Taking care of business

After Independence day celebration, we had to take a break day from traveling and take care of some stuff. You may wonder what on earth we have to take care of, now being free travelers who left their daily life and responsibilities to travel for a while? Well, it looks like you never break completely free from the system.

Thank God we have Internet!

Ever heard the sentence "I wonder how we did this before Internet existed?". This is exactly how we felt that Monday. We pretty much sat in from of our laptop and had a laundry list of things to do. We checked and responded to our emails, paid our credit card bills, looked for and purchased health insurance for travelers, searched and reserved a campsite in Glacier N.P. and planned our initial stays in Canada. What a day of hard work:)

First motorcycle maintenance on the road

When we left for the trip, we were both riding with a rear tire that had a plug in it: both unlucky in getting a nail in our tires, we decided to just patch them back then and hit the road. Well, just as we left Yellowstone, Caroline's tire was very low on air: looked like the plug did not hold after all. We therefore both decided to order and install new rear tires before leaving for Canada and Alaska in order not to be in trouble on the road. This is a little bit tricky, especially when moving constantly but we found a solution: we ordered our tires online at Motorcycle Superstore and they can ship it directly to an installer (they work with a preferred network) and we found one in Montana directly on their website. We actually called the motorcycle shop to check also if they had some part we needed for Chad's upcoming 7,500 miles tune up and Caroline's 11,500. They had it all so we pretty much hit two birds with one stone: two days later, our tires were at the shop, got installed in less than two hours and we also got all the parts so that Chad could tune up both bikes in the upcoming days. It was much easier than we though: hope all the rest goes as smoothly!

Back on the road after the hard work

Once we were done, we started heading towards Glacier N.P. where we were to stay for three days. We stopped at Flathead lake for the night where we camped in a State Park with front view on the lake. What a beautiful setting for Chad to write his daily journal on the laptop (see above). On the East side of the lake, there are all these cherry orchards and we were fortunate enough to be there just for the first cherries to be picked. Not quite yet the peak season but we sure enjoyed the first ones we bought on the side of the road.