Thursday – Hurricane

It was cold and wet outside when we got up, not very enticing for a ride, but then again, the worst days riding is better than the best day at work 🙂 I finished off cleaning up all mess I had scattered around in the garage and kept the original bike parts, panels, bolts etc. Then I started on a new mess, this is called packing the bike for travel 🙂

John, who is Kens workmate showed up around 10am and by then we were set to go, all rugged up with everything on, they had electric vests and such, but not me.

As you can see it was not the best riding conditions.

I had been told by one of the bike shop people that wearing orange safety vests is a waste of time and you are more likely to have a prang, well if you look at the size of the road works orange cones, you can see why you would be nothing more than a speed bump to a car driver on a mobile phone!

We headed south and around the lake again, very cold around here.

About half an hour later though, the sky started to clear a bit, but stayed cold. I am glad I had heated grips and the hand guards now 🙂 We went through some small twisties.

There was still snow around, first off on the mountains over there, then a bit closer, now it was getting cold, especially with the wind chill factor.

We got into Manti about an hour later and I was frozen, but before having some lunch we took a picture at the Manti temple for Mormons

We had a longish break to warm up, we were not in a hurry, off again and we now have to watch out for skittish tractors maybe?

I had made a request a few days back when I had seen it on a map, but forgotten where it was well, Ken hadn’t and we went straight there.

That would be a good name for a song! Nah, it would never get off the ground 🙂
A couple of welded together foreign animals.

It was getting late now and we took a turn into Bryce Canyon which as it turned out we should not have, as we would go there tomorrow, so a few shots later we turned around and headed back west.

Back at a turn off, we stopped for a break, we still had 120 miles to go to the place we were staying at that night, which is a condominium of a friend.

We now had to enter the National Park, this is where we got a bit of a shock. We, both Ken and I, had bought online the evening before a NP yearly pass for $80US, we had the screen printout receipt, but they said no way, so we had to fork out another $12 each for a 7 day pass 😦 Never mind, if we did not do this it was a long way back and around!

We had a few tunnels to go through, one went for over a mile, you can see a window in the wall in the 2nd shot.

The scenery was great but I was getting tired and cold did not help. It was gone 7pm by now, which to my Aussie head is skippy time, well over here they have deer which are just as bad, so this was making me not enjoy this part of the ride as much as I would have liked.

We headed on through then and eventually got into Hurricane about 8pm 🙂 It was riding into the setting sun that was scary, a long twilight here.

But, after sorting out the bikes and beds, we sat around and chatted for a long time, until 1.30am!!! I had some help to get to sleep 🙂

More on the morrow

Day – 372 miles and 595km
Trip – 1,323 miles and 2,117km

Cheers
TravellingStrom
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