Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Day Five or canyon racing in Utah

Well, I have to be truthful, I am writing this at the end of Day Six. Great intentions yesterday, even got a hotel with WIFI so I could keep you stalkers at bay....

By the time I got in and fed, I laid on the bed and fell asleep, even missed the lovely Marilyn's call.. :(

So, the day started of fairly well, got out of the hotel room fairly early, loaded Vanessa. She was not demanding attention this morning, and got on the road....

Met up with Jim, one of the guys I had supper with, Jim was not the guy with the chain problem. Anyway Jim was the guy who showed me a decent route through Utah. So after a quick McDonalds breakfast we were off.

Jim is one of those unassuming guys, does not brag, boast he just is... which I think is cool. So off we rode we made some miles, small cavet here, Jim rides many bikes, what he was currently riding was a KTM SuperMoto. Jim can ride. Vanessa and I (mainly I) were struggling. the pace was outside of my comfort zone for a couple of reasons. 1) my confidence was shot. I had a very bad experience the day before that until now was not really ready to openly talk about. I was riding through a canyon about 20km north of Elko, probably going a bit faster than I should (45mph in a 35mph corner) but what really got me was the sudden gust of wind came up and blew us into the other lane. I honestly did not know if there was any oncoming traffic.... there was not! Needless to say it scared the crap out of me. And I mean it really scared me. Please do not tell Marilyn...

So the second reason is that Vanessa is quite loaded down, she does not handle well at all, and certainly not as well as a KTM SuperMoto. Let alone a SuperMoto with a very capable rider...

This must have been very apparent to Jim as he waited for me once and then seemed to slow up a bit. I felt bad for that. We parted ways when Jim wanted to do a road with some gravel, I passed on the idea and continued on. We met up later in another town, had a beverage and again parted ways.

I rode through abunch of very scenic canyon, took a ton of photos, but cannot upload them as there is no WIFI fast enough here in the campsite.

So the rest of the drive I worked on my confidence in the corners with Vanessa, we came to some agreements... I would not push her too hard and she agreed to try and maintain a stable course when the wind hits.

We also worked on some likes and dislikes for the day... Vanessa likes getting all of my attention, She also likes premium fuel and not riding on the same road more than once. Some dislikes include, huge wind gusts, hot tar snakes that cause us to float around in the corners...

We made it to Blanding, Utah had some decent food at the restaruant across the parking lot. and as indicated earlier fell asleep hard.

 

 

 

 

 

Columbia River
Columbia River
 

 

 

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