Part two of a three-part series detailing my Motorcycle Odyssey of 2009.

After riding several hundred miles across the flats of Iowa, turning north onto the Great River Road in Western Wisconsin was like becoming giddily delirious. I just kept fighting to urge to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming for fear it would end abruptly.

It was my first time riding the route that parallels the Mississippi River from the Illinois border all the way to the Saint Croix River, though we were only on it between Prairie du Chien and La Crosse. If it hadn’t been for the occasional signs telling me how far we had to ride, I’d have been convinced I’d slammed head-on into a semi and gone to motorcycle heaven. Every inch of the route offered majestic vistas overlooking the river, rolling hills, jutting cliffs or winding roads that were both challenging and rewarding to ride.

Weaving our way along the shoreline, banking, climbing, turning, occasionally leaning into the throttle on an exhilarating downhill stretch to pass the slower automobile traffic — I’m convinced that a good road and a motorcycle is the closest sensation there is to flying without the use of wings or drugs. By the time Cam and I stopped at a rest area on the banks of the river halfway to La Crosse, it was as much to shake our light-headedness as it was to eat lunch.

The rest area sat adjacent to one of the fascinating, massive lock and dam systems that dot the Mississippi River. In just one of several cases of fortuitous timing that populated the trip, we arrived just as the doors began to swing open to admit a gargantuan string of 15 barges and an accompanying tow-boat. We watched, awe-struck, as the tow pilot maneuvered the 600-foot apparatus into the lock with mere inches to either side as a margin of error. I respect the hell out of the kind of people that do that for a living and probably don’t even break a sweat in the process.

Holy effing Christ, that thing is huge!

Then, the massive steel doors swung shut behind it, and over the course of 20 minutes, the chain of barges rose the dozen feet to the next level of the river. With a bellow from the tug’s horn, the doors at the other end swung open. The earth shook as the massive engine roared to life again, and slowly, inevitably, the tug pulled out of the lock and continued upriver.

Best. 45 minutes. Of free entertainment. Ever.

Cam and I finished our PBJs (salvaged from our hotel’s continental breakfast that morning), refilled our water bottles and continued north. Within a few miles, we overtook the barge, now so tiny on the river below, but still moving inexorably northward. We whipped past like mosquitoes buzzing a buffalo.

While we did and saw a number of things more exciting than the Great River Road, I think it was, for me, the high point of the trip — hands down the best ride of my life. Even though I was cramping from a second consecutive 300-mile day in the saddle, shivering from the cold breeze off the river and clinging for dear life to the speeding machine whisking me northbound, I achieved complete relaxation in those majestic hills.

I tried to explain the Zen of Motorcycling a couple months back to a friend of mine who has never ridden. She asked me, understandably perplexed, what was so rewarding about sitting in a perpetual gale, balanced on two-wheels, muscles tensed for hours on end and pelted with bugs and debris while the concrete whizzes by like a belt sander mere inches from your extremities.

Up until this trip, I just knew I liked riding. Riding a thousand miles in four days helped me figure out why. The answer is the beautiful simplicity of the whole thing.

The ride.

Throughout the entire trip, I had one constant: my bike. Everything else around me — the scenery, the road, the people, the digs, the weather — everything on the trip was a variable except my bike, and it was divinely simple.

Compared to a car or a truck, a motorcycle is a simple machine. There are no airbags, no advanced suspension, no bucket seats, no seat belts, no air conditioning or radio or electric locks or crumple zones or stability controls. A motorcycle is the simplest form of a motorized vehicle — nothing but an engine, a gas tank, a drive shaft (or chain), two wheels, brakes, rudimentary suspension, something to sit on and something to hold onto.

If you were to take a car and start pulling the parts off until there was nothing left but the essentials needed to travel hundreds of miles in a day, you’d be left with a motorcycle.

Similarly, for the duration of the trip, I had to boil my life down to the necessities in order to get by on the open road. With only my saddle bags and a backpack to live out of, I could afford to pack only the barest of essentials. There was no room for a laptop, a DVD collection or a set of golf clubs. My only possessions for four days were some rain gear, a couple changes of clothes, a few maps and my cell phone — and even that was blessedly inaccessible on the road.

Liberated from most of my earthly possessions,  I felt like an open book, and light as air. I know it sounds stereotypical, but out there, it was just me, the bike and the open road. And the glorious part was I had nothing but time to contemplate that sensation.

Locked away in my full face helmet, but with a pair of ear plugs to mute the overpowering roar of the wind to a soothing white noise, I was alone in my head for 120 miles at a time. Not that staying balanced on a snarling machine as you twist along a challenging river route is easy. It requires a base kind of concentration and a good deal of skill, but it’s not Dostoevsky either. With my body physically occupied but absolutely no draw on the higher functions of my brain, I had a lot of time to think on the Motorcycle Odyssey.

And think I did. I contemplated, I mused, I mulled, I even soul-searched a little. And a thousand miles later, when I returned home, it was with a a sense of spiritual gratification that’s probably hard for most non-riders to fathom…that, and a slight sense of dread as to how I would cope with having an entire flat full of possessions to look after again. That was a little overwhelming for a day or two.

Our afternoon on the Great River Road did eventually come to an end with our arrival in La Crosse. We gassed up, then veered due north on Highway 93 toward Eau Claire. It was a fitting sequel to the river road, climbing, diving and banking among the lush bluffs of the driftless region’s northern boundary. We crossed miles at a time feeling we were the only vehicles on the road. As evening set in, we stopped at a scenic overlook, discussed our options, and Cam called ahead to a few folks he knows in Eau Claire to see if they could put us up or at least tell us where the good bars were.

By the time we arrived in the city proper an hour later, Cam’s voicemail did in fact offer a place to stay for the night by way of his track buddy Marc’s kid cousin. We met up, grabbed dinner, spent some time sitting in a front yard drinking beer and blowing things up, then headed to Water Street. I was talked into imbibing a house special mishmash of colorful liquor known as the “Delusion,” and after getting my eyes knocked crooked and hitting a few more bars, we packed it in and called it a night.

I spent the night in an epic battle with the couch from hell, trying to catch a few winks of sleep. I don’t know where the thing itself came from, but I was mildly suspicious it had been passed around from college house to college house since the eighties. It was only two cushions long — not nearly large enough for a five-foot-eleven fellow to stretch out on, but some piece of its sinking frame stuck up right in its middle, preventing me from curling up in a fetal position without being jabbed in the side.

I spent a half hour tossing and turning before I realized the two halves of the couch could be pulled apart. I promptly moved them a couple feet apart and stuffed enough pillows between so my posterior could sink down a foot and rest on them, allowing my torso to rest on one half of the couch and my legs the other. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t even really comfortable, but it allowed me to sleep until 6 AM, when the sun shone directly through the curtainless window to wake me. I rolled over, grabbed a random pair of aviator sunglasses from the coffee table and fell back asleep almost as soon as they touched my face.

All told, I was the most ridiculous sleeping sight in the western hemisphere that night. I sort of wish someone had taken a picture.

That morning, we awoke early, packed up the bikes and made the short jaunt northeast to Chippewa Falls, where we fulfilled a lifelong dream and toured the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewery. It was everything we’d hoped and more.

We tooled around downtown Chippewa Falls for a while, grabbed lunch, then headed due east on Highway 29, which some say is the dividing line between “north” and “very north” in Wisconsin. Our destination: Titletown.

Coming soon: the Pilgrimage, and the conclusion of the Motorcycle Odyssey.