Thursday, June 17, 2010

Sunday. Nice day. Wet day.


Sunday morning brought out fresh eggs, fruit and additional hospitality from Mark and Linda. Once again it was a slow start, but it was sort of nice since the temps were low and it was overcast and foggy. We took our time in packing the bikes and doing other sundry things.



Among those sundry things was looking at Neal's yellow Ducati 749. His time was limited and he was gearing up to head home, and asked about tightening his chain, which was EXTREMELY loose. His complaint was that he tightened it, rotated the wheel (and the chain with it) and it was too loose in another spot. That's a sign the chain has tight spots and is worn, so we did the ol' "pull the chain off the sprocket" test and managed to pull it a good 1/2 inch off the sprocket. That's not good. Even notter gooder were 5-7 broken teeth on the sprocket. It was REALLY bad, and on a Sunday too, with the closest Ducati dealer in Minneapolis, there wasn't much to do, but ride on home with a credit card at the ready.

Around 11am we hit the road and had to make a big loop due to bridge construction. I'll spare the details .. the roads were pretty good (like Olden Road) but there isn't a whole lot of windy stuff in these areas. It remained dry until about 3pm when the rain started. It never got as bad as Friday, but it put a damper on things, especially when we got into some awesome roads after Eagle River.


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In the evening we arrived at the Timberline Inn in Eagle River, thanks for Mark's astute navigational skills. Brett from Duluth was there to meet us. The inn was nice, although the owner was surly and the room prices were high (about $100/each). I'm sure the lack of other guests had something to do with it. And the hotel was for sale. And we were admonished to not clean our ATV's with the towels.

The plan for dinner was to ride down to the restaurant where Al Capone had a shoot-out and some movie was filmed (sorry, I'm not a film buff, I don't remember the title. We weren't in the mood to saddle up and ride another 5 miles, and pizza and beer at the Pea Patch was sufficient.

Oh yeah, Neal made it home. When he got on the interstate near Eau Claire the chain was not happy so his wife came out with the truck and hauled him the rest of the way home. Way to go for domestic support staff!

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