June 6

Today, it was my turn for the first comment of the morning. “Well, so much for the eye candy, we’re in Kansas now Toto”. Don’t get me wrong, the State of Kansas has tons of interesting history and I'm sure that there are plenty of great roads for riding as well. There are also plenty of straight roads with nothing other than flat farmland on either side. That's what was in store for Mike and I today. We got to our latest start of the trip and took off from the hotel at 11:00 and headed east on Rt. 50. As we left Dodge City we did a bit of trail riding on the SuperHawks and got a shot of the welcome sign to town.

As we were leaving the area, we saw the largest privately owned livestock farm in the world. This farm processes (kills) 4000 head of beef daily! It was a massive farm to say the least and was pretty much the highlight of the day as far as scenery.

We did pass the town of Kinsley, which is the center point of the United States. We did not see any monument or marker and we did not look anywhere but on the main highway that we were riding on. We continued the day for 235 miles and landed in Emporia Kansas. We just passed the second major milestone of our trip and passed the 2000-mile mark (2025 to be exact)!

As a note of interest (or boredom depending on your outlook) our SuperHawk engines have been running on the road for 38 hours since we started on Saturday, May 29^th. We figured that the average RPM of the engine has been 5000. During that time each crankshaft has rotated 11,400,000 times. Each piston has gone up and down a total of 22,800,000 times and each camshaft has rotated 5,700,000 times. This is a lot for a 40-year-old bike. We discussed the fact that is unlikely that any other brand of motorcycle of that time would have the same reliability as our SuperHawks.

Our overall average speed has been 49.6mph. That is time on the bike in the saddle and does not include all of our stops.

Both of our chains are also stretching a bit more than we would have expected (must be the horsepower that is doing it!) as well.

Last night while cleaning the bikes I noticed that my left muffler is cracking again in the same area that Jim Wagnon welded up for us while we were in Phoenix. Jim’s welds are holding perfectly but it appears that the pipe is rusted from the inside and will need replacement by the time we get to Indy. We received a note from Bill Silver, a well-known SuperHawk expert from Hawaii and he mentioned that the SuperHawks were prone to the pipes cracking in that area from vibration. The rusting from apparent short-term use over my bikes lifetime certainly did not help matters.

We contacted Mark Riggin at Honda Sport in Topeka where our next stop will be and asked if we could get there a little early to do some maintenance on the bikes before we are scheduled to arrive. We will change the oil and do some other minor maintenance there. The bikes are really running great and once again are like motorcycle enthusiast magnets, both today and yesteryears. When we pulled up the hotel in Emporia, a fellow came up and could not believe his eyes. It had been years since he had last seen a Superhawk and he told us that he had owned both CL77 and CL72 (305 and 250) Scrambler models. He stated that he ran them into the ground but they never stopped going!

After we chatted, Mike and I went and did our laundry for the first time during the trip. Not that we don’t miss our families already, but we both have an even greater respect for Brenda and Carin! Its not the washing that was a big deal but the folding that gets us confused. We were entertaining all the folks in the Laundromat and Mike even offered a lady ten dollars to fold his stuff. She turn it down. She said that she was getting better entertainment watching him do folding on his own than the mopney could buy! Mike kept on saying “How the heck (not the actual word he used by the way!) does she get these things so flat?” I came back with “It’s all in the sleeves man, its gotta be in the sleeves.”

Since there is not much more to talk about today, I thought I would make mention of a pretty neat story about the History of American Honda.

Back in 1957 or so, Mr. Honda made the decision to sell motorcycles in the United States. Bikes back then were used primarily for transportation and were large machines but Mr. Honda had a vision that the people in America wanted to have fun and he saw a market for small recreational motorcycles.

Mr. Honda came to America and met with an individual that was already distributing motorcycles and had a lot of experience in the US market. Mr. Honda approached the Distributor and talked about the possibility to sell 7,500 motorcycles in the states. The American said that “7,500 motorcycles is an very appropriate figure” and that it would be no trouble selling 7,500 motorcycles. But as they continued to talk, Mr. Honda some contradiction in what he was saying and what the American was hearing. The American thought that Mr. Honda meant to sell 7,500 motorcycles in a year but in fact Mr. Honda intended on selling 7,500 motorcycles a MONTH! Once the misunderstanding was cleared, the American said: “Selling 7,500 motorcycles a month? That’s out of the question. Preposterous!”

In June of 1959, 45 years ago this month, American Honda Motor Co., Inc. was established in Los Angeles California.