Day 13 – May 31, 2010

When we got to the lobby, at 7:00, everyone was gone except Terry.  We had some breakfast stuff at the motel while Gary finished packing. They were already fueled up so I went to the gas station and filled up and went across the street to wait for them. When I looked down to put the kickstand down, I noticed the magic box (voltage regulator) at an odd angle.  The bracket broke off completely, and it was just resting at such an angle where it somehow stayed there. I went back the two blocks to the motel and told the guys that I will be another couple of minutes.  Gary gave me a stretch bungee cord and I wrapped it up tight holding the magic box to the frame.  I have no idea how long it had been broke and still don’t understand why it did not fall to the ground and pull the wires out.  The Anderson luck is still 'hanging' in there.

It was getting very warm again as we did our first fuel stop after the first 120 miles.  The next fuel stop was another 110 miles, and when we pulled in there were 10 or 12 Harleys parked around the corner.  I filled up and got a Gatorade and fired up my bike and rode around to the group.  I asked them if they started the meeting without me. They were a good bunch of folks from Indiana who were just going for a holiday ride. We talked for quite a while and took a few pictures.  Someone gave me an Indiana key holder and I put it on the front of the bike.  We all took off at the same time, they went right and we hit the freeway again.

After another 100 miles, we pulled off for fuel in Merryville, Indiana.  We rode across the street to the Radisson Motel to go in to the restaurant.  When we got outside a half hour later, the sky was black and rain was just starting to come down.  Lightning and thunder were very close and the sky just opened up and was just dumping water everywhere.  Gary pulled out his phone which has live Doppler radar on it and it was very UGLY right where we were at.  We all decided to go back into the restaurant and wait for a while.  It was a pretty fast moving storm and a couple of hours later we put on our rain gear and got ready to go.

Hwy 30 was the Westerly route we chose and when we got ready to go, traffic was bumper to bumper. A guy pulled in and said a bad wreck had the freeway Northbound shut down and the cops were diverting traffic on the road we were going to take to stay OUT of the traffic.  We went a couple of blocks and turned north to try to find a parallel road that was not as crowded.  What we did find was a lot of stop signs and stop lights. We finally made it to a freeway and there were a lot of toll stops.  Gary and Terry both had their license plate tags registered so we all took the I-Pass lanes and did not stop. Gary said I can get on line and pay the tolls, which I will do in a few minutes.