stayed up until about 3am packing and such, didn’t finish everything either, so i left around noon. stopped at wild west honda to pick up saddlebag guards for my brother and bought some foot rain gear. went outside and was packing away the guards and the bottom dropped out of the sky. had to go inside the dealer’s to put on the rain gear. my tour bag got rained on and some stuff got wet. gah. oh well. was pretty wet until around columbus. stopped after that and took off the rain gear. shut my helmet on my finger and cut it. ouch. got to austin without any more rain. my brother couldn’t get the saddlebag guards on with the socket set he had, so he packed them away and we left around 5:30pm. within five miles of us hitting the road, the bottom dropped again. had to stop and put on rain gear in the rain. right after starting off again, linc got splashed by a passing car…a lot of water. rained hard on us for at least 30 or 40 miles. finally stopped. there was much rejoicing, mostly by my brother who doesn’t have a windshield and decided to wear an open face helmet for the trip. got to waco around 8:30pm and decided to stop and eat at a denny’s (that was the first time i’d eaten, except for a twix i’d had about an hour earlier…i was drinking water though). asked the price of a room at the la quinta next door – $99. yeah, right. decided to drive on to hillsboro since it wasn’t raining and we were behind schedule (originally we were supposed to surprise our grandmother who is staying with relatives in fort worth, but that was definitely out for the day, of course). within a couple of minutes of leaving waco, it started raining on us again. what fun. got to hillsboro, where we stayed in the days inn…which is what the hotel is now where _bottle rocket_ was filmed. come on, you know i couldn’t resist. we didn’t get room 212 though. still, it was nice to see the place again. i hope we paid our rain dues today…we certainly had to go through a lot of it.
day 1 — trial by fire…no…rain
note: this is one of a number of entries that were lost in a server crash, followed by a desktop crash, back in late 2004. on march 1, 2009, i happened on a cache file on the crashed desktop hard drive, so i am reloading all of the entries with their original date and time values intact for posterity.