260 miles, 14 hours.

Today was the first rain of the trip. I needed to be at a BMW shop that was over an hour away, so I didn't have a lot of choice. The clouds were black and the raindrops were huge. I got wet instantly.

Cycle Werks of Barrington had the Anakee rear tire I needed, and they remounted it. They certainly didn't do anything to help, however. I had to drop and remount the wheel on the street (they wouldn't even let me get it out of the rain!), and the main service guy, named "Guy", was somewhere between passive-aggressive and completely withdrawn. Whatever.

I then zipped up to the Harley-Davidson factory at Wauwatosa. They finish and assemble several of the Harley motors. The tour was interesting- it's always neat to see new machines. However, I didn't enjoy the tour nearly as much as the Kansas City factory tour. This one was staffed by students on their summer break, so they didn't have a lot of knowledge or passion about the Motor Company.

It was interesting to see the rejected cylinder heads; some had very visible occlusions in the original casting that didn't show up until they were machined. Every engine is test-run (not on a dyno, just "free run") for 10-12 minutes. The tourbot claimed there hasn't been an engine failure in over 4 years. I'm not sure I believe that- not because it is Harley-Davidson, but because the odds would be against that. I assume it is a very qualified statement. I mean, if that is true, that should mean that the Kansas City and York plants would never send an engine back during final assembly, and that is definitely not true.

Next, I went into downtown Milwaukee. I intentionally rode on surface streets rather than getting back on the interstate. That put me through some fairly rough Milwaukee neighborhoods, which was interesting to me. It's interesting to see that property is for sale all across the country, though places like Milwaukee are probably doing worse than average.

In downtown Milwaukee is the Harley-Davidson museum. It's an amazing museum that opened less than a month ago. Wow. The bikes were top-notch, and the vast majority are unrestored. I especially liked the Art Deco era bikes, the military bikes, and other oddballs like that.

Next door to the museum is the archives and restoration facility. They have these huge racks of bikes that are simply being stored. They use a "one-row" storage system, so you have to move every row to get to a specific bike. Obviously, these bikes sit in storage for years at a time. I then ate over at the museum restaurant (yum!), and then got on my way. What a neat place- I was there for 3-4 hours, and I'm not even a Harley guy!

Naturally, it was dry all day but began raining as soon as I left the museum. I stopped about 15 miles south for some oil and a filter, then began heading back towards Chicago and a Cabelas store I had marked on the GPS. There's some long construction zones on the freeway marked at 45mph, which wasn't fun in evening traffic. Thankfully, a group of retro-European motorcycle riders (Triumph Bonneville, Ducati GT1000, etc) came through, so I dropped into the sweep position and stayed with them.

When I was about to get off the freeway for the Cabelas, the rain got worse, then the thunder and lightning got close. Thankfully, I was getting off the freeway around the same time the thunder and lightning were happening at the same time (meaning it was REALLY close). The only sketchy point was when the high-voltage power lines over the road began arcing.

Anyhow, I rode around for a couple miles looking for the Cabelas, then called Tamara for directions. The rain got much worse and the wind picked up. I got off the phone with Tamara and a VERY LOUD siren began going off. Hmm.

I figured there weren't many reasons for that loud of a siren. I rode across the parking lot, looking for somewhere to get out of the rain (hopefully, to get myself AND the bike out of the rain). A car honked at me, with a tone that indicated "you are dumb for riding in this". I rode to the entrance of a Wal-Mart, parked the bike on the sidewalk, then hustled under the cover.

By this time I figured out it must be for a tornado. The rain was coming down sideways because of the strength of the wind. I've never seen that much lightning- it looked like a strobe was going off. I waited out the storm, but also called Tamara so she could be my weather spotter. She confirmed it was a tornado, and told me how long I'd have to wait for the storm to pass over.

I found out afterwards that the tornado had touched down about 8 miles away from the Wal-Mart, only a mile or two from where I'd passed on the freeway during the really bad thunderstorm.

Once I got back home, I found out that Sue had to go out and do her volunteer fire department duties, while Jon and Alicia hid in the basement while the storm passed by. We ended up being out of internet service for almost 24 hours, but at least there was power.