Hot and Cold

$#%&!!  Roadside teardown..     The whole trip till now the bike had been running a touch hot, playing with jettings didnt seem to help any.  Hours of Super Slabbing it with huge winds got the temp gauge up to 120C and it was starting to have that crunchy shifting and other overheating symptoms.   Complete teardown on the side of the road to figure out WTF is going on..

I’d already redone the carb, replaced the air filters and everything I could think of prior to leaving.  Might as well replace that grungy crankcase filter too and see if that does anything..   350+ miles to go and no time to wait for a cool down, we hopped back on and an hr down the road at 80mph it had cooled down to 90C, MUCH better!   REPLACE YOUR GRUNGY CLOGGED CRANKCASE FILTERS!!

The wind was just horrible.  At one of the rest areas we stopped at to redo our Visine and take a breather the plate glass door shattered and cracked the surrounding glass in the wall when the wind slammed it shut. Later at dinner (Subway) the radio playing kept having warnings for all of the roads we had just been on, stating 75mph and up wind gusts.

We had reservations for a camping spot at Dead Horse Point State Park and we never made it there.  300 miles of fighting the worst winds we’d been through this trips and constantly having to expect and be ready for a a 75 mph gust from the side at any second that’ll knock you off the road is tiring.  Luckily the sections of Interstate we were on were closed to truck traffic from the wind and there was virtually no other traffic, or towns, or gas for 150 miles and we could ride right straight down the center of both lanes.  3 or 4 times we were blown all the way past the rumble strip onto the shoulder by a big gust out of nowhere. It felt like an unexpected tackle from the side.  One of those times we very nearly crashed, we were scraping floorboards trying to swerve back onto the road.

We passed a sign, No Joke, last chance for gas  90 (something) miles but were too frozen to take a picture.  When we finally crossed nomans land and could fill up with gas again.  We just pulled over and grabbed a motel room, we were exhausted!  About half of the parking lot was filled with bikes all the other riders had the same idea and given up for the day too LOL.    As we were pretty close to Moab I wasn’t surprised to see several other bikes with the same ADV stickers on them in the exact same places on their luggage and windshields too.  However, when I talked to their owners the next morning not a single one of them was a ADV member, all of the stickers had belonged to previous owners and they’d not taken the stickers off.

Yeah stop bugging me, wind and humidity sucks…   This is what you look like after 300 miles of 75mph cross winds and gusts and freezing rain.