Welcome to the chronicle of my hair, Heather's Hair.

heather owens, scooter model!

End of the day, Day 4

so this is going to take a bit of text (yeah, yeah, i know, i didn't take enough pictures). mike, pj and i are a little bit outside some small-ass town in nebraska where we stopped at an auto parts store to buy red loc-tite for patrick. while there pj brought this goo to make a seal between parts. he just sort of bought it on a whim. anyhow, we got a little lost and had to back-track, because we didn't have gps like the riders did, but we got back on track and saw bagel ahead of us making some sort of u-turn. usually not a good sign. turns out the reason he was making a u-turn was because he had stopped to see if patrick was ok. patrick was stopped by the side of the road trying to get his scooter to start.

we make a u and park next to patrick. he says 'it just died'. he tried to start it. it sort of started to kick-over but not really. at least it didn't seize (wouldn't kick at all if it had seized). so we stand around and start pondering what could have gone wrong. patrick has a suspicion based on another riders experience on a previous day. but the support truck is, who knows how far behind us, and if it catches up to us, technically patrick would only has 15 min to fix his bike before he needs to go on the truck. and we don't want that.

he starts to take things apart. he takes the reed valve off the carb and PRESTO! little hole in the reed block. ta-da! i have a spare in the car!. but what about the gasket? the current one is trashed and we don't have a spare?! oh wait! pj bought stickie goo at the auto parts store. oh happy day!

'omg! was that an alien space ship?!'

yes boys and girls, team oops clunk thud just happen to suck a reed (the valve above the carb that regulates how the fuel goes in, if it gets eaten aka sucked, that is a bad thing) at the same place a UFO decided to land a little later...(if you click on the alien space craft pictures you can see a bigger version, you know, in case you don't believe us). we put it in the car and took it with us.

as i was saying before the alien arrived, patrick was able to stick the new reed-block on and reassemble the bike to running, all in about an hour, by the side of the road, in nebraska. as rob benning said on the 2006 riding journal 'now that's impressive'

what could possibly rival that for entertaining? once we got to the next town, lusk, wyoming, patrick needed to get fuel and rejet. i needed to clean the windshield of the car. we also needed lunch.

at the gas station we stopped at to clean my window, there were a bunch of harley guys sitting in front of the mini-mart. they looked like locals hanging out at the mini-mart so i thought they might have a tip for lunch. in fact they were on a road-trip (no helmets) from alabama. i explained what we were doing. they simply couldn't believe we were riding scooters from california (well the race started in oregon but we were from california). they had never met anyone with pink hair before either. so several asked for a picture with me. how cute! wish i had taken one...

had lunch at subway (witnessed some local drama with an ex-employee, no weapons involved). we were told that, besides subway, there was only one other restaurant in town open until 10 pm. wow, wyoming. followed patrick the rest of the way in to valentine. we stopped for gas at a station with old skool pumps and a pamphlet on how to keep your kids from smoking (i took one. promise to scan the good parts and add it). generally is was the most pleasant day of the whole trip. a bad thing happened, sucking a reed, but we ended up making a great adventure out of it!