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Clean the RT, the bike earned it.

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Quite right, sir.

Thanks, everyone, for your kind words. I'm glad you've all enjoyed it. Just like the real trip, now that the writing's over, I have mixed emotions: relief and sadness. The last day of writing was about as hard as the last day of riding.

In reference to my "hula" move, Leslie observes:

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This sounds like it could also be a way to earn a little extra cash along the way.

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I was with you through a good portion of this trip and even while experiencing all these things with you, I never saw or remembered even a fourth of what you did.

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like I told Stretch, there's a lot of emotional baggage I brought on this trip:

-As a little kid I went on a zillion summer vacations with my family out west.

-Apart from a 24 hour jaunt from Denver to Gunny on a rented Goldwing last summer with Masako, this was the first time in three years I had ridden out there.

-And as you know, it was our only real opportunity at a farewell for Gleno.

So before I even left home, I was expecting to write a good Ride Tale at the end of it. I found myself paying a lot of attention to things, and even thinking, immediately after various events occurred, how I would write about it. The first week after I got home, I dumped my brain into a Word doc in the form of about a page of notes for each day.

And then I started writing.

I had no idea it would get as big as it did: with each pic as a single line of UBB code, the original word document now stands at 84 pages.

Shawn and Rainy, thanks a million for letting me use your pics in my story. Rainy, the write-up for the trip to Bryce and back wouldn't have been nearly as interesting without all of your on-the-go pics and your traffic stop surveillance.

Lisa sez:

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I was clicking through a lot of the links you provided, learning little tidbits along the way that I didn't know before. Before I knew it, I'm spending 20 minutes or so looking through Iowa State's website!

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I did a fair amount of research, trying to find the correct names for places and landforms and other things I saw, like the stuff in all those rest areas, and Iowa's state motto. Glad you found that stuff interesting.