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By Lynx, on July 22nd, 2010 Next day with nowhere to go we just slept in and did much needed tasks like laundry, and mailing another box of crap, I mean souvenirs home. Cece’s aunt and Uncle showed us around the nice little town of Lake Stevens and gave us some ideas of what to do around the area.
First though, another bike repair.. Over the two weeks we had been on the road my tour pack had begun to sag more and more in the back to where it was getting hard to read the license plate, but more importantly it was creating a growing lump in the bottom of the bag and taking away valuable space. My luggage rack did not go all the way to the end of the bag and over time the vibrations and bumps and 120lbs+ of weight had caused the thing to sag.
Took the thing off and much to my surprise it had bent the whole luggage rack down too. See in the pics how the Custom World International rack is all one solid piece with the sides bent down, it had bent straight across there where the sides end. I didnt think to get a picture of how badly bent it was. I had Rusty hold the bars to keep it from falling and picked the whole back of the bike up by the end of the rack. With the rear tire off the ground I could shake it up and down a little and it’d slowly bend back a millimeter at a time. That thing is fricken thick, it took a lot of effort to bend it back straight. Luckily it seems to have only stretched the chrome a bit and didnt crack it.
With it mostly straight I cut a piece cut a piece of this stuff from Lowes in half and wired it to each side with a strip of pizza box on both sides and on the top between the metal and the rack to keep from scratching it too badly.
Continue reading luggage rack repair
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By Lynx, on July 21st, 2010 Made it to Lake Stevens where we stayed with Cece’s Aunt and Uncle for almost a week. First thing they did was take us on a little tour of Seattle!
I’d always wanted to spend some time around Seattle where many of my college friends wound up and where most of my coworkers had lived at one time or another. Interesting to see how my life could have been had I persued employment in the North West instead of Colorado and New Mexico.
Continue reading Seattle
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By Lynx, on July 19th, 2010 
By the time we got to Spokane the bike was running more and more like crap the further down we went. It kept hickupping and backfiring through the carbs at idle once and while and now it was starting to do that while at speed on the highway causing a big jerk when it did and also starting to run a bit warm on my gauge again.
Next morning at the motel with the engine cold, time to rejet! Threw in jets 2 sizes larger and good as new, lots more power too.
About an hr later though… Went to pass an RV on the highway and suddenly the bike bogged down and one cyl cut out.. &@#% ! When I found a place to get off the road it idled fine but give it gas and it turned into a thumper. That should have been a clue, but I thought it had to be the fuel filter or something as I had just filled up 10 miles down the road. Tore the whole thing down trying to figure this out, eliminating one thing after another till finally it had to be in the carbs…
Continue reading Breakdown
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By Lynx, on July 18th, 2010 
Too bad we couldn’t cross the border into Canada to have a short look around just to say that we had been there and get to mark a Canadian provence on our states visited map 😉 That whole pesky pass port andbureaucratic red tape involving Native American’s sovereignty thing I mentioned earlier.
Idaho and eastern Washington were not quite what I was expecting. I knew Idaho had lots of forest next to Yellowstone obviously with the national forests there but I don’t know a whole lot about the rest of the state except the potato thing.
The northern stretch that we crossed was very thick and gigantically tall pine and fir trees with what looked like redwoods here and there thrown in, I now think those were Western Redcedars after looking at that site. Idaho had lake after lake after lake, some of them quite big too with very large boats cruising down them.
Not what I was expecting at all, I’m not sure what I was expecting but it wasn’t this. Idaho is a lot like New Mexico in that everyone’s perception of it is exactly wrong and I’m guessing nobody cares to correct those perceptions so they also aren’t overrun with tourists seeking out the natural beauty and spoiling it 😉
Continue reading Idaho to Washington
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By Lynx, on July 17th, 2010 Oil Change the next morning before leaving Kalispell… You’d think this would be easy but we went through 3 parts stores looking for oil to use and there was very little selection in any of them, the ones that did have something usable only had 1 or 2 quarts of it. So I ended up having to take notes of what was in which store and combine them all to figure out what to get. None of them had any of my preferred oil brands so I ended up going with plain Shell Rotella T synthetic, 2 quarts from one place 1 from another (more on this later).
Went to a Valvoline Express Care carwash/oil change place and asked if they would take my oil, one of the attendants said yes but we dont do motorcycles. I told him I’d do it myself in the parkinglot and hand them the oil afterwards. I was getting ready to start and the manager comes over and tells me to leave the premises. WTF? He says we do not allow any motorcycles at all on the lot, you need to go. We’ll take the oil but you cant park here. What an ass. I motioned to the Kawi parked in the shade on the side of the building and he gets defensive, thats an employees bike we dont allow the public to park motorcycles on the premises and storms off. Jeez! I can tell you one thing, if we had any Valvoline places in NM I sure as hell wouldnt go to one after being treated that way.
Rode around the block and parked at Taco Bell next door and just did the oil change there, walked my lasagna pan of oil across the parkinglot and handed it to someone and left. The first guy tried to apologize.
Continue reading Valvoline Care?
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By Lynx, on July 16th, 2010 Glacier National Park and riding the Going to the Sun Road was another thing on my bucket list. Unfortunately the whole trip we had been hearing from other riders who had just come from Glacier that the road was closed and we had to make the difficult decision to cut our visit short here a month just isn’t enough time to see and do all that we wanted. We had to give Cece’s Uncle a date to expect us and once we decided a week in advance we were committed.
They say that all of the glaciers in Glacier national park will be gone very soon at their current rate of melting and this is something I want to see before they are all gone. We were already expecting the road to be closed but if we hurried at least we could see the southern side of the park for a few hours on our way through if we raced fast enough.
The water is so clear. The bottom of these lakes are lined with bright multicolored smooth rocks, reds, blacks, oranges. Very beautiful, I want to go back. We are definitely staying here longer next time when we go to Alaska.
Continue reading Glacier National Park or Bust!
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By Lynx, on July 16th, 2010 Now on to something that actually has something to do with the “Rockies.”
There are several well put together exhibits of early life on in Montana like this filling station. Others included medical offices and store fronts as well as a nicely done Native American wing where no photography was allowed.
These examples of early dress go with the horse drawn era exhibits show casing how the early tourists would have traveled through the west and seen places like Yellowstone.
Continue reading Museum of the Rockies (cont.)
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By Lynx, on July 15th, 2010 
What does Leonardo da Vinci have to do with Montana and the Rocky Mountains? Yeah I don’t have a clue either but they had a very impressive exhibit on many of his inventions and sketches built into wooden models at the Museum of the Rockies.
Leonardo da Vinci was a genius and seeing these in person is very cool. He had way too many forward thinking ideas to attempt to construct and model them all and many just existed on paper and in his mind. It makes one think what might have been had the potential of many of these been realized so far ahead of their time.
Continue reading Leonardo da Vinci
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By Lynx, on July 14th, 2010 
Outside the Museum of the Rockies was a very cool Living History Farm. The volunteers at this place continue to live and work in period dress and continue to do all the normal frontier chores that would have been common 150 years ago including growing all their own food and making homemade dishes from scratch that visitors can taste. I like places like this to really show visitors and their kids who grew up with the convenience of modern day civilization just what life was like out on the frontier. You can read all the books in the world and look at vintage photos but until you actually come to a historic site like this that has been preserved and continually used and see in this lifestyle in person you cant quite grasp just how much work every day life was.
We did a self tour of the home, all of the older ladies were buisy giving tours or doing end of the day chores to get ready to close up. As we went through I was showing Cece what things were and they all seemed real impressed that I knew what everything was, its function and how to use it. We explained that we were from New Mexico where a lot of this stuff is all still used.
Continue reading Living History Farm
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By Lynx, on July 13th, 2010 
Getting tired of super slabbing it to put down lots of miles we decided to check out the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman and take a break. We followed the signs and got off at the exit they said and went through miles and miles of construction and deep gravel to get there, like riding on ball bearings ontop of sand. It was completely on the other end of town where it would have been shorter to take a different exit. We did get to see the biggest and nicest REI I’ve ever seen though like the size of a super Walmart, crazy.
If you are into fossils, dinosaurs or natural history at all I highly recommend going if you are going through Montana, this place was awesome and had some fairly extensive and well done exhibits. I’ve been to several natural history museums and was very impressed with the collections displayed at this one. On top of the impressive fossil exhibits they also had a Living History Farm and exhibits on the human history as well with a Native American section and some nice examples of the horse drawn vehicles up through early autos.
They had several of these interesting sculptures that showed artist renderings of the fleshy side and the skeletal structure of the other half.
Honey dont move! Theres something behind you!
They had a lot of T-Rex stuff, including the full skeleton out on the front lawn. I had forgot that several specimens had been found in Montana.
Continue reading Museum of the Rockies
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