Our Out West Trip Epilogue

We are back home again in Indiana. We left May 28th and returned home June 19th.We traveled 5608 miles and passed through and visited the states of Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa. We dodged storms for the fist couple of days as tornadoes tore through Oklahoma and Kansas. After that we had great weather with only a few hours of rain here and there. God bless the people who live in Kansas. We took a two lane highway through northern Kansas and I believe it was the most isolated road we've ever been on. Makes US 50 (America's loneliest highway) seem busy. The constant cross winds in Kansas (same as last year) just makes it miserable on a motorcycle. It would be hard to live there. The Harley ran great, used a half quart of oil and averaged over 40 miles per gallon of gas. We passed two broken down bikes, a Harley with a flat tire and a Honda Goldwing trike. They were taking the plastic covers off the engine area. We had the added security of two other couples, also on bikes as we traveled across this great country of ours. Thanks to Ron and Gloria from Wisconsin, and Bob and Bev from Michigan.

The goal of this trip was to visit as many National Parks as possible in this loop around the center of the country on a motorcycle. I think we accomplished that goal. For Becky and I we had never been to the Grand Canyon or any of the other not so well known (to us) national parks. I had my passport book with me and got as many stamps as possible to document this trip. Some of the dates are not right. Didn't check them before I made the stamp.

We took over a 1000 pictures of this amazing country and it's beautiful mountains, arches, canyons, rivers, waterfalls, wildlife, snow, rain and sun. This blog has been a window to a very small portion of this amazing adventure for us. One picture we did not take and now I"m very sorry we didn't think about it at the time were the number of foreigners who were visiting these parks. At times I think we were the only Americans there. One of the funniest  stories was when Becky walked up to a Chinese man who had just gotten off a tour bus and yelled "Where are y'all from??" he looked at her like she was a crazy person and responded "no engrish" and moved away quickly. I'm still laughing. We also had our pictures taken many times by the Chinese tourist (mainly young girls) of these American bikers. They are crazy about Harley's. Go figure. Thanks everyone who followed along.