I identify a local motorcycle dealer in Billings, Montana called Hi-Tech Motor Sports that also does service.
They are to open at 9:00 am, so I get over there at 8:00 am in the event
someone shows up early, nobody does of course. At 9:00 AM I get in the door and
pick out a tire on the rack that will work with my bike. Sue, the service
manager gets someone working on the bike ASAP. I am excited, because at this
rate I will be out the door by 10:00 am.
Then it happens. The
guy working on the bike calls Sue over and a bunch of them start pointing to
the axle arm and scratching their beards. Finally, Sue comes to me and tells me
that the axle nut is stripped out and they must figure out a work-around
because they do not have the OEM part. Of course, figuring this all out took
forever, but they did and I am truly grateful. I finally got out the door at
11:30 am, ran back to the hotel and checked out. Back on the road at noon.
I just trucked on East on the 90 and finally get off to back
roads, because I want to go to Hot Springs, South Dakota to see the Mammoth
exhibit they have.
At a construction stop, I pulled up next to a Yvonne
(fabricated) who was wearing a leather jacket, blue jeans, blue tennis shoes, and
had a long pony tail and a helmet piked on the back of the bike. She also had a
snake or an S on her neck, I could not figure it out without staring. As with
most people I run into, Yvonne smiled and asked me where I was from and where I
was going. I told her, and also told her that I had a bad tire issue earlier.
Yvonne said some other things that I just could not hear, mostly because her
very large motorcycle had a exhaust issue and partly because I had a very good
helmet, with an inside hat and ear plugs. I asked where she was from and she
pointed up the road and said “here”.
There was only 1 town up the road, so I guess “here” really meant here. I
finally passed her, since I could not stand the noise of her bike and gave her
a friendly goodbye wave. We later passed through the town, which was quiet
unlike Yvonne’s bike.
When I was 18, I was working on a bison archeological dig
near Chadron, Nebraska. Dr. Agenbroad, the professor in charge of the dig
received a phone call from a developer in Hot springs that had just uncovered
some Mammoth bones when bulldozing a housing project. Dr. Agenbroad asked several
of us to go to Hot Springs and start excavating the site in order to help
determine what was there. Even though I was supposed to be heading back to Illinois,
I stayed and went up to hot springs to help out.
When the 4 or 5 of us got to hot spring we started digging
around the bones, even though the bulldozer was still removing tons of earth
just feet from where we were digging. I was the first person to uncover mammoth
tusks. I was only able to stay about a
week at the site because I needed to start school. By then others from the
Chadron site had also come up to help.
42 years later I was able to finally come back to the Mammoth site in Hot Springs. Currently there is a building surrounding the excavations which
that are still going on. I jumped off my bike, purchased a ticket to the exhibit
and tell the girl at the desk that I was here 42 years ago on the first day of
the dig. She kind of gives me that “yes, and I am the queen of England look”,
but I was able to name people and events that she knew to be true. She also
told me that Dr. Agenbroad had passed away a few years ago, but Jim Meade, who I knew
at the site was now the director. I took the tour and I was just amazing to see
the story of what they have found over the last 40 years. Of course, we had no
idea that what the story was back then. If you want to know more, then you will
need to read about it online. What was
interesting was that they had marked the point where we first started digging
with a suspended red ball from the ceiling. The ball is now about 30 feet in
the air. I was able to tell others on my tour the story of how I first came to
what was then just a dirt hill 42 years ago.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time.
By the time I get out of the exhibits it is 8:00 PM at
night. I know there are state park camp sites down the road, so I go there. When
I get to the park the ranger tells me that all 165 sites are full. I guess that
could be since it is Saturday night. I decide to head east to a free site I see
on the map. Unfortunately, I do not
estimate how far that camp site is.
Later on I determine that the camp site is 2 hours away. The road, highway 18 is very dark as it
really goes nowhere. The road has been under much construction and at one point
the road gives way to about 30 feet of gravel.
Not cool when you are on a bike and going 65 miles per hour in the
middle of the night .There were mega bugs and they flew by me, and into me as
my new high beams laminated them in the dark of the night. I hoped there would
be a hotel in the many little towns that I passed by, but it was not to be. At
one point the wind was blowing sand across the road to the point I could not
see 10 feet in front of me.
After two hours I finally reached the free camp site. It was
in the center of a sketchy town. I circled the city park twice, and after a
person in a house rolled down their window and started yelling at me, I decided
to leave before the police showed up. It was now 10:00 at night.
I made the executive decision to head North back to the 90,
which was 2 hours away. I determined there was nowhere in the outback to camp,
and there were no hotels. I decided that after hitting the 90 and finding no
hotels then I would just keep driving all night if I had to.
I rolled into Murdo at 12:00 PM, which I later found out was
really 1:00 PM because of the new central time zone. After being rejected by 2
hotels, I found a nice hotel that took me in. Interesting place because they
had a full row of Tesla charging stations. The lady at the counter told me they
were part of an initiative to have charging stations every 150 miles across the
country. I hit the sack at 1:30 PM and was quickly asleep.
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