Pick­ing up where I left off, imme­di­ately after the thun­der­storm line blew through North Platte, there was a dra­matic change. The air was 20 degrees cooler, the humid­ity dropped by about 35 points, and there was this awe­some color and tex­ture to the sky.

Tues­day dawns clear, beau­ti­ful, and actu­ally chilly, for the first time in days. I haven’t really been chilly since I left Lub­bock, TX. I head west on I-80, actu­ally using the grip heaters and jacket liner. Here is a pic of my cock­pit:

GPS on the top, a Garmin Street­pi­lot 2720, old but it get’s the job done. Below that is the KTM dash. The left-hand knob is the heat con­trol for my jacket liner (plus pants liner if its really cold). The LED next to it flashes to tell me how far i’ve got the heat turned up. The KTM dig­i­tal speedo and ODO is next. It has two trip meters, I use #1 to track miles on the cur­rent tank, and #2 to track total miles for the day. I use the trip com­puter in the GPS to track total miles for the trip. The tachome­ter is obvi­ous, the LED above it is a volt­age mon­i­tor: green is good, yel­low and red means that volt­age is drop­ping. So far, I’ve not had an issue with alter­na­tor capac­ity. The right-hand knob and LED is a sim­i­lar con­trol to the one on the left, but this one con­trols the heated grips. And on top of my tankbag, a paper map of the state-of-the-day. That give me a way of see­ing an overview in addi­tion the detail the GPS gives me. It works out pretty well.

I cut north­west up to Scotts­bluff, NE to visit my par­ents gravesites and to have lunch with my favorite uncle, Mike. I get to town and ring him up. Well, it turn out that the same storm front had been through the pan­han­dle of Nebraska the day before, only it had dropped golf ball to baseball-sized hail. My uncle is in the roof­ing busi­ness, so he was way busy, and 45 miles south, in Kim­ball. So I drive out to the ceme­tery, won­der­ing as I approach the gate, how hard it will be to find the grave sites. But my mind has a pic­ture of the site, and I know which way they face, and I ride right to them. They are well kept and just as I remem­ber. A few min­utes reflec­tion on every­thing they gave me and did for me seemed appro­pri­ate; dad taught me the value of hard work and integrity, and mom taught me the value of belief in your­self and care­ful plan­ning. I miss them. But I leave think­ing that they’d both be pretty happy with the son they raised.

I blast down the road to Kim­ball, and find my uncle walk­ing around on top of the town bak­ery. We have lunch and a nice chat. I gotta keep in bet­ter touch with him. Res­o­lu­tion #625!

From there, it was an unevent­ful cou­ple of hours to Fort Collins, to visit Flash and Beth. I get to the address in the GPS, and have a sud­den mem­ory prob­lem: I remem­bered the address as 1516, but the GPS is pro­grammed for 1416. But at 1416, I run out of road. I slowly ride around the cor­ner, think­ing the patio on the place looks famil­iar, then I see an old white Alfa Romeo in the dri­ve­way: yep that’s the place! (Beth is a rabid Ital­ian car and motor­cy­cle fanan­tic). There’s ducati’s (and cagi­vas and guzzis and.…) in that there garage.

Quick unload, change clothes, and I help myself to a beer from the beer fridge (as instructed: “there, now you know where it is, get yer own damn beers” – flash), a Fat Tire ale, from New Bel­gium brew­ery. Flash com­ments that I chose well. I say that Fat Tire and 1554 are sta­ples of our beer inven­tory at home. He says ‘you wanna go visit the brew­ery’. Sure, I say. So we go off on a short brew­ery tour. I for­got my cam­era, so here are a cou­ple of cell phone shots that flash kindly took.

You will notice that i’m hold­ing the growler with both hands. There’s two rea­sons for that; it’s really good beer, and there­fore impor­tant, and i’ve been sam­pling beers with some amount of aban­don and am now some­what drunk. That also explains (at least partly) the stu­pid grin.