It wasn’t a very quite night at the Highway Hotel in St Paul.  We left at 7:30 and headed back to Roy & Shirley’s home for breakfast.  Shirley made a super meal for us.  She said that it feels like she has known us for years, and not just since yesterday.  We all hit it off real good, and it’s hard to leave such a welcome place!  As we were getting ready to leave, a friend of theirs, Pat, showed up.  He is another fellow Harley rider but I don’t think that he has seen a rat bike like mine up close and personal!  He seemed like another good person to know.  Roy said that it looks like my oil cooler wasn’t letting much air flow through it.  It was pretty plugged up with the oil coming out of my oil pump and mixing with the road grime.  He gave me a can of carb cleaner and something to let the crap fall on as I sprayed it off.  It seemed to look a little cleaner. 

As I was getting my jacket zipped up, the zipper decided to come unzipped right behind the main part.  After all these years, it’s time for yet another zipper.  I think that I have had 3 or 4 zippers put in over the last 32+ years that I have been wearing it.  The weather looks like it’s not a good time to have a zipper that doesn’t work!  I put on my heated vest (without the heat) over my leather jacket so that zipper would help out a bit.  It seems to work ok.

At our first gas stop, I saw a lot of oil on the right side of my rat bike behind the oil cooler.  It seemed that when I cleaned the cooler with the carb cleaner, I must have exposed an area that was just waiting to let the oil escape.  And boy did it escape!  I pulled over to the side after filling up, and cut the oil line and put it on the return back to the oil tank.  Therefore, bypassing the oil cooler and letting the oil that was in the cooler & lines run on the ground, just a little bit!  Oops! 

We had our rain gear on as it was looking pretty dark up ahead.  However, we only got a few light showers that fell on us along the way.  At our next stop at Subway, the gear came off.  We saw a small amount of blue sky for a couple of minutes, but no rain anymore.  I was pushing 150 miles on the next fuel run and stopped at a small out of the way gas station.  They had only 85 octane and didn’t take visa; cash only.  I put in $10.00 and it got me a couple of gallons. 

We only had another 48 miles to go to Bismarck, our intended night stop.  We went to a very nice Hampton Inn, where we were met by the smiling faces of Jordan and Lacy.  They were as friendly as their smiles were.  They told us about a steak house called East 40.  We went to it and it was pretty good.  Back in the room and back to the day’s events on the laptop. It’s supposed to be light showers in the morning and heavier rain later in the day.  We plan to be on the road at 6:30 tomorrow morning.  Drew just called me from Salina, Utah.  He said he had quite a ride over the Rockies; rain, hail, sun, repeat the process again and that was his day.  He went into a leather shop in Denver called Jerry’s Leathers to have his chaps fixed.  The guy who helped him was Brad, who looked just like Jerry Garcia, from Drew’s point of view.  Brad only charged Drew $5.00 and he was very happy.  It seems like I need to find a ‘Brad’ real soon to put a new zipper in my jacket for me!  I talked to Cynthia last night.  She said Randy and her got to Moab, Utah in very warm fashion.  They plan to ride around some of the parks today and stay in the same place again tonight.  It appears that her worries are diminishing.  The ones about not making it back to work on time.  Don’t worry Joanne.  It looks like she will be there next Monday! We’ll let you know if we make the planned departure time in the morning……