This is the view outside my door this morning, the mo'tel is built on this crazy hill, and it is raining for real. I check the weather channel and Missouri Doppler on the web and find there are bands of thunderstorms moving towards the south east out of the Gulf. There seems to be a break in them though so I suit up, including rain gear and sit in front of the AC waiting for the rain to stop.

I couldn't update my blog last night as for the first time in almost 4 straight weeks I didn't have internet connectivity. As is often the case, the nicer the mo'tel, the crummier the connectivity. I usually run a speed test on the connection to see what my experience is going to be like, and in some little Ma & Pa mo'tels, like the one in Scott's Bluff oh so long ago, I got 12 MB/s down and 5 MB/s up, true high speed. Tonight's signal strength was so weak I couldn't even get to the login page.

My waiting strategy pays off and in about 20 minutes the rain abruptly stops, I go to have one last whiz, no small feat in rain gear and by the time I come back the sun is shining. So begins my day of; ride northbound in a glorious tailwind of better than 30 MPH until I would catch up to black sky or precipitation, then ride westbound in a pretty far from glorious crosswind of the same speed until I found a suitable northbound road again.

Also part of my route 'planning' was the knowledge that extreme weather was forecast for an exaggerated hourglass shape with its bottom lobe across southern Kansas and its top lobe across southern Nebraska. There was a thin line across northern Kansas that was 'safe' and that was what I was headed for. I drove on many a wet highway, and at one point for about
a 10 minute stretch with mounds of hail on the shoulders........timing is everything!!

Leaving Branson, MO I encounter several traffic jams on the Interstate, we actually come to a complete stop on a number of occasions. The 35 mile drive to Springfield takes about 90 minutes. (Doh!) If you didn't get the Simpsons reference, you may be too old. All of the traffic jams happen around on-ramps, and is due to Labor Day RV/Boat traffic and the fact that 'mericans are the worst mergers ever! (See below)

All things considered a pretty slow day adventure-wise so I will take this opportunity to rant a bit about my observations of 'merican drivers gleaned over the past month of driving amongst them. As a group they all share the same faults;

• no clue whatsoever about what the left lane (fast lane) is for, content to amble along at 20 mph under the posted limit
• no clue about moving over to the left lane to allow merging traffic to, well, merge. I have witnessed too many incidences to count of close calls with merging traffic, it is not even exciting anymore it is so frequent, it is expected.
• no clue about merging, granted they rarely have anywhere to merge to, but the concept of getting up to speed and blending is completely lost on them

They also love to tailgate, little to no use of turn indicators and the worst of all habits they have is; most states have laws that dictate you move over and slow down when passing law enforcement or highway maintenance vehicles stopped on the highway. It is a good law, but the drivers do that for any vehicle on the shoulder, and usually very abruptly. So you can be booting along in the left lane when all of a sudden someone will come into your lane, no signal-no warning, and slow down to 40 MPH! That'll leave a spot on the seat! More than once I have had to veer onto the shoulder to avoid missing one of these clowns.

I think the worst thing of all is that as they are cutting me off, or putting themselves in danger, they are also patting themselves on the back and congratulating themselves on being such a good, law abiding driver.

As the day wore on I started to see a sliver of lighter sky on the western horizon. This became my goal, I was around 500 km on the day, I need to do 600+ so I decided to 'ride to the sun' no matter how long that took. It was further than Topeka, KS and further than Manhattan, KS but I finally caught up to the sun, and felt it on my face in Salina, KS. Sadly I also caught up to a dragonfly infestation of biblical proportions!

Above the highway on several occasions I could see these vertical black masses hanging like veils or drapes. It took me a few times to realize they were bugs, not necessarily mosquitoes, but some type of small gnat. I stopped and shot video of one of these, but you can't see them.

Not surprisingly there are also a large amount of dragon flies abounding, eating this huge bio mass of gnats. I can see the DF's zig zagging across the highway in front of me, and either they are exceptional pilots, exceptionally lucky pilots or my bike pushes enough air in front of it to divert them, I only hit 4 so far.

Did I mention how huge they are though? I took one in the shoulder and it was like hitting a rock, my whole arm was numb for about 30 minutes. I took one in the chest, musta been a glancing blow cus it didn't hurt, but his wreckage fell into my lap and he was huge! The other 2 were face shield hits that sounded like a hit from a .50 cal inside my bucket.

While I am on the topic of bugs and helmets, another small rant. My fancy iicon helmet has all sorts of ducts, and slits & slots and venturi's on and in it, to providing cooling and to ensure the visor doesn't fog up. On the ducts are the proudly emblazoned word 'Ram Air Induction'.



I call them 'Ram Bug Insuction' as they vacuum all sorts of bugs out of the ether and inject them into my helmet, usually behind my sungl************ and unscathed and ****** off. Many times I will be cruising along, visor down, when all of a sudden there is wasp crawling around on the inside of my sunglasses. I guess the inconvenience of that is far outweighed by how effective the ducting is at keeping the helmet cool, minimizing head itch and keeping the visor clear. Especially when you consider how many hours this month my coco-nut has spent inside of it.

I am most likely 4, maybe 4.5 days from home, I will continue my west & north strategy and drive until supper time. I am getting out of the densely populated eastern plains now, and with the holiday traffic gone I hope it to be a good day.

Talk soon!