Border to Border Posse Ride '21 Day -1

 It has been a log year already with multiple things trying to make this trip not happen. But through stubbornness or dedication, we made it! There were a few modifications to the trip but Zak and I are on the road.

Leaving Arkansas we lucked out with Texarkana Harley Davidson having some summer hours. So we waited around for about half an hour to get our first chips of the trip.

Our next stop was Dallas! And if you have ever traveled to Dallas boredom sets in rather quickly with the lavish scenery. So we started watching for license plates, what any normal American on a 'Road Trip' would do. I made a comment that there should be a dashboard with magnets or something to track this. Zak said "or we could just write it down...I guess I could, nothing but time!" So now we had another game. Name all the states so we can mark them off the list. We starting documenting our states and were feeling pretty good about it. So he started to count them, before I give you our grand total here is how we did it. We went by the alphabet, 'A' (Alabama, Arkansas, Alaska...). We made it to 'H', nope not 'H', next. I know what you are thinking, but we missed it. So continuing on we were down to 'S', nope, 'T', nope again. We only had 39 states listed. Oops, but in our defense some of them wouldn't be missed. So looking at a list and him calling them off while I was driving wasn't helping, so I started referencing the map in my head. Started off with Maine. As I called them off he would look through the list and confirm or add them. Going south down the East Coast, I made it to North Carolina. "Yep got it" he replied. And if you were paying attention earlier you can see what is next. South Carolina...oops there are some 'S', lets go ahead and add South Dakota too. Making it to Florida I started going back up, we had left off Kansas as well. Made it up and back down with another one or two missed and we make it to Louisiana and continuing on my zig zag north to south, Texas. Oops again. Now this was funny for more than one reason, the big obvious one, we were in Texas. Second, we had already started playing and Texas, Arkansas, & Ohio were already on the seen list. So after a good laugh we managed to get all the states without the assistance of the internet.

Being almost lunch time we stopped in at Braum's to make sure Kristen still was paying attention!

She was FYI! As I was catching up on missed notifications while driving I noticed that my battery was low on my iPhone. Now I haven't been using my iPhone, so I pulled up the battery status to see what was using all the juice. And to my surprise worthless. I had only 11 minutes of screen time on my phone and was not using it for tracking or navigation. I'm sure you would agree, very irritating!

Since we were close to Dallas we made our plan of approach for the plethora of dealers and chips! We started off with Black Gold. Then were on to our next stop, which turned out to be Harley Davidson Financial Services. FYI they did not appear to have any chips. So we went on to Maverick then Texas, to Longhorn, to Stampede, and finishing up the day at Fort Worth. These were unofficial stops and had already racked up 7 new chips.

 On one of our stops we were waiting in line and overheard the person in front of us talking to the cashier. She had been our riding, didn't have any rain gear. Had been through a couple of brief showers and was picking up a new pair of boots. She already had the new boots on, had paid for them and was about to depart the register and it dawned on her, she had no way of transporting the old pair. After a brief discussion she settles on just throwing them away. As she was leaving, she was on a sport bike of some kind. But we couldn't help but laugh a little about the lack of thought.

To finish off the day we had the 7 chips and 12 states & Ontario.