Circle to Circle

by Shirley Hardy-Rix

  •

  It’s wet and cold this morning when we head west to Kootenay National Park. We take the Bow Valley Parkway, a very pretty ride, even in the rain. It’s narrow and winding, perfect for us.

  I’ve had to resort to the winter gloves today, my fingers are so cold. This makes using the camera virtually impossible so the wonderful mountains and cloud formations are committed to our memories’ hard drives rather than the camera.

  It’s my bed that deflates this time, twice. Bloody hell, this is beyond a joke. I do say I don’t mind and I do go straight back to sleep when I blow it up again, but it’s annoying. I’m sure the only reason I wake is because my butt’s on the ground.

  •

  We need to head back to civilisation. Öhlins have admitted the shock shouldn’t have snapped. Apparently water got into it, causing it to seize. They’re going to replace it. We just need to tell them where to send it. We’re still not sure where we’ll end up. Whether we ship home or ride home we need to get back to the US lower 48 states. We cross the border into Montana and spend the night in Whitefish on the way to Glacier National Park. We get talking to a Harley rider at the diner and he notices me searching through all of our quarters. I explain my quarter collection and that I need one from Montana. He doesn’t have one, but the barmaid is intrigued and asks what we’re doing. She starts going through the scores of quarters in the till and the tip jar without any luck.

  A young guy comes to the bar and orders a drink. She asks if he has a Montana quarter; if he does, he can have his drink for just 25 cents. He does, so I get my Montana quarter and he gets a drink for 25 cents. Everyone’s happy.

  Another Harley rider at our hotel isn’t happy. He left his light on and the battery’s flat as a tack. He and Brian try and push start it, running up and down the car park. That doesn’t work. A maid has a set of jumper leads. With great difficulty, Brian pushes the leads onto the battery and holds them there and we start the bike off the car battery. We always help a fellow biker in need — it might be our turn next.

  Brian: Today is the most amazing day.

  From Whitefish we take the highway to West Glacier and the Glacier National Park. The Going to the Sun Road begins at Lake McDonald, a peaceful, beautiful spot. Our timing is perfect. The road closes in two weeks.

  There are plenty of places to stop and enjoy the views around the lake. The reflections of the mountains and the trees are exquisite. The road takes us higher and higher to Logan Pass — the highest point at 6,646 feet. On the road up, the views across the mountains and the valleys are spectacular. This scenery is awesome. Around every corner there’s a photo opportunity. For once the road works don’t worry us (and there are plenty, as usual). The delays of 10, 15 or 20 minutes just mean we can sit and watch the scenery.

  We spot a couple of bikes parked on the side of the road. The riders are using binoculars to look into the wilderness. We stop to see what they’re looking at, but they tell us they’re just looking. We pass them again on the flatlands on the eastern side of the park, but don’t stop this time.

  We ride the Peace Loop around the bottom of the park, a narrow road that winds its way through the hills alongside the Flathead Range. It’s been the most amazing ride today — Going to the Sun Road is a must for any biker.

  •

  We need to get moving through Montana to get to Yellowstone National Park, but we don’t want to take the highways. The back roads take us to Big Fork, through the State Forest, along the Swan River and past some more amazing lakes. Summit Lake is only a small one, but it has some incredible reflections.

  •

  At breakfast we get talking to an older couple on a road trip. Each year they do 16,000 kilometres around the US without hitting the major highways. This will be us when we can’t or won’t ride the bike the long distances anymore!

  Shirley: Inspired by the couple at breakfast we ride the small roads again today going over the Big Belt Mountains to the Lewis and Clarke Highway that takes us right into Gardiner, Montana, the northern gateway to Yellowstone National Park.

  At the Iron Horse Saloon we bump into the couple with the binoculars from Glacier National Park. They show us the photos of the two families of bears they were watching when we hurtled past them. Good one Brian!

  •

  The ride into Yellowstone National Park is amazing. There’s an osprey in a tree with a fish in his claws, a herd of female elk with their young on the grass outside the park headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs and massive bison grazing on the side of the road.

  Ken and Carol have been camping in Yellowstone for a few days and we miss them by a couple of hours. Nic and Christian are heading our way and we’re flattered to think they’ll drive across a couple of states to enjoy the wilds of Yellowstone with us. We get a campsite that’s big enough for our tent and their Land Rover, in preparation for their arrival tomorrow.

  They’re very strict here with bear boxes. We have to put EVERYTHING in it — right down to our cooking utensils and water bottles.

  You can’t come to Yellowstone and not visit Old Faithful. The geyser goes off as regular as clockwork, give or take 10 minutes. About five minutes before the allocated time the steam gets higher and then we see a little water spurt out. The spurt and steam get bigger and finally — there she blows. The water bursts into the sky amidst all the steam. Then, in about 10 minutes, it’s all over. It dies down and then there’s just a simmering steam pillow again.

  During the night my bed goes down twice — again.

  •

  We head to the Grand Teton National Park that abuts Yellowstone, travelling down the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway. He donated the land to the public to ensure the land is protected. The park newspaper has a photo of a dead elk on the front page — hit by a car. This is to shock people into driving more carefully. The paper says more animals get killed on this stretch of road than anywhere else in the park.

  We ride the shortish loop through the centre of the park, taking it anti-clockwise. This gives us great views of the Grand Tetons, a stark mountain range that just appears out of the ground.

  The Jenny Lake loop offers up some of the most incredible reflections in calm water that we’ve seen on this trip.

  At the bottom of the loop there’s Dornans, a small group of businesses established by the family during the gold rush era. The ‘chuck wagon’ was set up years ago and is still serving good food at a reasonable price.

  We head back to Yellowstone through desert country — flat and uninteresting, with just the odd animal.

  The Land Rover is at the gate to the campground. It’s fantastic to see Nic and Christian again. We sit around the campfire and talk — old friends together again.

  There are two elk does at the end of the track. They’re massive creatures. We try not to intrude on their space and have to back away when they decide they want to walk in our direction.

  My bed collapses during the night yet again.

  •

  Brian: We head off in convoy with the Land Rover to explore Yellowstone Lake and their version of the Grand Canyon, the Yellowstone Canyon.

  On the far side of the lake there’s a herd of bison. It’s magic to sit and watch them even from this distance. We can hear them bellowing and see the dust cloud as they play fight.

  We have to drag ourselves away or we’ll never make it around the loop. We haven’t gone very far when there’s a traffic jam. A massive bison is walking up the road, with the traffic queuing up behind him as he plods along. He doesn’t have a care in the world and no one’s going to argue with him — he’s way too big. He seems to be enjoying the fact that he can hold up the traffic.

  Virtually around the corner we come across another herd of bison with some on one side of the road and the rest of the herd on the other. These beasts are gargantuan. We’ve been warned that they can wreck a car if riled or frightened. We feel quite vulnerable sitting here, exposed on the bike, while they take their time t
o move across the road, just metres in front of us.

  Yellowstone National Park has it all, mud volcanoes, raging rivers, massive waterfalls, hot pools, geysers, turquoise lakes and fascinating wildlife.

  We don’t see any bears. It’s getting close to hibernation time and they’re eating 20,000 calories a day to prepare for the long winter sleep. Some sections of the park are closed to tourists so the bears can eat in peace.

  It’s our last night with Nic and Christian and she cooks up a special dessert for our last supper — bananas with chocolate and marshmallows wrapped in foil and cooked in the coals. It might not be good for the waistline but it’s great for the taste buds.

  Shirley: It’s decision time. Brian and I have been weighing up what to do now. It seems pretty clear we have two options. We can ride to Los Angeles, put the bike on a boat and fly home. Or we can ride home.

  To be perfectly honest I could go home now. I’ve suffered from homesickness a lot on this trip. I miss family, friends and pets as well as the comforts of home. It’s not that I’m not having a great time. I am.

  Brian: When are we ever going to get the chance to ride around the world again? We’re already half way there. It’s quite simple, really.

  We can fly to the UK, ride through Europe, get the ferry to Egypt and head south. From southern Africa we can fly the bike to Perth and ride home across the Nullarbor Plain.

  It’s something I’ve always dreamt of doing, and now’s the chance.

  I know Shirl wants to head home, but there’s no real reason to rush. We don’t have work commitments and the family will understand.

  Shirley: You win, Brian. You’re right. We’re not going to get this chance again. Instead of going west to LA we’ll head east to New York or Toronto and fly with the bike to Europe.

  Heading east

  10 – 23 September 2012

  Brian: Shirl’s a real trouper. I know deep down inside she’d like to go home, but she’ll regret it if we don’t keep riding. So we’re heading east. I need to sort out where we’ll fly the bike from.

  •

  We don’t know much about Buffalo Bill Cody and are convinced to check out his museum in Cody, Wyoming when the security guard offers us tickets for $10 rather than $18. We learn a little about the army scout turned wild west showman. Annie Oakley was part of his troupe. It’s fascinating to see photos of these people who were just names on TV shows to us as kids. There are 1,200 guns on display in the museum and a sign outside telling visitors to leave their own guns in their cars. We’re entering a very different world.

  Shirley: Little Big Horn and Custer’s last stand are another part of American history that we’ve learnt about through Hollywood. The battle between Custer and Sitting Bull is a sad tale of Native Americans being hunted from their traditional lands so white gold prospectors could move into the area. Custer was ordered to round up the local tribes and force them onto the reservations. It didn’t work.

  It’s not known how many of them died, but Custer’s men, all 265 of them, died. At the battleground there’s a plinth in memory of Custer and his soldiers. White headstones are dotted over the surrounding land, spread far and wide, marking the spots where soldiers died. As a sign of changing times there are now markers where some of the indigenous warriors fell. Their markers bear the poignant words ‘Died trying to protect their way of life’.

  •

  I think I’m going crazy when we get back on the bike after a drink break. I don’t remember Brian fuelling the bike up but the gauge says the tank’s full. I’m not going mad, but the fuel gauge is. It goes from full to empty in a matter of minutes. This isn’t good.

  On the way to Alaska we met a biker riding the same model BMW who told us his bike thinks it only has enough fuel for about 250 kilometres no matter how much fuel is in it. After 250 kilometres it just stops. We don’t want to have to deal with this problem so we backtrack and fuel up. Now we’ve definitely got enough fuel to get to Sturgis, South Dakota, our next destination.

  Sturgis is famous for bike week, when riders from around North America converge on the town. It’s the good roads in the hills around town that bring us here.

  When we check into the hotel an old man is standing outside watching our every move. A couple of hours later we’re in the service station across the road. I’ve got my back to the counter, looking through the Sturgis T-shirts when I hear a man ask Brian about our trip. Brian tells him we’re riding around the world.

  The conversation goes like this.

  Man: ‘Are you armed?’

  Brian: ‘No.’

  Man: ‘Really? You’re riding a bike around the world without a gun? I never leave home without a gun. Look.’

  I don’t want to turn around. I don’t want to see what’s happening behind me, but it’s a bit like a car accident — I can’t take my eyes off it. The old man has produced a small, five shot revolver out of his jeans pocket. If this was Australia the security screens on the service station counter would be activated by now and the police would be called. Not in Sturgis, South Dakota.

  The girl behind the counter doesn’t flinch. She leans over and says, ‘Nice gun.’

  This is another world altogether.

  Brian: I carried a gun throughout my working life, because I had to. I’m gobsmacked when I see the attitude to guns here in the US. The old man in the service station says he never leaves home without his gun and won’t even sit on the back porch at home without a gun nearby.

  BMW is right next to our hotel. They fix the fuel strip inside the tank and tell us it might last for five years, or three weeks. Good luck.

  •

  From Sturgis we head to Deadwood where Wild Bill Hickok is buried next to Calamity Jane, whose dying request was to be buried next to Wild Bill. Legend has it Hickok was holding two black aces and two black eights in his poker hand when he was shot in a Deadwood saloon. This is still known as the dead man’s hand. Today the same hand of cards lie scattered on his grave.

  We’ve heard a lot about the roads through the Black Hills of South Dakota and they don’t disappoint. From Deadwood we head south past the exquisite Pactola Lake.

  We take a little detour to the Crazy Horse Memorial, a huge work in progress being carved into the side of Thunderhead Mountain. It depicts the warrior Crazy Horse on his horse, virtually riding out of the rock face. The Native Americans wanted one of their warriors immortalised near Mount Rushmore. Henry Standing Bear wanted it known that the ‘red man had heroes too’. Work began on the monument back in the 1940s. It may never be finished, but even as it is today it’s impressive.

  We ride the Needles Highway — a most incredible road that winds its way through pillars of granite, known as needles. It’s a twisty road through narrow canyons surrounded by stone cliffs, pines and fir trees. One tunnel’s a single lane wide. A couple of blasts of the horn before heading through and you hope there’s nothing coming the other way.

  I don’t think it can get any better and then we hit the Iron Mountain Road, highway 16A. It’s 27 kilometres of incredible road through the mountains and boasts 314 curves, 14 switchbacks, three pigtails, three tunnels, four presidents and two splits. The presidents, of course, is the view of presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln at Mount Rushmore you can see as you ride out of one of the tunnels.

  The tourist authorities describe it as an historical work of art. Some people might dispute it, but for a motorcyclist it’s possibly the best road in the world. I know that’s a big claim, but it’s awesome.

  Heading back to Sturgis a bloke on a sports bike tries to round us up. After the brilliant ride today I’m not having a bar of it. He just can’t get away from us in the corners. This bike handles it well and Shirl’s a good pillion — even though I’m sure she’d rather I just let him go. We get to some lights on the edge and he looks over at me on the big bike, two up. He’s obviously impressed and even acknowledges Shirl for her part in our little play.

  The Bla
ck Hills of South Dakota are really incredible. We’ve had the best ride today. For dinner we head to town and the Knuckle Bar, famous in this part of the world. It’s a barn of a place filled with motorcycle memorabilia — bikes, signs, photos — and the food’s not too bad either.

  The Sturgis Motorcycle Museum is legendary. It’s got bikes dating back to 1900, possibly the most extensive collection of motorcycles throughout the decades. It also honours motorcyclists in the Hall of Fame. I can’t convince Shirl to join me here, though. She opts for some quiet time at the hotel.

  Shirley: We can’t drag ourselves away from the Black Hills. In the north is Spearfish Canyon, another road that’s been carved through the mountains over the centuries by the Spearfish Creek. Pine trees seem to grow straight out of the rocks. It’s another great day on the bike.

  In Sturgis there are a few bars, like the Knuckle Bar and the Loud American Saloon, but if you don’t want to buy a T shirt or get a tattoo there’s not much to do once you’ve visited the motorcycle museum.

  Brian: Now the decision’s made to continue on rather than heading home, I’ve checked out the web and found a company that will fly the bike from Canada to Manchester in the UK, roll on/roll off. This means I just have to get it to the airport and ride it into the freight holding yard. There’s no need for a crate, no breaking the bike down, no stress. And we can get Öhlins to send the new shocker somewhere in the UK.

  There’s a Horizon’s Unlimited travellers’ meeting in Canada in a couple of weeks and we want to get to the east coast to visit friends in New York and Washington DC so I book the bike to fly out on October 11. That gives us just under a month, plenty of time. It also means we’ll be in Europe and the UK before it gets too cold. Africa will be hot and wet or hot and dry depending on the country, so there’s not much we can do about that.

  Shirley: I hope we’ve made the right decision. I’m a little apprehensive, but the decision’s been made, so let’s get on with it. We head east and ride through the Badlands of South Dakota.