The weather looked pretty shitty in the morning, overcast and about ready to rain. Luckily hardly any rain fell throughout the day. In the afternoon it actually cleared up and became very nice.
In the morning we went to the Topeka Harley shop to get some stickers and badges but more important, to have a look at the little museum beneath the actual shop. It had quite a few really old and older Harleys. My favourites are the two WW2 ones, the purpose built style of the bikes is so nice to look at and the simple straightforward engineering for nothing more then doing a job is what got Harley started well.
I will never be a Harley fan as I think they are more a marketing success in marketing an image instead of a good motorbike. I do think that the background of the Harley Davidson is something to be proud of, unfortunately they didn’t really do well in improving the bikes to keep them up to date. Anyway, that is my opinion and the reason why I prefer Japanese bikes over any others. Although BMW is definitely trying their best to keep up with the Japanese ;)
Before we walked through the museum, we had coffee in the Eagles Nest. There we bumped into some very nice people that gave us plenty of tips and good stories. Also the Eagles nest cook showed his pride and joy, smoked tender meat. The whole crew (but me) loved it. A very passionate man when it comes to cooking.
After that we went to the go-kart track to see if we could go for a ride but unfortunately the weather and a late start made it unlikely that we would get to ride. So we switched to the back-up plan, the indoor gun range. Thanks to Greg Escobar we had all the info to get to the range. Once I was able (thanks to my friend at the Eagles Nest) to decrypt Craig’s notes and punched the address in the TomTom it was a breeze to get there. We got there without a hitch and were set up with some BIG guns.
Lards, Crackles and myself were shooting .44 Magnum, Macca had a .357 Magnum and Christophe and Annie were using .45 and 9 mm Glocks. The target was a Dog the Bounty Hunter type on a large sheet of paper. I was so lucky that the owner had a beautiful .44 S&W with scope on it, to compensate for my “funny” eyes ;). The shooting was great, I haven’t shot since I left NZ in April. Huggie, I did try to teach those Ozzies a bit of proper shooting but they were all over the bloody target, Damn West Islanders ;)
Macca did end up winning our little competition, with a single shot on the “Deck of Cards” target. He was the only one that actually hit his “Card”. He will collect his price later this week.
After the shooting we started riding on the 75 North towards Nebraska. We had lunch on the way in a place called Café Trail in Holton Nebraska. A very good lunch and some interesting sayings on the wall that clearly show that the place is female run ;)
The landscape changed to rolling hills covered with mainly corn fields. It is incredible how vast this country is for someone from Holland. Despite the fact that I spend a lot of time in the US and Australia, I can still be amazed by the sheer vastness of it.
On our way we rode through a little town called Dawson (209 inhabitants) and the film crew and myself did a bit of filming there while the rest continued on their way. Hopefully we can get some nice footage out of that little detour.
We ended up in Omaha in another Super 8 motel where I got my first run of the trip done, finally !! Dinner was at the Outback Steakhouse, very nice and very funny how they try to make it look Australian. Unfortunately not everything is spelled correctly: it is she-la not Sheila ;).
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