Happy Birthday America! If you were in Russia you would know why I put that smiley face at the end of America. It has got to be a good day today because the sun is shining and the sky is clear. Well I got up with big plans of getting really close to Irkutsk today. I just realized I lost one of my titanium tent stakes today or yesterday. I had 12 of them and now I have 11. I’m ticked off at myself about that. It’s been 25 years plus since I lost a tent stake. Oh well…. Well, my plans kind of went down the toilet. I finished out the rest of bad road and stopped at a grocery store to pick up some water and food. Just as I was walking out, in rolled the two Scottish guys Tom and Gordon. Well I’ll be darned. So today I got the skinny on where they have traveled, what their future route is and when they plan on being back in Scotland. During our conversation, Gordon went in and bought all of us a cup of ice cream. It sure tasted good and I’m not even sure I thanked him for it. So if you read this Gordon, thanks, if I didn’t say it before. Like I said before, they’re going to Vladivostok, catching a ferry to Japan, then flying their bikes out of Japan to the USA, driving from the West Coast to Miami, Florida and shipping their bikes by ship back to Scotland. They should have a great time. Both Tom and Gordon are retired police officers who are currently unemployed, and will be looking for a new job on their return to Edinburgh, Scotland. They told me I could ride with them but I declined. They took some pictures of me and I took four or five pictures of them and their motorcycles. They’re riding BMWs like the Long Way Around guys did, if you can remember Ewan McGregor and Charlie Bormann. Have fun you guys, and safe journeys! I hope to see them farther down the road on the way to Vladivostok. So now I’m back on the road by myself again. Even though I rode all the bad roads, I rode back into another stretch of it and this went on all day. I don’t believe I rode over 150 miles today. The fastest I rode in the potholed areas is 25/30mph----40/48Kms. For me to ride faster than that was suicidal. In reality I rode faster than the cars and trucks thru these areas and, of course, I had to eat their dust while passing. Today is the first time I actually used my motorcycle for its intended purpose, enduro riding on rough roads with lots of suspension to absorb the shock from the potholes and rocks. I did my level best to stay out of the deep potholes and miss all the stones that were baseball size and larger. There’s a lot of new road construction going on in this area which is the reason for the bypasses and rough road. I remember reading about the KLR 650 having heating problems while building my bike. I wired the fan so I could turn it on manually thinking I’d never need it. While I was driving through the potholed area at 25 mph/40 kms I noticed that it started running almost twice the temperature it normally operates at. No air was passing thru the radiator at the slow speeds and the dust was acting as insulation to keep it from cooling efficiently. I flipped the switch on and watched to see if the engine would cool down. The temperature dropped by half with the fan running. I was happy to see that. Further down the road I came across a creek with a driveway down to it. I drove in there, cleaned my lights and my helmet visor, and squirted some water through my radiator to flush out any dust that may have built up. The gas stations only pump gas. No towels for checking oil, nothing to wash your windows etc. etc. You’ll see the trucks and cars drive down by the ponds alongside the road and wash their headlights and windshields. Some of the newer stations sell oil, candy, pop, stuff like that. You rarely see that out here in the hinterlands. You know, I haven’t regretted it a bit that I put those additional screens in front of my radiator, either. The window screen keeps the bugs out and ¼ square screen slows down the rocks thrown by oncoming trucks and cars. Hopefully that will keep a hole from being poked in my radiator. If they graded the road twice a week I think this rough road crap wouldn’t be as much of a problem. I travelled from 100 miles east of Kansk to Nizhneudinsk today. Like I said, I don’t think I traveled farther than 150 miles/241 kms today with all the rough roads. I’m bush camping in pine trees tonight. No problem with mosquitoes tonight, but the black flies are something else. Again I wore my head net to keep the flies out of my face. There were twenty of them crawling around on my hands. They can fill the tent just as fast as the mosquitoes and are harder to kill. It took about 15 minutes to get all of them out of the tent. I’m thinking it may rain tonight or tomorrow. Plenty of thunder already tonight. I can do without the rain. I worked on my blog and went to bed. I lost another hour today again. Lots of train traffic to listen to all night. I looked outside before I laid down and all the flies had disappeared. The buzzing had stopped and the air was clear of insects. I unzipped the tent and took a walk around in the pine trees. They didn’t have any branches within 15 feet/4 1/2 meters off the ground. The whole area was insect-free. I’m thinking the flies must have been day shift flies and they went home for the evening at 9:00 p.m. Usually about 9:00 p.m. the night shift insects emerge but not in this case.
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