While you are reading this I am heading towards Southern Illinois to have a slightly above average burger with several hundred other motorcycle riders. I will have posts about that, but you will have to wait.
In the mean time, I had to take a ride to test out the Bluetooth set up I installed on Curiosity. Since the weather has been – chilly – I didn’t want to ride too far. Yeah, I have heated gear, that wasn’t the point. Actually, the day I randomly ended up with was one of the nicest days in recent history, here in the Midwest.
I headed for the Holy Hill area, which is a small area of Kettles, south of the Northern Unit of the Kettle Moraine State Park. This is an area of small hills and curving roads popular with motorcyclists in the area.
The roads were still full of sand and grit, and there was still snow along the shoulders here and there, but I did see other motorcycles out, especially later in the afternoon.
Holy Hill is common name for the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Help of the Christians at Holy Hill. It’s a really big church.
In the fall, visitors line up to climb a lot of stairs into one of the towers for a view of the surrounding landscape. You can actually see pretty far, but I wasn’t out to climb a tower. I wanted to ride places.
I spent about two hours finding dead end roads, working with the GPS and listening to podcasts. The audio worked very well, but the offline GPS application I was using (CoPilot) left a lot to be desired. It kept wanting to recalculate, something that required touching a button on the screen, and seemed to have a hard time working out my direction of travel.
It was a nice day, and I rode about 150 miles. This finally got me off the aux fuel cell and onto the main tank, so Curiosity easily clears 300 miles on one fueling, with the fuel cell on. I am not sold it for continuous use, but will have a better idea after the Moonshine Run.
Horizons Unlimited
Jupiter's Travellers
The Shop Milwaukee
Traveling250's Blog 