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The MisterEd 8000; Grande Tour of America

August 16, 2003 - Portland, Oregon to Winnemucca, Nevada
11 hours, 15 minutes. 576 miles

TODAY'S MAP: (from the H.O.G. members trip planner & MapQuest)

Day one of the tour includes no pictures except the one on the main tour page - this one:

As sometimes happens on my road trips, I got into "ride and get there" mode on the first day and kinda forgot that I had a camera sitting right in the tank bag in front of my face.

The day includes a couple of "oops" moments that reminded me that I needed to calm down and relax and pay attention to what I was doing. At the start of the day, about 35 miles out, I discovered that when making an adjustment to the angle of my left footpeg a couple of evenings earlier, I hadn't tightened the jam nut hard enough. The peg came loose and began to rotate under my foot before I even made Wilsonville. I stopped and got out the toolbag only to find that the one single allen wrench I was missing was the specific one (5 mm) needed for that particular footpeg bolt. Figures. A quick stop at a local auto parts store for a couple of sets of allen wrenches fixed that.

The second "oops" moment occured later in the day after a fuel stop in Brothers, Oregon. With my particular setup, I have to unclip the front straps on my tour pack (the bag that my rain jacket is strapped to in the picture above - I have my right hand sitting on it) so that I can flip the seat up to get to the gas cap. This, of course, requires that you re-clip the bag to the bike after fuleing. I got busy paying for gas and forgot abou this last crucial step. Upon leaving the gas station, the bag, of course, partially left the bike and dragged on the road just behind the rear tire for a few hundred yards until I realized what had happened.

The top straps on the bag got a bit cooked and there is a fresh hole melted through the back of my rain jacket. Otherwise, nothing else was seriously damaged. It was a wake-up call for me to pay attention to what I was doing - having two slipups like this on the first day of a long trip was not making me feel relaxed.

The day was sunny and warm, never got above 80 the whole day - perfect riding weather. I followed I-5 to Salem, then took SR22 and US20 to Sisters and continued on in to Bend. At Burns, I rolled on to SR78, the Steens Highway, on out through the Jordan Valley. Arriving in Burns Juction, having gone close to 125 miles and finding the one filling station there displaying signs on the pumps reading "OUT OF GAS", I proceeded 13 miles north of the junction on US95 to Rome to get fuel, then turned around and headed back to the junction to follow US95 south to the Nevada border. McDermit, NV greeted me with the first place on my trip where I was allowed to operate a gas pump without breaking the law. (For those who don't know, Oregon is the only other state besides New Jersey that doesn't allow you to pump your own gas. Now, for motorcyclists, they will let you actually fill the tank, but you're not allowed to operate the pump, put your credit card in, remove the pump handle, etc. - the attendant has to do all that for you.)

About Winemucca, my feet were simply killing me. I had worn my Sidi Combat Touring boots. They're fine boots and they had been fine for trips of a couple hundred miles or trips where I had been off the bike walking a lot, but I found out on this day that they hurt badly after almost 600 miles of nearly continuous riding. I came to hate the damned things toward the end of the day and since I didn't want to carry them all the way around the country, they found a dumpster at the hotel that night after I had purchased a new pair of boots at Wal Mart.

GO to the next day of the trip

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