Horizons Unlimited Virginia 2016 Part One

Okay – so I have been terrible at posting. I offer no excuses, but spring is here and summer soon to follow, and I certainly have been busy.

While I do still have, and probably will always have, Curiosity, I recently obtained of the new 250cc adventure bikes from CSC Motorcycles, the RX3. I’ve been riding it since November, just around Milwaukee and it’s environs, have had a positive experience. No longer trips, since travel on a motorcycle in the Midwest in winter is a tricky thing, and I’ve been trapped away from home by snow storms in the past.

But spring is here, mostly, and with spring comes moto events. I am a huge fan of Horizons and the stuff the provide for the overlanding community, so when I can get to one of their events I do my best. Since I had the RX3 I decided this would be a good first trip.

So this is White Rabbit, just before I left home. I didn’t like the packing, the bike felt crowded. It’s been more than 5 years since I took a trip on anything but Curiosity, and before that was my Ural Patrol – where packing wasn’t really an issue. Despite the complaints online about the size of the luggage, I found I couldn’t fill the boxes and was wishing I’d just taken the top box off before I was out of the next state.

I headed for Northern Indiana and Prophets Town state park. This was an important site for a battle with Native American’s, after the Revolutionary War, and the Tippecanoe Park was a regular stop when I was growing up as a young re-enactor.

It was smaller than I remembered.

There is a museum inside which I paid a couple bucks to enter. It was also small, not much larger than the gift shop, but had a lot of displays, interesting historical pieces, and a cool diorama.

Since being back in the USA I’d stopped carrying my canonshot Elph (which was quite literally falling apart and made a terrible grinding when I turned it on). So all the pictures since then have been on my various mobile phones – but this trip I was carrying, for the first time since High School, a SLR – a DSLR to be honest but they didn’t have those when I was in High School. I bought a Nikon D70 off craigslist for cheap, and this was my first trip with it.

There is a state park near Tippecanoe so I headed over there for the night. It was $36!! Which caught me and my budget off guard. When did State Parks get so pricey? And just for a tent site, and not even a really good tent site. There were few trees and no where to hang a hammock, and a park ranger kept driving by, probably to check on the riff raff. I ended up on the ground.

There were bird hunting and no traffic off in tent country (other than the ranger), so I decided to watch a little Star Wars and and the sunset.