2019 Prefrontal Tour

The stats are in for the 2019 Prefrontal Tour. Distance traveled: 6085 miles Farthest day: 820 miles - 738 by bike, 82 by ferry Longest day: 16 hours Elevation covered: 350,069 feet Most elevation in a day: 93,240 feet! Top speed: 101 mph (again) Top average speed: 69 mph (because Iowa) Bacon references made: 1 (in the bonus footage) What a fantastic ride, with great scenery - so much you can't swivel your head safely to soak it all in - and an opportunity to spend time with people I admire. Planning is already underway for the next big adventure, and the destination might just be to uncovered territory in the southeast, or the northwest, or South America...  Will it be 2020, or perhaps there's room for a 2019 Version 2.0?  Only time will tell. Thanks for following along with us.  Now grab some handlebars and stay tuned!

Day 13 of the 2019 Prefrontal Tour was a day of happy endings and sad goodbyes.  It came all too soon after the best evening of the tour - dinner with Jack and Donna at their home in Delafield, Wisconsin, with great fare and time spent together, and a rare opportunity to feed their wild turkeys and learn the finer points of pullet husbandry. The Fast Ferry begins its day from Milwaukee at 6:00 AM, which meant rising at 3:30 to pack, load and get on the road by 4:45, at a cold but dry 45 degrees.  Jack was kind enough to get up and prepare coffee and we reminisced about the trip and planted the seeds for the next one, hopefully somewhere near the Blue Ridge Parkway we hear so much about. I rolled down the driveway with a touch of sadness at going solo again, and turned left, prepared to take the quiet country lanes through Delafield and onto the slab to Milwaukee.  Sunrise was little more than a rose-colored promise on the eastern horizon, and I dodged the first deer ...

We left Nebraska to the roar of classic cars at 7:15 AM, a temperature of 57 degrees that seemed colder than it was, and a low sun rising over a flat horizon with no mountains to give us an intermittent reprieve. As luck would have it, the parade of classic cars was set to depart from our hotel, and we scrambled to insert ourselves into the line not once but twice as we jockeyed to get gassed up and on the road amidst the endless line of Chevelles, Camaros, Scooby Doo-themed Astrovans and wood-sided station wagons. We'd played ready golf two days prior and our fairway shot to Kearney was a safe lay-up that left us a long fairway wood to the green in the form of I-80 across much of the remaining distance - 665 miles to Delafield. With the heated grips set on "LIGHT TOAST" we made excellent time thanks to Nebraska's 80 mph speed limit, and we entered Iowa at 10 AM to an immediate wake-up call through the handlebars - potholes a fixed cat couldn't fill and win...

We shot out of Salida at 6:50 AM, to 46 degrees, saluting the sun a bit as it rose low over the eastern hills - something it would do dozens of times as the canyon walls rose and fell around us.  It was a beautiful way to say goodbye to the mountains, with the Arkansas River's pools and rifflings below. We came spilling out of the canyon at the alluvial fan of Parkland, still early in the day but thousands of years too late to see it formed.  Signs for Royal Gorge were along the roadside, but that's a ride Sue and I don't want to take again any time soon. We buzzed through Canon City, shops still closed, grass growing up through the cracks in the parking lot at Sears, and then by 8 AM we were on the prairie proper, leaving behind the beautiful smells of sage and mesquite and settling in for triple digits. Today was a day for backtracking due to severe weather developing northwest and southeast, the humidity forming throughout the day hot and heavy on the ground and o...