Day 3 and 4

What a crazy past few days this has been.  Sad news is that Team Hale moto lost a member - Blaine.  The story - we began day 3 normal, around sunrise at 7 30am.  We started chugging along down the road in West Virginia mountains heading towards Eerie Pennsylvania.  Blaine began to have power loss in his bike throughout the morning.  We pulled over and he try flushing his carbs with carb cleaner, as we thought it was a fuel problem.  That would fix the problem for a little bit, but then the problem persisted, grounding us right outside of Eerie, PA.  We worked on the bike for about 2-3 hours but came to the harsh reality that Blaine wouldn’t be joining us for the rest of the trip and would need to find a way home.  Ken found a Ford f150 at the airport down the road and we went to pick it up.  We found a hillside and managed to load up the poor r90 for it’s trip back home to Atlanta.  We were very, very sad to loose Blaine and his r90 as he was an integral part of our team, representing the historic aspect of BMW and it’s cross country endeavors.  We said our goodbyes and Ken and I headed on towards Niagara.  We ended up camping at a KOA near Lake Eerie that night.  The next morning we could feel strong winds and wandered if it was coming off Lake Eerie or if the winds were from Hurricane Irene.  We began to make our way towards the Niagara Falls and finally arrived in the late morning.  The Falls were incredible and everything we hoped they would be.  It’s amazing to see how small you are in relation to mother Nature’s full force.  We hung around for a little over an hour and decided we should head on if we were going to make Montreal.  We headed up 401b through Toronto.  I thought Atlanta traffic was bad, but Toronto is pretty rough… As the day progressed, it began to get colder and darker, as we were heading into the outer bands of Irene.  Once it got too dark above us, we decided we should seek shelter before we got into a situation that would be bad.  I’m too tired to calculate our total miles for the past few days, so hopefully these pictures will keep you entertained.

Trekking along and missing Blaine

Team Hale Moto