Flint Hills ride 6-3-17

Had a great ride today in the very green and lush Flint Hills! The area is so awesome when it's this green, you gotta get out and see for yourself.. Myself (Honda Africa Twin), Randy Megli (Yamaha Super Tenere), Derek Smith (Honda Africa Twin), Lance Poteet (Suzuki DRZ400) and Gary Wilbert (Triumph Tiger 800) hooked up in Wichita and headed northeast. Derek can probably offer more details of actual routing but we rode into a bunch of very friendly tough bastards riding the Dirty Kanza, we gently rode against them for a few miles offering our encouragement to them as we went with many of them exchanging high fives with us...

Derek had a rear flat on his Africa Twin and I wish we'd have taken more photos of Randy's fan club of cattle as they kept trying to offer their assistance to Derek, they were CLEARLY not familiar with his reputation as a master inner tube replacement specialist!!! But it did give Randy a chance to interact with his bovine minions... A couple came upon us as they were out enjoying the beautiful vistas in a side by side while obviously enjoying multiple adult beverages! LOL! (They really didn't seem to impaired and were very kind and I had no issues sharing the road with them)They hung with us and shot the shit for a long time, she was a lifelong resident of the area and owned a 2000 acre ranch nearby...

Huge thunderstorm cells began to develop and loomed ominously throughout the region and on our way back we spent quite a few miles in their cooling embrace but after the hour long stop in the humidity and warmth the showers for the most part felt pretty damn awesome and welcome minus the slight visibility impairment...

Anyway other than the flat and the missed appointment to meet up with Asis in Cottonwood Falls for munchies and more miles it was phenomenal day out with the boys and my first time back in the saddle since my gallbladder removal about 6 weeks ago. It was an incredible reminder of exactly why the hell we do this! Thanks for sharing the day with me once again my friends and I can't wait till we do it again! 

PS..... Click on images below for full size pictures if you didn't already know that.....

Sounds like a great ride, sorry to have missed ya's as well but I still had a nice leisure few hour ride and great day to be out there.
Wild flowers are just coming on, next couple of weeks should be awesome.

Its OK, Woody- not everyone knows how much of a super pro I am at changing tires! 

Just like Woody said, we had a general loop laid out thaat would have been 60-ish miles of gravel, all around the Cottonwood Falls/Matfield green areas. We started to run across a group of probably 150-200 DK'ers literally after our second turn, southwest of Teterville. We continued on at a slow, courteous pace, and made our way to Teter Rock, which lance had never seen before.

We hung out there for a bit, and took pics of the mustangs and all that jazz, then continued on. I was concerned that the DK course had picked some of the same roads I had, and sure enough, our next mapped turn [headed north on 50, immediatly east of Teter Rock] was marked as a DK course turn, and we saw another 50 cyclists coming down that. So, from there, we threw out the map, and just winged it. None of us wanted to be riding against the racers all day, if we could at all help it.

We started meandering further East, looking for a promising road headed north. We were still trying to reroute our way back over, and meet up with Asis. While doing so, we ran across a cool old brick building, which looked to be a small church. It was a great place for a rest and regroup, and thats where i was when I sent Asis the text about having no idea where we were at, lol!

As we were sitting there,  some rain found us, and started doing rain things. We boogied north from there, and rode out of the rain after 5 miutes or so. From there, we started trying to get back west, with minimal success. We got to some highlands just immediately north of 35, where i got a pinch flat.. lame. While I was changing that, some freindly locals rolled up in a razor, and shot the breeze with us for awhile.

I got the bike patched up and we continued on, hoping to hook up with cottonwood falls, but some local town just north of CF had a parade, and wouldnt let us pass through! ugh!

Que up a 45 miles slab reroute to Florence for some gas and a break, and to survey the weather ahead- which looked foreboding. We made the call to head down 77 to El Dorado, and we succesfully skipped the worst parts of the storm- but we all got totally soaked anyways.

All in all, it was a fun ride. Total was a bit over 200 miles for the day.  Thanks everyone for coming

Thanks for the detail write up Derek.
  The town just north of Cottonwood falls, Strong City, was having it's Flint Hills Rodeo 
Next weekend is Madison Days.
Lots of activity in the Flint Hills in June.

Nice write up's.  Sounds like a great ride overall. Wish I could have made it, hopefully next time.