Soooo… we are still in Tellico Plains. Bill will not get his coil and wheel bearings till tomorrow …. we should be back on the road on the 18th. Testing shows Bill’s coil is out of spec & when he was taking off his wheels he found both wheel bearings were really badly worn so he ordered wheel bearing too. That happens to bikes that live in the dirt.
The Bad new is the extra time it will take to wait for the parts to arrive tomorrow….it isn’t really bad because we have no schedule and it gives me time to learn some video editing manage the 2T Wi-Fi disk drive to store data in a comfortable environment. The Good is that the other half of our team who left 2 days ago is hitting Mississippi now and Barry’s last remnants of rain along with bad TAT conditions so our wait will benefit us in the future with good bikes and trail conditions.
Four Aussie’s rolled in yesterday riding the TAT. They took 2 of the 3 bedrooms here so we piled into one bedroom for the night. Nice Guys! … they all flew over together and bought Kawasaki KLR 650’s in NC to ride the TAT from NC to OR where they plan to ship them home. They are not camping and have the whole ~42 day trip planned going from motel to motel with advance reservations….impressive or impossible not sure which.
The other Aussie!… of the day, all day, was Elsie. I was trying to read some techinical (for me) video editing and portable storage user manuals in my down time today. Just as I would start to get into some complicated instruction I’d hear…………donk……donk..donk…donk ……Elsie’s rubber toy bouncing at my feet…….again and again and again. “I wanna play” she says.
Other forum threads about this trip are here if you are interested ……..Joe M. was the originator of this trip with his post in a motorcycle forum. Joe M., Ed and Steve are in the group that is out ahead of us at the Mississippi border. https://advrider.com/f/threads/trans-america-trail-2019-6-strangers-journey-to-brotherhood.1391353/
Joe D in my group started a forum thread here, https://advrider.com/f/threads/mad-tater-2019-a-trans-america-trail-journey.1393198/page-4
