Ralph Weickel’s Blog

June 4, 2009 or Day 13 or the journey found us heading east from Durango with the goal of Kansas by night fall.  Leaving Durango on Route 160 east we stopped at the Durango HD and then settled in for a long ride.  On Route 160 east we would cross Wolf Creek Pass at 10,850 feet and La Veta Pass at 9,413 feet - both were a great ride.  Wolf Creek provided the nicer views and was filled with avalanche areas while the top had a great place to pull over and it felt like taking a rest on top of the world.  The Wolf Creek Pass gets an average of 38 feet of snow annually.

Once out of the mountains at Walsenburg, CO we headed east on Route 10 and encountered a severe storm - common sense would have said to wait and we rode on encountering sizable hail - it hurts when it hits you especially in the face - and this was our third hail storm this trip and the worst.  We made it through the storm and rode off into sunshine.  The trip across Colorado proved to be longer than anticipated and it reminded me of how big a state Colorado is.  This part of Colorado was flat with plenty of cows especially at the Wiley livestock compound.

As evening fell we stopped for dinner in Lamar - had a good Mexican meal - and headed for the Kansas border.  We traveled Route 50/400 east toward the Kansas border and entered Kansas about 8:oo pm MST.  We lost an hour shortly as the time changed and rolled into our stop for the evening - Garden City at 10:30 pm CST.  The ride to Garden City provided a nice wake-up call when deer ran across the road and we barely had time to stop for them - deer and motorcycles do not mix well.  We also passed a major Tyson chicken plant in Humboldt, KS.

You may have noticed in many of the pictures I am holding a HOG Magazine at the various State and County markers - the reason is that Harley has an annual contest which awards points for states, counties, parks, etc. visited; with one point awarded for each letter of the alphabet.  It requires a picture of the rider, their bike, latest HOG magazine and the location marker.  We have collected 45 points on this trip to date.

Today we will look for additional counties and cities that have obscure names with the goal to end in Kansas City by nightfall.

Have a fun Friday!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 9:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.