Day 10
Sat 15th Aug

It was when I was having my cold shower in the morning after being cooked out of the tent that I was thankful for the relocation, although I wasn’t too thankful of being woken up at the time.

 

 

 

Despite being tired we soon felt better as we found out that if we signed up as members to the casino that removed us, we got a $10 betting voucher each and a free buffet! So we signed straight up, bet the free $20 and made $10 real cash which paid for the campsite, then stuffed our faces with free food courtesy of the casino. As you can imagine, that made us feel much better.

 

 

We left the casino around mid afternoon and continued our ride down to get back on to the T.A.T. It was horrendously hot, and stopping every five minutes searching for Mississippi mud pie didn’t help. Fortunately though I found a freezer full of ice and promptly stuck my head in it; so good.

 

 

 

Sadly we didn’t find any Mississippi mud pie, and before we knew it we were crossing over the massive Mississippi River in to Arkansas. There was quite a bit of pavement but we eventually got on to some gravel and dirt, and soon found ourselves at a surprise TAT stop.

 

 

 

There wasn’t anyone there but there was a book to sign, and apparently there was water too but we couldn’t find it. It was fun looking at all the other riders that had been through, and we hoped that we’d bump in to some more as we continued west.

 

 

I decided that I wanted a photo sat on the swing, and just as I sat down the swing dropped by about 2 inches, and Ed managed to capture this…

 

 

This is more what I had in mind.

 

 

The gravel, dirt, and dust continued, and we soon arrived in the town of Marvell. We needed to get some fuel and some more oil for my bike as it had started getting thirsty, as were we, and it was when we’d pulled up outside the dollar store to get some water that we met Dale. He’d ridden the T.A.T himself 4 years ago, and after asking where we were staying he immediately invited us back to his house. It was 7 miles in the wrong direction, but with the lure of a converted barn to sleep in, a hot shower to de-grime and some good company to keep us entertained, we gratefully accepted his offer. It was a real pleasure to spend time with him, his wife Liz and their son Owen, and they looked after us very well. We got a proper bed to sleep in, real towels, and a garage to work on the bikes, not to mention a lovely dinner with fresh veggies and fruit. You really appreciate things like that when you’re on the road, and as always we couldn’t thank them enough.

 

 

Dales air compressor also came in very handy to get some of the dust off the bikes, and Ed set about swapping our carbs over to see if it made any difference to the way his bike ran. We also got to blast off our air filters, which is when we discovered that the glue had come away between the filter material and the casing, causing my bike to suck in dust and dirt; that would explain why it had started using more oil. It had been whisping oil smoke for a while, but I think riding in a perpetual dust cloud with a faulty filter had finally got the better of the piston rings.

Dale warned us that we had more dust ahead, and deep stuff too, so Ed glued the filter back together and we also changed the front sprocket from a 17 tooth to a 14 tooth, to give us a bit more torque in the dust and a fighting chance of getting through it.