Day 58: Aurora, CO

Hastings Minnesota is a cute little town. I was surprised to discover that it was actually its own community, and hasn't yet been swallowed up by suburbs expanding from the twin cities. My uncle showed me around town a bit, down by the locks and the river park, and the small lake, as well as downtown and out by the old mill. It's kind of strange that I've known my Uncle Bob for twenty years, and I think this was the first time we'd ever had a real conversation. It turns out he used to ride motorcycles as well. It was also the first time I'd had a conversation with my cousins Kelly and Christian. Last time I saw them I think they were seven and four, so we didn't have much to discuss at the time. My cousin Chris had been in Rapid City South Dakota working on a documentary film and purely out of coincidence ended up visiting his family the same time that I was there, so I got to catch up with him as well. It turns out that we've been living just a few miles from each other for the past several years, but I haven't actually seen him since I was 14 years old. We all went to St. Paul for lunch one day so my aunt and uncle gave me a brief tour. It's a really nice little city, a good mix of quaint and modern. My aunt loves old homes, so they took me up to Summit Hill to see the beautiful, huge gothic mansions made of bricks and stone. It was a short but lovely visit, and I'm grateful for a chance to see my aunt and the rest of her family. On my way out of Hastings I wandered through Minneapolis for a few minutes and wasn't all that impressed. It's a little larger and a lot less charming than St. Paul. It's like a smaller, less interesting version of St. Louis.

The ride from Hastings to Dickinson was mostly pretty boring. Fargo is smaller than I expected, and didn't seem to have much personality, though I guess it's not really a fair judgement to make from the interstate. I had a long way to go that day (566 miles) and it didn't look like it was worth stopping to investigate. Just east of Bismarck the landscape starts to become intersting, and is actually quite beautiful. I was lucky enough to pass through during the short time of year when everything is green. I never thought I'd say it, but I really liked North Dakota.

Apparently I arrived at the right time, because it was the start of Rough Rider Days, which is a week long festival including rodeos, demolition derbies, and other colorful events. My cousin is a Rangeland Management Specialist for the US Forest Service, so when we went out to see the badlands at Theodore Roosevelt National Park it was like having my own personal guided tour. I've never seen anything quite like the badlands, and the vast expanses of grassland to the south is also beautiful in its own way. I got to see a great storm too, not very flashy, but the hardest rain and strongest winds that I've ever seen. No golf ball sized hail though, which was disappointing to me, but good for everyone else. I went to my first real rodeo, and I think it was the first time I really understood the appeal of contemporary cowboy culture. Not that I'm about to go out and buy myself a big ol' hat or anything.

While in Dickinson I got a taste of the local cuisine, which in addition to good old-fashioned 'murican food includes things like borscht (I never thought beets and cabbage could be this good!), some kind of cream-based potato dumpling stew that I can't remember the name of, and fleischkuekle, which is basically a beef patty wrapped in pastry and deep fried, and it's absolutely delicious. I also had the opportunity to eat a buffalo dog for the first time. It was slightly better in texture than any normal hot dog, but at $7.50 with no sauerkraut, relish, or even mustard, it will probably be the last one I ever eat.  I actually had a lot of fun in Dickinson, but my cousin assured me that I just had lucky timing, and it's typically very boring.

When I left Dickinson I headed south to the Black Hills. I had a really wonderful route all mapped out, with lots of squigly lines and variations in elevation, and it was going to be the perfect ride. Except that most of the smaller roads that Google shows traversing the Black Hills National Forest turned into gravel, dirt, mud, or even grass once you got about 200 feet off the highway, so I ended up taking a much less interesting route which circumvented most of the forest and skipped Mt. Rushmore entirely. I've heard so much about Sturgis and Spearfish and Deadwood that I don't think they could have possibly lived up to my expectations. Spearfish is kind of a neat little town, but Deadwood is a horrible tourist trap of 'wild west' and 'gold rush' themed casinos with very little left of interest to me. All of the saloons that looked like they were worth stopping at were closed down and boarded up. It didn't improve my attitude much that I found myself in the middle of a thunderstorm. Once I got south of Deadwood the weather and the traffic both cleared up a bit, but the road wasn't as twisty in real life as it appeared on the map. When I finally made my way to highway 87 through Custer State Park that all changed though. Highway 87 is a great road, but you have to watch out for deer. They have a tendency to hang out in the ditches next to the road for some reason. I ended up camping at the Elk Mountain Campground, in Wind Cave National Park, which is beautiful and full of wild life. The buffalo and the antelope in particular are pretty fearless. At the campground I ran into an old biker from Texas named Wayne who had just retired and was now living his life on the road. He said he'd been saving money his whole life to do this, and it occured to me once again how lucky I am for the opportunity to do it while I'm still young. They had free firewood at the campground but I was never much of a boyscout and had to ask my neighbors for a lighter. After I somehow managed to break his lighter my new friend from the Netherlands offered to start it for me. In what seemed to be a typical European mix of old and new technology, he doused the firepit with lantern fuel and used a flint and steel to create a small explosion. With a nice warm fire started I realized I still had no cookware or utensils, so I got creative and invented something called Cowboy Nachos - beanie weenie on top of beef jerky.

Although Hot Springs South Dakota is a pretty neat little town the rest of the ride to Denver was relatively dull. The folks in Wyoming were all very friendly, but it's hot and boring, and though the country is pretty I didn't see anything that couldn't be found in more spectacular examples someplace else. Cheyene is a strange place. It's basically a small sea of suburbs surrounding an airforce base that's so vast its hangars can't even be seen from the interstate. I always assumed that Denver was in the mountains, since it's at such a high altitude, but it's actually on the high plains, just outside the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It's hot and dry, but it feels great to see some mountains again. Real ones, not like the misnamed little molehills in the midwest. I haven't seen real mountains since I left Tucson, and I haven't seen mountains with snow on them since I crossed the Sierras. I haven't seen this kind of traffic since Southern California either, but I'm a lot less excited about that.

Day 52: Hastings, MN

After being chastised and brow-beaten for failing to update my loyal fans, I've finally found some time to do a little writing.

I spent a bit longer in Chicago then I originally intended, due partly to weather and partly to my own disorganization and lack of planning.  But to be completely honest, after 7,000 miles I wasn't all that excited about jumping back on the bike right away to ride another 3,000 miles back home.  It was a much needed break, and gave me some time to do a little maintenance and a little cleaning, as well as have some fun and spend some quality time with my family.  Rather than trying to recreate a narrative of the past two weeks, I'll just list some of the highlights, not in any particular order:

I got to meet my cousin Andrew's wife for the first time, as well as my cousin Charlotte's husband and two sons.  My Uncle Dan and Aunt Audrey took us out to dinner at White Fence Farm, somewhere off of Joliet Road.  They serve the best fried chicken I've ever had, hands down.  I don't know exactly how they do it, but it's not a traditional batter.  Apparently they steam the whole chicken before they bread it and deep fry it in a pressure cooker.  The restaurant itself is huge, with seven or eight different dining rooms, and basically a small museum full of antiques, including some sweet motorcycles.  It was the first time I'd ever seen an Ariel.

I went to see a band called Catfight with my cousin Kristi.  It's a girl band that plays covers of everything from AC/DC to Greenday to Franz Ferdinand.  They're pretty talented musicians and they put on a great show.  The next day she helped me change the oil and air filter on my bike.  She has a little Kawasaki ZZR600, and I was hoping we could go for a ride, but her bike needs a battery and her registration is expired.  Maybe I can talk her into riding it out to Seattle next summer.

I went on a ride up to Lake Geneva with Uncle Kim & Aunt Terri, Uncle Jeff & Aunt Lynn, and my little cousin Kaira.  It was the longest I've ever ridden with a passenger, and apparently the longest ride she's ever been on.  Her father has a big Harley Davidson Electra Glide with a big comfy back seat, but she seemed to enjoy the sport bike quite a bit.  I think she has knee-dragger potential.  It was a beautiful day and a beautiful ride, and we had lunch at Popeye's across the street from the lake.  They've got great pulled pork sandwiches and unbelievably tasty apple pie.  The apple pie was so good it made the scoop of ice cream that came with it seem kind of pointless.

I went on a ride with Uncle Dan out to Rockford, then down to Dixon, and back to Elgin.  That was an absolutely beautiful ride.  Highway 2 between Rockford and Dixon is a nice winding road along the river.  Not exactly what I'd call twisty, but pretty good for Illinois.  We stopped at the John Deere Historical Site and I got to see one of my uncle's blacksmithing friends do a demonstration.  He gave me a little good luck charm to take with me.

One of my uncle's neighbors is an artist and author, and while I was staying there I read one of his books.  It's a collection of short stories and poems, and basically amounts to the insane ramblings of an angry old man.  It was great.  I tend to agree with the majority of his opinions.  He was having a showing/book signing at a gallery in Glen Elyn, so we went to that and I got to meet him and talk about his book, and what he went through to publish it.  He's a really interesting guy.  Afterward we went to the Bavarian Lodge for some authentic German fare.  I ordered the Braumeister's Platter, which included a bratwurst sausage, a thuringer sausage, a nockwurst sausage, a center cut smoked pork chop, and a slice of roasted pork, along with sauerkraut, red cabbage, hot german potato salad, sliced pumpernickel and rye, and a bowl of liver meatball soup.  Everything was great.  Then we went to Oberweiss Dairy for some home made ice cream.  The butter pecan was just about perfect.

Aunt Terri made the best oven baked chicken I've ever eaten, and some kind of cucumber and onion salad that she learned how to make from her mother.  Uncle Kim grilled up the most perfectly cooked pork tenderloin I've ever had.  Aunt Lynn made some delicious biscuits and gravy, maybe even better than my brother's, and some baked carmelized onions that were delicious.

I really enjoyed just sitting down after dinner and talking to my uncle, sipping the twelve year old scotch he's not allowed to drink anymore, listening to all his stories.  He has a story for everything, and usually more than one.  He's got drinking stories, cooking stories, boating stories, hunting stories, motorcycle stories, and all kinds of crazy childhood stories, which my mother insists are mostly exaggerations.  I've found that it's quite different getting to know my aunts and uncles as an adult and on my own, rather than in the context of a family gathering like weddings, funerals, and holidays.  I seem to have earned a bit of street cred with all my biker uncles for this trip, and especially for doing it on what they see as a completely uncivilized and horribly uncomfortable bike.  Uncle Dan took one look at it and exclaimed "I wouldn't give you fifty bucks for that thing!"  Oh well.  It's not for sale anyway.

On one of the rainy days I took the train into the city to meet my old boss from Safeco.  We had coffee and watched the rain, and caught up for a bit before she had to get back to work for more conference calls and meetings and reports, and all the things I'll probably never miss about my old cubicle job.  I spent the rest of the afternoon just wandering aimlessly, taking pictures of the buildings and bridges, and ducking into bars and pubs when it started raining too hard.  I found a really cool looking piano bar, but the bartender informed me that they didn't open until seven, and "oh, by the way, we have a dress code."  It was a nice little reminder that I was pretty far away from the west coast.

The ride to Hastings was nice, but I got kind of a late start and had to make some work calls every time I stopped for gas, so I didn't have as much time to explore Wisconsin as I was hoping.  I've heard a lot of good things about Madison and it would have been nice to wander around a little bit, but I guess that'll have to be another time.  Wisconsin is a beatufil state.  The roads aren't as straight and square, and they have nice rolling hills and cute little farm houses, dairy barns, and grain silos everywhere.  It's almost as picturesque as Missouri but it feels like it has a lot more personality.  I love the little towns in the midwest.  Every tiny town has a functional downtown, with a main street harboring more than just boring, kitschy little antique and gift shops.  As a result of a road closure I ended up on a detour and encountered the best twists and turns I've seen since Mt. Lemmon in Arizona.  It kind of caught me by surprise and I almost forgot how to ride them properly.  Riding along the river at sunset was beautiful, but as soon as the sun went down I was blazing my way through clouds of bugs again, just like Mississippi.  Maybe I'll hit another thunderstorm on my way to North Dakota so I won't have to wash my jacket all over again.

Day 37: Wheaton, IL

Eventually the rain in Memphis lightened up quite a bit, or at least enough that I would be able to see where I was going, so I just threw on all my rain gear and continued north.  Most of the rain was along I-55, so I wound my way northwest through Arkansas and Missouri until I hit US-67, which took me back northeast into St. Louis.  I think I may have figured out why Arkansas is the poorest state in the country.  In Mississipi I saw a lot of corn fields.  Across the river in Arkansas I saw a lot of neatly cultivated rows of dirt.  In all the heavy rain most of those neatly cultivated rows of dirt turned into lots and lots of mud.  I saw a domesticated zebra in Arkansas, just hanging out in a pasture with a bunch of mules and small horses.  One zebra.  Not even a pair.  It was possibly the strangest thing I've seen so far.  The folks in Arkansas are nearly as nice as the folks out on the bayou in Louisiana.  Everywhere I stopped people wanted to talk to me.  It was as if no one had ever seen a sportbike before, and the idea that anyone would ride one all the way from Washington state to their tiny little town in Arkansas was just unbelievable to them.  The girls at the gas station teased me about riding in the rain, the young guys wanted to know all about the bike, and all the old guys gave me somber warnings to ride safely, and be careful.

Missouri is a pretty state, and almost every view from the road could be called picturesque.  That being said, there's really nothing interesting about it.  Nothing significantly sets it apart from Mississipi, Arkansas, or Illinois, aside from the effort that they seem to put into maintaining that picturesque appearance.  Every lawn is trimmed, every house is neatly painted, even the grass growing along the highways seemed like it was actually tended and cared for.  I stopped in Fredericktown, which is a charming little community about 90 miles south of St. Louis, looking for a barbcue restaurant that my brother had heard about called The Pig.  Some yokels on the internet claimed that it was the best barbecue in the state, and worth the two hour drive from St. Louis.  Since I ended up on route 67 to avoid the rain, it seemed like providence.  With a little searching I was able to find the place, and it looked like what you'd expect from a drive-in barbecue shop that's been open since 1947.  When I saw the menu on the wall I thought it was a typo.  $2.40 for a pork sandwich.  When the price was confirmed, I thought I had hit the jackpot.  As soon as I saw it, I realized why it was only $2.40.  It was about two ounces of meat squished between two pieces of white bread and grilled in a sandwich iron.  I finished it in about two minutes, and when the girl came back and asked if I was done with my plate I said 'yeah, unless you want to put a couple more sandwiches on there.'  I figured for two and a half bucks I could sample just about everything on the menu.  All said and done, I had a 'Brown' which is theoretically made from just the edge of the pork shoulder, so it has the most smoke flavor, a 'Combo' which is basically a Brown with a slice of american cheese melted on top, a fried catfish sandwich, pulled pork, and coleslaw, along with a couple bottles of soda.  I hadn't eaten anything all day because I was anticipating the best barbecue in the state of Missouri.  After making my way through three sandwiches that were good, but less than impressive, and a tiny little dixie cup full of coleslaw that wasn't any good (and cost me a $1.75) I decided to forego the white bread and just orded the pulled pork without the sandwich.  It took the little girl a couple seconds to catch on, but she asked the cook to 'throw in a little extra, cuz he seems kinda hungry'.  The pulled pork actually turned out to be pretty good.  It was the only thing that really impressed me, which is nice, otherwise I would have walked away incredibly full, but not very satisfied.  It was a typical midwest style, with smoked, shredded pork stewed in a thick, sweet, tomato based sauce, and it was really pretty delicious.  I ate a ridiculous amount of food and the bill was still five dollars less than my rib dinner in Memphis, so I can't complain too much.  Besides, to find this place I ended up on a tiny little highway out in the country which turned out to be the best road of the entire day.  Perfect blacktop, smooth, winding turns, and beautiful farm houses and ponds and orchards and pastures to my left and to my right.

I made it into St. Louis about an hour after dark and rode straight past the Arch.  It's huge.  I was never really that impressed by it before.  I always thought 'It's a big arch; who cares?'  But it's absolutely enormous, and when it's lit up at night it's quite pretty.  St. Louis is a beautiful town, probably the prettiest city that I've seen so far.  Even some of the more beat up neighborhoods south and west of downtown are full of old brick houses and tenements that show a lot of character and soul, even if they're not so well kept or restored.  I decided to take a tour of the Anheuser-Busch brewery while I was there.  I'm not a big Budweiser fan (in fact I kind of hate it) but it's the biggest brewery in all of North America, so I had to check it out.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the tour is free and even includes two free beers in the tap room at the end of the tour.  Free beer always tastes better.  I've probably been to more than thirty breweries in four different countries, and this was by far the biggest and the nicest.  Parts of it were built in the 1880s and they've built new additions to it as late as the 1990s, but they've done a really nice job of maintaining the architectural style.  A lot of the brewery sits on land that was originally part of the Busch family estate, and some of the existing buildings were part of that estate.  Regardless of what you think of their beer, the brewery has a lot of history, and it was fun to see beer being made on such a massive scale.

After my brewery tour I had lunch at a place called Penny's BBQ, famous for their ribs and their pork steak.  I'd never heard of a pork steak before and I assumed it was basically a big pork chop.  It's a little more than that.  The chef used to be a meat cutter for Kroger, so he cuts every pork steak himself, and each one is smoked individually, then grilled and smothered in a honey barbecue sauce.  It's listed on the menu as an 18oz Pork Steak for $10.99, but I swear I've had 20oz porterhouse steaks that weren't as big as this.  It was enormous, about two and a half inches thick and the size of an oval dinner plate, and there was only one tiny little bone in it.  They had home made potato salad and coleslaw to go with it.  The potato salad was possibly the best I've ever had, and when I told my mother about it she was horrified.  Her coleslaw is still better though.  I don't know how they got the potato salad to be so rich without being incredibly dense and pasty.  I think they may have used whipped butter.  I don't know, but it was damn good.  The pork steak was also wonderful, and for the first time in my life I felt like I may have eaten enough pork for one day.  But that didn't stop me...

After all that food I had no choice but to go back to the hotel and take a nap.  Nap taken, I went downstairs to the lobby where they had free drinks from 5:30 to 7:00.  St. Louis is quite a beer town, but you'd better be willing to drink Bud, Bud Light, or Busch. Cuz that's what you get.  I heard a rumor that President Obama had 150 pizzas flown from a little place in St. Louis called Pi (the mathematical symbol) all the way to Washington, D.C. because it's his favorite pizza in the country.  Normally I don't pay much attention to celebrities' opinions, especially politicians, but for a Chicago kid to say that his favorite pizza comes from St. Louis, well, that's a pretty gutsy claim.  So I had no choice but to check it out.  The place itself drove me nuts.  It's in a trendy, gentrified part of town and was packed wall to wall with ageing yuppies and rich young hipsters, and is the kind of pizza place that has a bigger wine list than menu, but before I finished my first beer a seat opened up at the bar so I seized it and settled in to wait for my pizza and observe the crowd.  The bartender confirmed the rumor that it was, in fact, Obama's favorite pizza, but rather than having 150 pizzas shipped to Washington he had the chef and kitchen crew flown out to Washington D.C. and they cooked the pizzas there.  Much more sensible.  Anyhow, I ordered the South Side Classico (deep dish), which came with onions, green bell peppers, italian sausage, and of course mozarella.  The sauce was incredible.  It had huge chunks of tomato and tasted strongly of fresh basil and wasn't overly seasoned with garlic or oregano.  The crust was just right, crispy on the outside where it seared on the pan, but fluffy and chewy on the inside.  I can't however, say it's the best pizza in the country.  Too much sauce, not enough toppings.  It's a deep dish.  The reason you make a deep dish pizza is to fit more toppings on it.  That's why they were invented.  I could barely taste the sausage, and there weren't nearly enough peppers or onions on it.  It was still a fine pizza, just not the best in the country.

The following day, having exhausted my food and lodging budget for St. Louis, and still full from all the pork and pizza, I set out for Chicago, or at least the outskirts thereof.  I took the interstate, which was boring, but after all, this is Illinois.  The highway engineers of the midwest have less imagination than a slice of wonderbread.  "Go straight for 15 miles.  Make a 90 degree turn to the right.  Go straight for three quarters of a mile.  Make a 90 degree turn to the left.  Go straight for 30 more miles.  If there's a hill, get the dynamite; we're going straight through it.  I'll be damned if this road is anything but flat."  Not that there are really any hills to worry about.  I saw an exit sign for Mt. Pulaski.  The closest thing to a mountain I could see was a hill about as tall as a three story apartment building.  There are bigger hills in Seattle that don't even have names, let alone aspire to the title of 'Mountain'.

I haven't been in the Chicago area for very long, but already it looks like my schedule is filling up.  We had a big family barbecue in Elgin yesterday with my mother's side of the family.  Tonight I'm taking my grandmother out for dinner.  Later this week I'll be having dinner with my father's side of the family.  Later still I'll be having lunch or dinner with my old boss from Safeco who moved here a few years ago.  And somewhere in between I'll be changing my oil & air filter, going for bike rides with all three of my uncles, and spending some time with all of my cousins.  I should still have plenty of time to relax before I head out west, finally in the direction of home.