway in the middle of nowhere the speed limit is 90 km/hr about 55 mph. That hurts. And it seemed folks seem to travel about that speed, except the big transport trucks they seem to move along between 100 and 110 km/hr. Small towns are even worse 70 to 50 km/hr and again the natives seem to go just about that speed. Remembering Triggers encounter in Canada in 2009, I maintained roughly 20 over in the 90 zones, which seemed to be pretty safe. Through the towns I maintained just about the speed limit. I figured all the time I would gain by speeding would be wiped out with a visit from Dudley Doright. Past Arnprior, northwest of Ottawa the 4 lane highway disappeared for basically the next several hundred miles. The weather was beautiful as the sun was going down and I felt pretty good. As it got darker, I could just feel the anticipation of those little critters waiting to jump out and ruin my day. A fox ran across the road and now I was really freaked. Thankfully there was no more wildlife, or at least I didnt see anymore that night into North Bay. But unfortuneately that was not the problem, the road construction was. Dirt and gravel is bad enough during the day, but when it catches you off guard at night in unfamiliar circumstances, yikes. Two or three hundred yard (excuse me, meter) long stretches of dirt at 70 km/hr definitely shook the cobwebs out of my head. My only close encounter with a gendarme occurred that night coming into Mattaway. A stretch of dirt caused me to go slower than I would normally have done and I hit the city limits just at the speed limit, catching Mattaways finest in my high beams sitting there waiting to catch one of dem rogue FJR riders. But what was nice that night was that I was able to use my Hella xenon HID auxiliary lights for really the first time. It was nice being able to leave them on for long stretches. At least I would be able to have a fighting chance of avoiding some critter if he decided to kamikaze me. After Mattaway, it was basically smooth sailing into North Bay.
As I was riding to the Comfort Inn, I notice lots of leaves or paper or something like that blowing around on Lakeshore Drive. The attendant at the Shell Station said what I saw were shad flies. They only come out at certain times of the year and only live for a very short time. They were covering EVERYTHING and the attendant (and the girl at the Comfort Inn) warned me to watch the road, since crushing all these nasty things on the road could be like driving on ice. The girl at the Comfort Inn gave me this flyer with all the information you ever want to know about the shad fly. Checked into the Comfort Inn about 11:20 (10:20 my time) and tried to unwind and read email, to no avail. So here is what I did at the end of day one.
It appeared that I was probably a little ahead of my schedule, according to S&T, so I decided to sleep in an additional 45 minutes to avoid dark driving in moose, dear, fox and whatever else wanted to run in front of me country. This decision almost came back to bit me in the *** and cost me the gold time of less than 50 hours.
3:45 am (2:45 to me) came pretty quickly. Nicole, the same girl at the desk the night before, brought out breakfast fixins for me even though it was a couple hours early. What a sweetie. Ate a decent breakfast, loaded up the camel bak, kicked the tires to make sure they werent flat and fired up the GPS. Here is the agenda for today. The picture is kinda dark, just like my attitude this early in the morning.
Headed north toward either Matheson (190 miles) or Cochrane (240 miles) in the dark at 4:30 am. My gas mileage was pretty good, so I wasnt too concerned about the station in Matheson being closed (it was open) and having to go to Cochrane. My welcome sign to the real Transcanada highway was a moose warning next 50 km sign. No picture, sorry. Im not a good picture taker and I wasnt about to stop on the typically crappy shoulder the highway had. The weather forecast showed intermittent rain showers, which turned out to be true. I ran through slight drizzles through Cochrane, Hearst (next gas stop) and almost to Longlac (next gas stop). I didnt bring my heated gear, which could have been a BIG mistake. It wasnt that cold, but the persistent drizzle started taking its toll and I finally put my rainsuit on at Hearst. Ah, big difference. Now I was warm and toasty. The heated grips went a long way to temper the cold. The stretch basically from Cochrane to Longlac had nuttin. Some open prairie, some trees, some rocks. I am sooo descriptive, arent I? I had plenty of time to play with the GPS, listen to either XM radio or mp3s and just figger out how I would screw up this ride!! One little stretch of road construction detour went through some soft mud that caused me to almost have to walk the bike through it, but no harm, no foul.
At Longlac the sun came out and I took off the rainsuit. However, the wind was blowing like crazy from the north and was pretty cold. Knowing I was turning south pretty soon toward Thunder Bay, I figured running with a tail wind would warm me up, which it did. Talked to a couple guys from Alberta on Hardleys who were coming from Thunder Bay they even had helmets!! Maybe Ontario has a helmet law, I dont know. I mentioned before I had only seen one critter a fox the whole trip. West of Longlac I spotted this guy down the road you can see him, cant you?
Since I really couldnt tell if he was a cub or just a small guy, I was not about to get much closer and have mama come charging out on the road. Since I already had the camera out I went a little further down the road and took this picture typical of hundreds of miles I saw in Canada.
Now I started playing games with the GPS estimated arrival time and what I needed to do make it under 50 hours. Actually I was really shooting to make it under 48 hours. Day 1 travel was primarily on interstate, with cruising speeds of 75 to 80 for me. Day 2 was a different story. With the speed limit of 90 km/hr (55 mph), I didnt do much more than 110 km/hr about 67 mph. I started to realize that to make the gold time, I was going to have to pick up the pace and cut down gas stop times (which were around 15 minutes at that time). Little did I know that my buds in the lower 48 were thinking the same thing, since I had given my Spotwalla site to a few guys. Thanks to Airboss for lending me the Spot tracker. Trigger had a fit when he saw I didnt get going the second day when I was supposed to. Soo, as I rode the nice sweepers north of Thunder Bay, I figured the party was about over and it was time to get serious about the time.
I came into Thunder Bay at 5 pm their time on Friday afternoon, which means everyone was getting out of town. I made pretty good time through the multiple traffic lights, got the mandatory receipt and headed for the CA/US border on 61 into Minnesota. Of course the border crossing was a little more congested on a Friday afternoon and it took me about 24 minutes to get to the US agent. She was very nice, didnt ask me to take my helmet off as she took my passport. When she asked me for my drivers license also, I was thinking uh oh. Whats up now? As it turned out, she didnt really like the crappy passport photo and was satisfied with the drivers license photo. Welcome back to the USA!
Now highway 61 in Minnesota along Lake Superior is very pretty, with some nice stretches of road. Plus plenty of little resort towns along the way. But NOT on a Friday afternoon when hoards of vacationers are coming up north and nobody is in a hurry, except me. In addition, since the Minnesota state guberment is shut down right now, all the state parks are shut down and the entrances along 61 are barricaded, causing people to park along the road As I bit my tongue in some long slow lines of traffic, I kept telling myself that one ticket would not only be costly, but eat a huge chunk of time. I am proud to say that, while I did pass briskly, I didnt cross the double yellow once. Hear that Wheaton?
Got into Duluth about 7:30 pm and got the mandatory receipt. Derek Dickson had been following me on Spot and tried to catch me, but I was too fast (haha) and we didn't connect.
Now for the tough part 7:30 in the evening, 530 miles to go after already riding almost 900 miles today. I had made the drive from Crown Point to Duluth many times on business, but normally during the day, stopping for lunch and getting to the motel in the afternoon. Tonight I would be riding somewhat tired, not to mention that I would be riding down 53 in Wisconsin which is deer central, which the signs kept telling me. Sure enough, just south of Superior, WI I saw my first deer on the shoulder. Sheeeit!! It just stood there as I passed and I thought one forest rat down, god knows how many more to go. As it turned out, I never saw another one, or maybe I should say they were there but I just didnt see them. The tailwind I had from just past Longlac kept up and I cruised pretty easily at about 75 mph. Playing more GPS games to stay awake, it looked like I would make the 48 hours as long as nothing disasterous happened.
It was pretty smooth cruising down 53 to I-94 and then to I-90. At Black River Falls, my second to last gas stop, I had to scrape a ton of bugs off my face shield that I hit while riding. Lots of fun smooshing those bugs around on the face shield to see!! The front of the poor old FJR looked like it got carpeted with bugs, but I didnt have time to worry too much about that, other than clean the head lights a little bit. There was too much traffic on the interstate to use my nice auxiliary HIDs and I really did miss that extra visibility. Hit the WI/IL line and welcome to IL construction down the northwest tollway all the way to Elgin. Even at midnight there was enough traffic to be observant for idiots in construction zones especially on Friday night. Road construction on the IL tollway was going round the clock, so the speed limit, even in the middle of the night was 45 mph. Arggh. I have places to go and times to beat!! Traffic moved at about 60, so that wasnt too bad. Looped around Chicago on I-294 and I-80/94 and actually wished that there was a little more traffic in order to move briskly in a pack theres protection in numbers, right? Got back to Crown Point at 3:38 am, a little less than 48 hours after taking off. :yahoo:
This picture says it all (add 5 hours on the GPS for my motel stay)
1060 miles the first day - 18 hours
5 hours in the motel
1400 miles the second day - 24 hours
So, I am glad I didnt wimp out on this ride. The weather couldnt have been better. Basically no rain, a tailwind for the last 700 or so miles and moderate temperature. Maybe that's why I really wasn't that sleepy the last few hours in WI, IL and IN. When I did my BBG, the last few hours were hell trying to stay awake. Road construction in PA sucked, as did some of the road constructions practices in Canada push dirt around on the road and, oh, forget to warn the motorcyclists about it. I took an assortment of dried fruit, peanuts and apples to munch on at gas stops, which kept me going. As well as saving time and money. And I said this before, get a transponder for the IL, IN, OH, NY tollways. It definitely saves time and aggravation. It would be nice to revisit the area north of Thunder Bay for a more leisurely ride, but that will have to wait for another day.
Hoped you like the report. Sorry if you were looking for lots of pictures, but Mark wasn't with me on this one. And thanks to my FJR buds for the moral support.
Heres the route:
Since I live in northwest Indiana pretty close to I-80/94 I could get on the circle route pretty easily. The ride around the Great Lakes can be an Iron Butt ride, achieving a gold status if you do the ride (with the proper documentation) in under 50 hours. So that was my goal. Most people seem to take the route counter clockwise just because of the timing of riding in the Canadian boonies during the day time and avoiding Chicago rush hour traffic. I also planned the northern (TC-11) route in Canada, rather than the southern route (TC-17) due to the supposed reduction of tourist traffic on the northern route. Required receipts are required in Cleveland, Watertown, NY or the US/CA bridge crossing , North Bay or Sudbury ON, Thunder Bay, ON, Duluth, MN or Superior, WI and anywhere in IL. I planned to ride a little over 1000 miles the first day and stay in North Bay, ON. The second day would be 1400 miles in hopefully good weather and NO forest rat, moose (is that a forest elephant?) or bear encounters. It is difficul to ride this ride in daylight under 50 hours, so my route was planned to hopefully minimize night riding with the critters lurking. I have done several saddle sore rides and a bun burner gold, so I am familiar with long hours in the saddle, but was still not looking forward to the second day's ride in the dark through Wisconsin.
Took off Thursday morning from Crown Point at about 5:00 am. Here's what the GPS said for me to do today:
Leaving about this time would put me into North Bay at 11:00 at night. My night riding today would cover from Arnprior, ON (just west of Ottawa) to North Bay. Pretty uneventful riding through Indiana, Ohio (stopped on the east side of Cleveland for the required receipt) and was cruising pretty good UNTIL I reached western PA near Erie on I-90. The dreaded trail of brake lights ahead did not bode well. The construction sign said the construction was 2 miles away, but I was already in a parking lot, at a dead stop. The old FJR cooling fan was working to keep the bike cool, but not me. After about 15 minutes of slow moving and stops I decided to turn around and go back down the shoulder to the interchange that was only about ½ mile back. My GPS showed some side roads that seemed to be a pretty good alternative to the mess I was in. As I rode back down the shoulder I passed a bunch of Hardleys just sitting in the high speed lane, all off their bikes, just chillin. I put my hand in the air and circled to show them that I had a plan to go around this mess, but they seemed content to sit there on the highway. As it turned out, old Mr. Garmin did me right this time cause I got around the mess in a fairly timely fashion. I figured I lost a good 30 minutes to this fiasco. Smooth sailing through the rest of PA and NY on I-90, turning north at I-81 toward Canada. I should say if you dont have an electronic tollway transponder like IPass or EZTag or equivalent and you travel much from IL east on the interstates, GET ONE!!! It saves a bunch of time and aggravation. Indiana and Ohio got on board a couple years ago, so you dont need to haul around 50 pounds of change for toll booths. Where was I oh yeah. Stopped in Watertown, NY for a receipt and pretty much breezed through the US/CA border station. The Canadian border agent was very polite, but did ask me to kindly take off my helmet and sunglasses to compare me with my incredibly crappy passport photo. The only place where I had to use money was the bridge between US and Canada here.
Ohh, Canada or is it ehhh, Canada?
Changed the GPS display to metric so I wouldnt be going 100 mph in a 100 km/hr speed zone. Figured if I got tired enough in the evening that might be possible for me. Speaking of speed limits, the speed limits on the freeways near Ottawa was 100 km/hr, but on the Transcanada highway in the middle of nowhere the speed limit is 90 km/hr about 55 mph. That hurts. And it seemed folks seem to travel about that speed, except the big transport trucks they seem to move along between 100 and 110 km/hr. Small towns are even worse 70 to 50 km/hr and again the natives seem to go just about that speed. Remembering Triggers encounter in Canada in 2009, I maintained roughly 20 over in the 90 zones, which seemed to be pretty safe. Through the towns I maintained just about the speed limit. I figured all the time I would gain by speeding would be wiped out with a visit from Dudley Doright. Past Arnprior, northwest of Ottawa the 4 lane highway disappeared for basically the next several hundred miles. The weather was beautiful as the sun was going down and I felt pretty good. As it got darker, I could just feel the anticipation of those little critters waiting to jump out and ruin my day. A fox ran across the road and now I was really freaked. Thankfully there was no more wildlife, or at least I didnt see anymore that night into North Bay. But unfortuneately that was not the problem, the road construction was. Dirt and gravel is bad enough during the day, but when it catches you off guard at night in unfamiliar circumstances, yikes. Two or three hundred yard (excuse me, meter) long stretches of dirt at 70 km/hr definitely shook the cobwebs out of my head. My only close encounter with a gendarme occurred that night coming into Mattaway. A stretch of dirt caused me to go slower than I would normally have done and I hit the city limits just at the speed limit, catching Mattaways finest in my high beams sitting there waiting to catch one of dem rogue FJR riders. But what was nice that night was that I was able to use my Hella xenon HID auxiliary lights for really the first time. It was nice being able to leave them on for long stretches. At least I would be able to have a fighting chance of avoiding some critter if he decided to kamikaze me. After Mattaway, it was basically smooth sailing into North Bay.
As I was riding to the Comfort Inn, I notice lots of leaves or paper or something like that blowing around on Lakeshore Drive. The attendant at the Shell Station said what I saw were shad flies. They only come out at certain times of the year and only live for a very short time. They were covering EVERYTHING and the attendant (and the girl at the Comfort Inn) warned me to watch the road, since crushing all these nasty things on the road could be like driving on ice. The girl at the Comfort Inn gave me this flyer with all the information you ever want to know about the shad fly. Checked into the Comfort Inn about 11:20 (10:20 my time) and tried to unwind and read email, to no avail. So here is what I did at the end of day one.
It appeared that I was probably a little ahead of my schedule, according to S&T, so I decided to sleep in an additional 45 minutes to avoid dark driving in moose, dear, fox and whatever else wanted to run in front of me country. This decision almost came back to bit me in the *** and cost me the gold time of less than 50 hours.
3:45 am (2:45 to me) came pretty quickly. Nicole, the same girl at the desk the night before, brought out breakfast fixins for me even though it was a couple hours early. What a sweetie. Ate a decent breakfast, loaded up the camel bak, kicked the tires to make sure they werent flat and fired up the GPS. Here is the agenda for today. The picture is kinda dark, just like my attitude this early in the morning.
Headed north toward either Matheson (190 miles) or Cochrane (240 miles) in the dark at 4:30 am. My gas mileage was pretty good, so I wasnt too concerned about the station in Matheson being closed (it was open) and having to go to Cochrane. My welcome sign to the real Transcanada highway was a moose warning next 50 km sign. No picture, sorry. Im not a good picture taker and I wasnt about to stop on the typically crappy shoulder the highway had. The weather forecast showed intermittent rain showers, which turned out to be true. I ran through slight drizzles through Cochrane, Hearst (next gas stop) and almost to Longlac (next gas stop). I didnt bring my heated gear, which could have been a BIG mistake. It wasnt that cold, but the persistent drizzle started taking its toll and I finally put my rainsuit on at Hearst. Ah, big difference. Now I was warm and toasty. The heated grips went a long way to temper the cold. The stretch basically from Cochrane to Longlac had nuttin. Some open prairie, some trees, some rocks. I am sooo descriptive, arent I? I had plenty of time to play with the GPS, listen to either XM radio or mp3s and just figger out how I would screw up this ride!! One little stretch of road construction detour went through some soft mud that caused me to almost have to walk the bike through it, but no harm, no foul.
At Longlac the sun came out and I took off the rainsuit. However, the wind was blowing like crazy from the north and was pretty cold. Knowing I was turning south pretty soon toward Thunder Bay, I figured running with a tail wind would warm me up, which it did. Talked to a couple guys from Alberta on Hardleys who were coming from Thunder Bay they even had helmets!! Maybe Ontario has a helmet law, I dont know. I mentioned before I had only seen one critter a fox the whole trip. West of Longlac I spotted this guy down the road you can see him, cant you?
Since I really couldnt tell if he was a cub or just a small guy, I was not about to get much closer and have mama come charging out on the road. Since I already had the camera out I went a little further down the road and took this picture typical of hundreds of miles I saw in Canada.
Now I started playing games with the GPS estimated arrival time and what I needed to do make it under 50 hours. Actually I was really shooting to make it under 48 hours. Day 1 travel was primarily on interstate, with cruising speeds of 75 to 80 for me. Day 2 was a different story. With the speed limit of 90 km/hr (55 mph), I didnt do much more than 110 km/hr about 67 mph. I started to realize that to make the gold time, I was going to have to pick up the pace and cut down gas stop times (which were around 15 minutes at that time). Little did I know that my buds in the lower 48 were thinking the same thing, since I had given my Spotwalla site to a few guys. Thanks to Airboss for lending me the Spot tracker. Trigger had a fit when he saw I didnt get going the second day when I was supposed to. Soo, as I rode the nice sweepers north of Thunder Bay, I figured the party was about over and it was time to get serious about the time.
I came into Thunder Bay at 5 pm their time on Friday afternoon, which means everyone was getting out of town. I made pretty good time through the multiple traffic lights, got the mandatory receipt and headed for the CA/US border on 61 into Minnesota. Of course the border crossing was a little more congested on a Friday afternoon and it took me about 24 minutes to get to the US agent. She was very nice, didnt ask me to take my helmet off as she took my passport. When she asked me for my drivers license also, I was thinking uh oh. Whats up now? As it turned out, she didnt really like the crappy passport photo and was satisfied with the drivers license photo. Welcome back to the USA!
Now highway 61 in Minnesota along Lake Superior is very pretty, with some nice stretches of road. Plus plenty of little resort towns along the way. But NOT on a Friday afternoon when hoards of vacationers are coming up north and nobody is in a hurry, except me. In addition, since the Minnesota state guberment is shut down right now, all the state parks are shut down and the entrances along 61 are barricaded, causing people to park along the road As I bit my tongue in some long slow lines of traffic, I kept telling myself that one ticket would not only be costly, but eat a huge chunk of time. I am proud to say that, while I did pass briskly, I didnt cross the double yellow once. Hear that Wheaton?
Got into Duluth about 7:30 pm and got the mandatory receipt. Derek Dickson had been following me on Spot and tried to catch me, but I was too fast (haha) and we didn't connect.Now for the tough part 7:30 in the evening, 530 miles to go after already riding almost 900 miles today. I had made the drive from Crown Point to Duluth many times on business, but normally during the day, stopping for lunch and getting to the motel in the afternoon. Tonight I would be riding somewhat tired, not to mention that I would be riding down 53 in Wisconsin which is deer central, which the signs kept telling me. Sure enough, just south of Superior, WI I saw my first deer on the shoulder. Sheeeit!! It just stood there as I passed and I thought one forest rat down, god knows how many more to go. As it turned out, I never saw another one, or maybe I should say they were there but I just didnt see them. The tailwind I had from just past Longlac kept up and I cruised pretty easily at about 75 mph. Playing more GPS games to stay awake, it looked like I would make the 48 hours as long as nothing disasterous happened.
It was pretty smooth cruising down 53 to I-94 and then to I-90. At Black River Falls, my second to last gas stop, I had to scrape a ton of bugs off my face shield that I hit while riding. Lots of fun smooshing those bugs around on the face shield to see!! The front of the poor old FJR looked like it got carpeted with bugs, but I didnt have time to worry too much about that, other than clean the head lights a little bit. There was too much traffic on the interstate to use my nice auxiliary HIDs and I really did miss that extra visibility. Hit the WI/IL line and welcome to IL construction down the northwest tollway all the way to Elgin. Even at midnight there was enough traffic to be observant for idiots in construction zones especially on Friday night. Road construction on the IL tollway was going round the clock, so the speed limit, even in the middle of the night was 45 mph. Arggh. I have places to go and times to beat!! Traffic moved at about 60, so that wasnt too bad. Looped around Chicago on I-294 and I-80/94 and actually wished that there was a little more traffic in order to move briskly in a pack theres protection in numbers, right? Got back to Crown Point at 3:38 am, a little less than 48 hours after taking off. :yahoo:
This picture says it all (add 5 hours on the GPS for my motel stay)
1060 miles the first day - 18 hours
5 hours in the motel
1400 miles the second day - 24 hours
So, I am glad I didnt wimp out on this ride. The weather couldnt have been better. Basically no rain, a tailwind for the last 700 or so miles and moderate temperature. Maybe that's why I really wasn't that sleepy the last few hours in WI, IL and IN. When I did my BBG, the last few hours were hell trying to stay awake. Road construction in PA sucked, as did some of the road constructions practices in Canada push dirt around on the road and, oh, forget to warn the motorcyclists about it. I took an assortment of dried fruit, peanuts and apples to munch on at gas stops, which kept me going. As well as saving time and money. And I said this before, get a transponder for the IL, IN, OH, NY tollways. It definitely saves time and aggravation. It would be nice to revisit the area north of Thunder Bay for a more leisurely ride, but that will have to wait for another day.
Hoped you like the report. Sorry if you were looking for lots of pictures, but Mark wasn't with me on this one. And thanks to my FJR buds for the moral support.
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