Day Twelve - Webster to South Haven

This is the last entry for the trip. I'm guessing it will be pretty short (if I don't get rambling on).

Charlie and I headed east out of Webster with the threat of three lines of storms lining up behind us ready to take one last shot at us. According to the weather man each of them potentially had heavy rain, hail and tornadoes associated with them. Our plan was to outrun them.

From the center if the state we bee lined for Dubuque on the Mississippi. The plan had been to stay the night at my daughter's in Algonquin, IL, but as the day wore on we figured we'd be riding in rain on Thursday if we did. So we headed home.

From the Iowa border the roads were great for riding. Winding through some pretty countryside past the Mississippi Palisades and some interesting towns like Galena, Savanna and Dixon, Illinois.

While in Savanna we stopped at the Iron Horse Bar and Social Club. An Interesting place. It was very old and in the center of town. It had three floors: the first was the bar and part of a motorcycle museum (mostly flat track racers and very old Harleys and Indians), the second was more old cycles and the third was the social club (sofa, chairs and a bar) and the chapel where some hard core types get hitched (Heather the bar keep told us about 2 per month). We only had a beer, but the lunch fare was a beer and a burger for $4.oo. As a side note, Kim later told me there was another spot just around the corner that we missed called Poopy's. Sorry we missed it (I think).

In any event we headed south to hook up with Route 80 past Chicago. Between the wind and the turbulence caused by the trucks (and there were a bunch of them) the ride on 80 was a bit of a workout, however we moved right along and made it to South Haven by about 6:30. For those who are curious, we did out run the rain. It blew up Rt. 80 about 2 hours after we rode through.

All told we put about 4480 miles on the scoots, traveled through a dozen states (Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan) and three Canadian provinces (Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia). The trip was shortened by two days because we clipped a couple of destinations from our itinerary (Revelstoke, BC and the Glacier Provincial Park, the Badlands and the night at Kim's). I kind of feel bad for having to do that, but the trade off would have been a high probability of riding in pretty nasty weather.

Maybe in the next few days I'll throw in a "conclusion" blog, but don't count on it. Thanks for reading this far and for your "best wishes" these past two weeks.

In the meantime; shiny side up and may the rain be always behind you.