With the exception of the last couple hours, the last two days have been overwhelmingly just super slab.

Yesterday, I woke to a damp and chilly motorcycle. It had rained all night. There was a steady wind and temperatures were not predicted to get much warmer. 

The Beloved Blue Oil Burner has been running incredibly well. The fact that it is back together is 100% due to Duncan motivating me to finish the hard part of the project. He sacrificed so many of his weekends to help me methodically try to piece the bike carefully back together.

I told him, "If we do this, I'm going to want to do it my way, which is going to suck and I'm sorry. No shortcuts. Slowly, carefully. If we have to take it all back apart again because of a mistake, then that's just what we'll have to do." 

He agreed and, being a man of his word, he was there with me through the entirety of the project. The results when the two of us worked together were always so much better than either of us would accomplish alone. He would watch while I tackled some problem and would often stop me before I made a critical error, or provide a better easier way of doing things. We'd almost always discuss a task carefully before attempting to tackle it. He had such a wealth of knowledge. The two of us together were much greater than the sum of the parts.

During the 2010 trip to Alaska, I became aware that if I did not think about how far I was going but instead just focused on the next hill, I would travel farther more easily than I could have imagined possible. I traveled on that trip ready to turn around at any moment when "it got too hard". 

In the intervening years, I've "tried" to build things and whenever I focus on the goal, on some distant point that I feel compelled to get to as quickly as possible, things go awry. It is true in software development where the stress of not having gotten anywhere near what I feel I need to done creates a stress that then leads to short cuts that leads to technical debt (the shortcuts you know you have to go back and fix later) .. that leads to failure. 

I feared that would happen with this project.

So, with Duncan's acceptance, I coined a phrase that I have repeated to myself like a mantra, "I'm not trying to get it done. I'm just doing it." 

I'm putting my motorcycle back together. I'm not trying to get it completed. Each moment, each individual task. That bolt that doesn't want to come loose? If I'm trying to get it done, that's an impediment, a block, and that leads to short cuts that tends to result it broken or stripped bolts and as a result the desire to get it done postpones it being done. 

The frozen bolt requires its own time. Maybe it will take months. Maybe the project will stop there. But all that remains is doing it. Slowly. Carefully. Breaking loose the frozen bolt. Maybe it means soaking it in penetrating oil for days. Applying heat. Slowly. The frozen bolt is the next task to do. No thoughts beyond it. Just doing it. No trying to get it done. 

Counter-intuitively, whenever I approach a project in this mindset, it gets done quicker and the result is of higher quality. Pause. Be curious about the thing in front of you. Forget the future. Forget the past. 

I fully expected that after all the wires, hoses, connections, electronics, nuts, bolts, and other fasteners, the rear main seal, the clutch, and all the myriad of other things that we took apart and reassembled not to mention some of the attempted improvements that we would most definitely have to take it all apart again and do the whole project over.

I didn't document the project as well as I would have liked. I was asked to write it up for a magazine at one point. 

I remember when I replaced the front main frame on the R1100S I missed one ground connection that prevented the bike from starting and I just couldn't figure it out. So I towed it up to Bob's and Steve there after some hours figured out my mistake. I had connected the ground to a post that was, in fact, insulated in a bushing. 

Oops. 

So I figured we'd make some similar mistake. Or for ages we'd be tracking down performance, stalling, overheating, electrical or other issues. I never imagined that it would just work, the first time, flawlessly. 

And moreover, I never even considered that the improvements which included an aftermarket ECU (fuel injection) chip matched to the exhaust I have and some new piping and an EGR valve to deal with some oil vapor issues, that the thing would run /so much better/. But it's true. The bike now runs and handles far better than new. And now I've put close to 8000 miles on it since putting it back on the road it continues to perform flawlessly with the only exception that the gear indicator display goes flaky after it rains. 

Not getting it done. Just doing it.

I will forever be grateful to Duncan for gently nudging me to put the bike back together. "I know you'll feel better." he would say. 

There will never be a day where I do not miss my friend. 

Leaving that strange geriatric hotel casino I noticed this.

Route 34 across Iowa was a solid suggestion. It's a much nicer route than the superslab (Interstate 80). It's not oppressively flat the way Kansas is. There are things to look at as you motor along.

There was this impressive field of windmills as far as the eye can see.  

There were solar arrays, some of them impressively large. 

 

But mostly it looked like this.

The miles clicked by. I noticed that 50 miles had passed and I hadn't even noticed. I was feeling no pain. 

None.

Weird. 

So as the miles clicked by as I was geezing it being slow, I decided to try to ride for a bit longer than the 60 minute intervals with half hour breaks I had been running.

And hour and a half passed by. I continued on. I would turn my head side to the side. Extend and protract my back and otherwise try to invoke the pain I was so familiar with. There were hints but no range of motion of was impaired. No lightning strikes of pain.

So I decided to carefully probe this further.

As I approached empty, I came across a gas station in the middle of nowhere. A proper farmers gas station is what I thought it looked like. I had run through an entire tank without stopping.

I loitered here for a while. There was this expansive view of the country side.

I stood here for a while perusing this landscape and asking myself the question, "Why travel?" 

The youngin' spawns will ask why go anywhere when they can see it all on TikTok? One can read and see everything there is about a place in more detail. Why go there? 

When one does a thing for deep reasons and often reasons that one doesn't fully understand, coming up with a good answer to this question is more challenging than one might think. 

Why ride across so much slab for so long just to stand on this hill overlooking this view in the wind and sunshine? 

How can one explain the feeling, a feeling that not everyone has? To be here Out There Far Away ... 

One can come up with all kinds of nonsense about expanding character and having experiences and all this higher level brain stuff that falls flat that no inexperienced youngiin' is going to care about.

Of course all those things are true. Travel and it will expand your character and it will provide you experiences you could not otherwise imagine. 

But these are "benefits" or "goals". The "getting it done" part. 

Why be in this place at this time? I fear the answer may be as simple as that is what humans do. Humans eat. They sleep. If they do not bad things happen biologically. I wonder if there aren't some primordial vestiges of the wanderer that remain embedded in some of us where we just don't feel right unless we go. 

To go to a place and let the whole of your nervous system experience that moment in a way that no TikTok video will ever capture. To feel the land. To feel the air. See see and interact with the surroundings. 

To encounter and interact with people so very different from yourself. 

To see things through different eyes. 

But all these things, to the youngin's don't feel like compelling answers. 

But a nervous system that has traveled, that has been Out There, comes back changed. Calmer. More open. If you let it be. 

There is so much more to say.

I crossed from Iowa into Nebraska.

Route 34 gave way to Interstate, a.k.a. Super Slab. 

The miles clicked on and I was still in no appreciable pain so I decided to probe it further. "I wonder if I go back to my regular pace, will it cramp up?"

The speed limit was 75 to I increased to that. A half hour went by. I was still ok. Ok. Then a GMC pickup passed me and I thought, "Ok, game on." and for the next 45 minutes or so I chased that pickup doing something like 85 miles an hour and I was fine. There were hints, echoes, vestiges of the pain I was afraid of but it never turned into the searing spasms. 

I went for the rest of the day like that, at pace and I was fine. 

Interesting. 

I did not sleep well last night. So I woke up tired and when I hit the road today to do yet more slab I was hurting a little bit, but not bad. 

I continued on keeping my normal pace. It felt right and after a while I was able to lose myself in thought as the wind blew away the cobwebs. 

I crossed the border into Colorado. The wind was coming at a diagonal that was stressing my neck and my back started locking up a little bit but not bad. 

The landscape suddenly changed and I felt like was in the "The West". 

On my adv-traveler.com site, I use a route calculator called GraphHopper. It's pretty good. However, if you give it starting point and end point it will often pick routes that are different from Google. Google takes traffic and a whole bunch of other variables into account when calculating its routes where GraphHopper doesn't have access to any of that. As a result sometimes it routes you over small side roads or through towns Google would never. 

I've found that this "bug" is a feature. I was routed off the interstate onto a very lonely road out into National Grasslands. 

Now we're talking!

It might have been a straight long road but I finally felt truly "Away". Colorado has that effect on me.

I came across one of those well wind mills and had to stop.

There's more to say, as always, because I tell no short stories but it's getting late. 

I'm in Fort Collins now.