Walkabout day 15: not so much heat, wind, and navigation…

Got up ear­ly this morn­ing, hop­ing to get a few miles under the wheels before the heat became oppres­sive. Which was suc­cess­ful. But, as Ms. Shooz so astute­ly notes, if it’s not one thing it’s anoth­er. In this case, wind: A gusty quar­ter­ing tail­wind, any­where from 15 – 50mpg, and any­where from straight over my tail­pack to right in my right ear. That last­ed from south of Wichi­ta to the south­ern out­skirts of KC. It’s quite tir­ing, con­stant­ly being on watch for the next wind­break, lest i dive off the right side of the road, or the next cut, lest I wind up doing some 80mph off-read­ing in the medi­an. Rid­dle me this, bat­man: Under what con­di­tions can a rid­er be leaned to the right, hold­ing coun­ter­steer­ing pres­sure on the right bar, and in a gen­tle left turn? Yep, it blew that hard. Road and scenery wise, a bit of a bor­ing day, just mov­ing my butt from one loca­tion on the plan­et to anoth­er at this point. Olka­homa and Kansas are real­ly quite pret­ty this time of year, though. Every­thing is green and lush. And humid. Did I men­tion humid?

As I drew near KC, I noticed a way­point on my GPS. it says ‘Garmin’. What the heck does that mean…. HELLO! It means I am approach­ing the cen­ter of the nav­i­ga­tion toys uni­verse. So I stopped for the oblig­a­tory picture.