Tonight we’re in Atlantic, Iowa.  What an amazing day it’s been!  But a very long one .. again we didn’t get up and going until almost 11:00 and we didn’t arrive at the hotel until 10:00 p.m.  

Iowa is just beautiful!  For everybody from back in Michigan .. imagine the Irish Hills expanded for hundreds of miles.  But without all the trees along the roads.  You can see for miles and miles here.  It’s beautiful rolling hills with bright red barns and white farm houses tucked in among the fields, and cattle dotting the pastures.  (And some really smelly pig farms!)  And the further west we rode, the bigger the fields got.  They’re just amazing!  When we could see it from the top of a hill, it looked like a giant puffy quilt that was gently laid over the ground.

The weather was great .. in the low 60′s which is perfect for riding.  It was overcast for the first part of the ride, but once the clouds broke up it warmed up to nearly 70.  

Mark and I are in a contest sponsored by Napoleon Harley Davidson called the Throttle Twistin’ Tour.  They have a list of phrases such as “Live to Ride”, etc. all relating to motorcycling.  The object of the contest is to find towns that begin with each letter in the phrase, for instance L – Litchfield, I-Iowa City, V-Vicksburg, etc.  We have to have a picture of the city limits sign (or post office) with our bike in the photo.   The winner gets a $1500 gift certificate from the dealership.  So this trip is perfect for getting lots of signs.  Today we got 11.  

Mark has spent the past few months scanning the atlas looking for the towns we need that are close to the freeway.  It’s been nice to have a reason to get off the beaten path and see the little towns along the way.  And we even found a few we didn’t expect.  It was nice to just travel along parallel to the freeway and see things at a slower speed and feel more like we’re here rather than just flying by and seeing it all from a distance.

We had lunch at the Iowa 80 truckstop.  According to the Travel Channel it’s the largest truckstop in the world.  It was a pretty cool place.  And .. they had a Dairy Queen … time for a Midnight Truffle!

Which is why it took us 11 hours to travel 310 miles.  But even that wasn’t all bad.  We rarely get a chance to ride at night so the 2 hours or so we traveled after dark was kind of a treat.  The sunset was beautiful.  And as we rode west the horizon kept changing colors from different shades of purple and pink.  At one point we passed a wind turbine farm that was right next to the freeway.  They were amazing looking silhouetted against that beautiful horizon.

And once the sun was completely down the sky was clear and the moon bright.  It was still warm and comfortable for riding.

Tomorrow we ride 400 miles to Murdo, South Dakota.  Hope to see you there!

Tags: Harley Davidson, Iowa

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 2:48 pm and is filed under The Big Adventure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.