Monday, 1st of September: Lost and found in Montana - Into the " Lower 48 "

Crossing an easy going border at Roosville ( after all the hassles with getting vis for the US the landborders with Canada are just the opposite way) we get into the " Lower 48 " , as Alaskans tend to call the other States of the USA south and below Alaska. We somehow adopted this term using it with some smile. Riding south Highway 93 we go through Montana - emotionally it feels like getting into one of our childhoods western movies. This is cowboy country !
Via Eureka, Whitefish and Kellispell we are due to Missoula to hit Highway 90 east to butte, when after 250 dry kilometers we get hit by a major coldfront. This one includes heavy rains, temperatures around 3 degrees Celsius and gusty winds all along the way - that all happens while Hurricane Gustav is on its way to hit New Orleans again on the other side of the country.
While Baba stops to clean his helmetvisor ( which was wet from the inside and therefore taking sight away ) Hombre is loosing sight from the front and mistakes a car with only one headlight working in his backview mirror for Hombres bike.
With our radios temporarily not plugged in it happens - Hombre carries on riding and takes off the road to Butte along the way - and we loose each other .
While I ride on towards him and keep searching him along the route and backwards for miles , he decides to slowly ride on and gets forward to Butte that night - which is one of the worst nights to drive a bike we both ever had. In addition all our regular planned retrieval manoeuvers would not fit into that special situation.
Normally it would have been easy to use our cellphones to find each other - grace to whatever reason neither my quadband Nokia nor Hombres tripleband Nokia connect to any serviceprovider - what was a problem throughout Canada already should go on all the way till we get into western Idaho.
So we both ended up in different motels along the way and finally after many different ways of trying got email contact to find out about where. Cold and tired from that day, but happy both of us were ok we slept tight - supposed to meet each other next day at 6 pm in Yellowstone Park.

Hombre (sleeping in Butte this night) and
BABA (sleeping in Missoula)