Me, suffering the ass pain of riding a serious sportbike 470 miles!

August 2003

Bikes ridden: 1999 Yamaha R1, 2003 Suzuki Hayabusa

This ride was a one day, 469 mile, ride that covered 5 states.

Originally titled “Six States before Supper” it was our first videotaped jaunt.

I lived in Omaha, Nebraska at the time. Tracy had just bought a brand new
Suzuki Hayabusa and came up for the weekend.
We decided that Omaha would be a good start for our state line quest based
on it’s geographic proximity to six state lines. Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri,
Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota.

The initial goal was to leave early in the morning, get six state line pictures,
be back in time to eat dinner.

6 am, The garage door opened, we had a breakfast of krispy kremes and bad coffee and we were off. Our first state was Kansas, which was some 100 miles away, We immediately turned around and headed back into Nebraska, Two down, Easy stuff..Missouri was only 30 miles away, this was going to be gravy. Missouri came and went and we bounced into Iowa.

We had four states down before lunch! Stopping for rightfully earned lunchbreak, We grabbed the map and realized an error in our planning. Minnesota was going to be farther than we thought. We could get it before the day was out..but not before dinner. Tracy and I made a decision to leave MN for another day and focus on riding to South Dakota.

We spun on the back roads of Iowa, There was at one point an overturned, crashed car that was actually ablaze. We had to backtrack some 30 miles to get back on course.

We took our pictures at the South Dakota state line, and headed home…

We made it back… before supper.

Lessons learned: 1) The country is bigger than it looks on a map 
          2) I'm going to need a different bike

The day long ride really started it all. It became Chapter 1 in the “By Way of Motorcycle” video series. If we hadn’t wasted that day running around on our motorcycles, this website probably wouldn't exist

Billy