Faux Band Bios

BASS

Al spent fifteen years studying to be a Rabbi before learning from his parents that he wasn’t Jewish. Taking up the bass, he began to learn the music of Led Zeppelin, saying “They seemed like a logical choice, since they weren’t Jewish either.”

Al collects seashells, prominently displaying them in a glass case in his home. His collection currently contains three shells, and he hopes to double that amount over the next ten years. He is also a bit of an amateur chef, preparing such dishes as grilled cheese, cold sandwiches, and soup, sometimes combining two of those dishes to make a hearty and nourishing meal.

Al spends his weekends celebrity cloud watching, and recently saw a cloud that looked like Madonna looked right after her Borderline phase but BEFORE the Material Girl phase. He also is proud that his first name contains the least amount of letters of anyone in the band, and even in the real Led Zeppelin.

Bass playing is a welcome change for Al from his career doing something or another for some company, and he hopes one day to make enough money playing the bass to retire from his day job, but doesn’t think it will happen anytime soon, seeing as he just can’t live on two hundred dollars a month.

GUITAR

Woody began playing the guitar over seventy-five years ago, when in a former life he studied music under famed jazz guitarist Joger Kofka, considered by many to be the twenty-fifth best jazz guitarist of that period.

Woody is the father of four children who live in another state and know him by another name. He plans to reunite with his children when “hell freezes over” or when a court-order forces him to.

A life-long fan of Jimmy Page, Woody traveled to Australia to meet his musical hero, learning fifteen minutes into a twenty-four hour flight that Jimmy Page actually lived in England.

As a hobby, Woody hunts really, really small game, such as field mice and turtles, neither of which is really game (the noun), but Woody claims not to know that. He also enjoys making snowmen, but finds the season too short to really master the art. He hopes to own his own snow-making machine one day, as soon as he pays off his Marshall stack, which is currently doing double duty, acting as his stage rig as well as his apartment.

Woody is very close with his mother, but admittedly not as close as when she was breastfeeding him, something she did until he was eleven. Odder still is that she was his foster mom.

KEYBOARDS

Keyboardist Andrew is proud of his use of all ten fingers (including the fourth finger and the pinky) while playing the great music of Led Zeppelin, but was disappointed to learn that Zeppelin didn’t do the song Dust in The Wind, as he was looking forward to playing it with the band and had spent a few hours learning it on the piano.

Andrew has played along with the CDs of some of the biggest names in the music business, including The Rolling Stones (16 letters) and some of the shortest names, The Who (six letters), for example. He does not sign autographs, but would consider it, if asked.

A keen negotiator, when purchasing his Kurzweil PC-88 he talked the dealer into throwing in the black keys for free. He has yet to use the black keys, but is convinced that one day they will come in handy. Also, a natural born skeptic, Andrew really can’t believe it’s not butter.

When not performing with Swan Song, Andrew (known as Andrew) designs and manufactures “Will Work For Food Signs”, and has such diverse hobbies as posting huge rewards for the recovery of imaginary pets, and full-contact origami. He gives back to the community by reminding homeless people that they should be happy: no overhead, but feels that any other charitable work would be counterproductive since he despises people.

VOCALS

Patrick’s mother reports that he began singing while still in her womb. Nicknaming him “The Golden Larynx”, his family couldn’t be prouder that he now replicates the voice of Robert Plant, although his father believes that a Paddy O’Neil tribute band would be just as exciting.

Patrick is also an artist whose main course of study has been the great French masters, but Patrick puts a new twist on their work by drawing updated versions of their subjects. His “Mona Lisa as Hippie Chick” is breathtaking.

Patrick is a meatatarian, choosing to eat meat but not vegetables, saying that, “Meat is meant to be eaten, that’s what it tastes so good. But vegetables are meant to be seen, that’s why they look so good.”

He has won numerous titles in shadowboxing and is politically active, working hard recently on an attempt to make Delaware the fifty-first state.

Patrick sleeps with his microphone under his pillow.

DRUMS

Mike began playing the drums when William Ludwig and Avedis Zildjian were still in diapers, although Mr. Ludwig has gotten very old and is now again in diapers.

Mike has studied every aspect of the great John Bonham’s career and plays an exact replicate of John Bonham’s drum kit, including the cigarette ash on the floor. A machinist by trade, Mike often hand-makes pieces of his drum equipment during company hours instead of his doing what he’s supposed to be doing.

A keen observer of human nature, Mike keeps track of the audience members who go to the bathroom during the drum solo of Moby Dick and later appears at their homes to perform the solo on their heads. He is also an avid supporter of the legalization of marijuana, and for finding an easier way to spell marijuana. Mike currently uses marijuana for medicinal reasons, which he defines as “getting fucked up.”

He can perform a note for note reproduction of every Led Zeppelin song ever recorded, looks exactly like John Bonham before he got fat, and plans on one day choking to death on his own vomit.



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Do I camp?

Another question I get, do I camp?

Do I camp? How can I answer this question? Let’s see… in the grand tradition of my Jewish ancestry perhaps I will answer it with another question. Are you insane?

No, I don’t camp! I don’t like bugs! I don’t like sleeping on the ground! I don’t like smelling like the ground! I don’t like wide temperature fluctuations while I sleep. Or getting eaten by animals. Or having to walk down a path to use a community bathroom… or worse… there is no bathroom, just a path… and maybe not even that! I also don’t like having to pack up my entire bedroom, including the walls, after I wake up in the morning.

And I certainly don’t like encountering the other campers. For one thing, they smell like the ground. For another, they have very dirty feet which for some reason are always in plain view.

Oh, and anything that requires me to hang my food from a tree so that I’m not killed in my sleep is not for me.

Camping, I might add, is different from MOTORCYCLE camping. Camping, when one is traveling by automobile and can carry hundreds of pounds of food and gear, is vastly different than camping while on a motorcycle journey where one has trouble finding space for an extra pair of socks.

No to mention that no one has ever had to call the Coast Guard or the Forest Service to help them find their way out of a Days Inn. No one has ever needed a search party to bring them back from the hot tub at a Best Western or the vending room at a Super Eight. No sir, the only people who get lost in the wilderness are people who at some point were in possession of a mess kit.

Do you know how long I would survive in the wilderness? About an hour and a half. A little longer if I had some porn.

I couldn’t start a fire with anything less than a gallon of kerosene and a self-lighting propane torch. I couldn’t figure out which plants were edible and which were poisonous until I ate a little of each and waited to see if I died.

I don’t know on which side of the tree moss grows, north or south. I’m not even sure I know what moss is. And even if I could figure out which way is north, I have no idea how that could be helpful. People in movies who get lost always have to figure out which way is north. Why is this?

I have no idea how to trap or otherwise kill an animal, and even if one surrendered to me I wouldn’t know how to butcher it. And even if I did know how to butcher it, I couldn’t. I have an unbelievably weak stomach and the very idea of cutting into the flesh of anything other than a watermelon gets me queasy. Not to mention that I’m a ridiculously picky eater. If you think I’m going to eat squirrel or rabbit, even to keep from dying, you’re mistaken. And where would one find an appetizer in the wilderness? Is there a way to hunt or trap a Caesar salad or a shrimp cocktail? You don’t really expect me to dive into my entrée without an appetizer or even some fresh bread to get me started, do you?

But I don’t think we have to worry about what I would be eating. This should come as no surprise, but I don’t think I would be much of a match for the predators out there. For example, I can’t recall which animals can climb trees and which can’t, and I imagine that’s the kind of thing you’d like to know before climbing a tree to get away from some stealthy killer who wants your connective tissue for that night’s dinner.

For some animals you’re supposed to stand still when you spot them and from some you’re supposed to run. I have no idea which is which, and anyway, it seems unlikely I could outrun ANY living creature, except maybe a one-legged turtle, and even then only if he’s nearsighted.

And here's one I love, you’re supposed to look for a cave in which to take shelter. Yea, right! Where does one look for a cave? Even if I found a cave I wouldn’t take shelter in it. I wouldn’t even look in it. Snakes take shelter in caves. Spiders and bats take shelter in caves. And worse than that, there might be another lost camper taking shelter in there who will want to tell me about the expensive yuppie Harley he has back home.

You look for a cave, I’ll look for a coffee machine. You look for a mollusk (rich in nutrients), I’ll look for some porn.


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About Harry Poachtree

Chapters one and two.

Harry Poachtree was an amateur philosopher, best known for his whimsical and often-underappreciated musing: “If not for shoes, would we still need socks?”

In his later years Harry would lament that so many of his contemporaries and the public at large failed to see the deeper implications of that question, assuming, as did Harry’s wife, that he was only kidding. But when pressed by the New York Time’s philosophy critic as to what that deeper implication might be, Harry would only reply that “some animals eat only vegetation, and some animals eat other animals, but no one eats themselves.”

At this same meeting with the New York Time’s philosophy critic (which would prove to be Harry’s last interview with the media before his death---and there have been none after), Harry also revealed that he was working on a new approach to quantifying intelligence, based not on what a person knows, but on what they don’t know. He claimed this method would improve the self-esteem of citizens around the globe, saying, “It’s easy to determine what you know, you simply tell us. But there is no way to know, or even guess at what you DON’T know, because you don’t know that you don’t know it. I, for example, have no knowledge of nautical terms or their history, nor do I know if Africans use toilet paper. They may use some other method of which I’ve never even dreamed.”

Sadly, this new approach was never fully explained, and a careful studying of the papers Harry left behind (which included several works in progress) failed to reveal what he had been thinking in this new realm.

(There was discovered in his papers, however, some insight into the paradigm shift Harry had been predicting regarding the use of winking as a form of communication. It had been assumed for generations that winking did not provide the range of expression needed for it to replace language or writing, but when Harry expanded winking (which by definition means only one eye) to include BLINKING (which can be with both eyes) a whole new world opened up. Though it was in the early stages of development, Harry was convinced that this form of communication could close the global gap between citizens of the world. In a margin Harry had scribbled, “Even terrorists wink. Some day, we’ll all live in one big, happy world.” True to his commitment to preciseness, Harry then added, “although actually the size won’t change. We already live in a big world. And technically, it’s already ONE world.”)

Early in his development, Harry was both lauded and despised (often by the same people) for his tendency to simplify things, which he explained with this famous quote, “It is necessary that everyone from a child to a chicken understand the world in which they live, and when that understanding is being hampered by a confluence of inexactitude and confusion, it is the philosopher’s job to distill the information into bite-sized chunks, making it easier to digest, although I use the word “job” loosely because we don’t actually get paid.”

(One of Harry’s earliest biographers once speculated that Harry’s use of the words “chicken” and “bite-sized” in the same sentence was a subconscious reference to his love for chicken nuggets, a product he consumed on a weekly basis by the thousands. Harry thought the suggestion pure folly, going so far as to say publicly that “while I enjoy chicken nuggets as a snack, I don’t consider them a proper meal.” This put the debate to rest for a time, but the subject was revisited some years later when Harry claimed that he could “recall with precise detail each and every nugget I’d ever consumed. The size, the shape, the topography, the flavor, the crispness---you name it, I remember it.” But by then the biographer had been deported and was unable to be located for his reaction.)

Harry’s wife, Palmer, is a valuable source of insight into Harry’s thinking and his personal habits. It is she who told the world of his love for silence, and in doing so revealed a side of Harry Poachtree than none of us knew. When cassette tapes were first introduced, Harry would buy boxes and boxes of blank cassettes and play them at top volume, often handing her a note asking her to rate the silence of each tape. When CD’s were introduced he was ecstatic at the quality of the silence heard on blank CDs, often burning copies and sending them to friends as gifts. After his death, many of these blank CDs were sold on EBay for almost half their retail value.

Harry’s wife Palmer was also not shy in criticizing her husband while he was alive, and she has become more vocal after his death. (She was roundly criticized herself for announcing that “the time for mourning has ended and the time to seek new romance has begun” while helping to lower Harry’s casket into the ground.) But in regards to Harry’s work as a philosopher, many believe that Palmer was less than respectful, once saying to a reporter from TIME Magazine, “If Harry Poachtree is such a good philosopher, how come he still works at the post office?” The reporter tried to explain that Harry’s commitment to the common man and his devotion to “keeping it real” were what made Harry so well-loved (and that Harry also needed the benefits), but Palmer seized on the phrase “keeping it real” and spent the remainder of the interview asking the reporter if he was sure that he wasn’t from “Jet” magazine.

Harry rarely commented on his wife’s opinion of his work, except in 1986 when he told a Swedish newspaper that his wife and he “shared a different view of the world. She is more pragmatic than I am, although I can run faster than her, which, if pragmatism means something to you, is a pretty good thing to be good at. Running, that is.”

Harry’s children are also valuable assets in uncovering the real Harry Poachtree, particularly his daughter Miranda, who is herself an aspiring philosopher as well as an employee of the postal service. When first contacted by me in regards to this article, she agreed to be interviewed, with the caveat that the interview be conducted by means of winking. When I explained that I would need an audio tape of the interview for my archives should there ever arise a question of accuracy, she rescinded the stipulation and agreed to meet me at a local I-Hop on a Sunday, her only day off. “We deliver mail six days a week,” she told me on the phone. “You wanna talk about my father, you need to do it on a day when I ain’t been lugging around seventy-five pounds of bullshit from door-to-door while trying not to step in dog shit. Is dog shit one word or two?” she then asked.

I had heard rumors of her profane nature and so I was not surprised by her crassness, but I also didn’t know if dog shit was one word or two. I figured my candor would ingratiate me to her, maybe gain her trust or respect.

“I have no idea if dog shit is one word or two, but I’ll check with my editor and I’ll let you know,” I told her.

I was looking forward to our meeting at the I-Hop and hoped the magazine who commissioned me to write this piece would reimburse me for the expense. Little did I know how costly that meeting would turn out to be.

Chapter Two

I was apprehensive about my meeting at I-Hop with Harry Poachtree’s daughter, Miranda; not because I wasn’t prepared---I was---but because I’d read that breakfast food often makes her gassy. How this bit of private information come into my possession is difficult to admit, but in light of recent events I feel free to come clean.

I’d contacted a friend---a source, really---in the Bureau (the FBI), told him I’d be meeting with Poachtree’s daughter, and asked if he might have any background information I would find useful. Harry Poachtree had been investigated numerous times over the years by the FBI, beginning as early as 1971, when he was rumored to have been involved with a communist group responsible for bombing a U.S. military aircraft, a Navy Piper Cub being stored at a civilian airport. One of the bombers, a Hungarian who was arrested at the scene when the bomb exploded as he was positioning it in the aircraft (and who lost three fingers in the explosion), had in his possession an essay by Harry Poachtree that had been published weeks before in TIME Magazine.

The essay was entitled “The Changing Faces of the Soviet Union” and was a strange piece, in which Harry wrote only (and in great detail, almost clinical fashion) about the facial features of various Soviet leaders, including some very obscure members of the Politburo. The essay concluded with this memorable and dramatic passage about Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov, a former member of the Presidium:

“Molotov’s eyebrows meet in the very center of his face, an explosion of small eyebrow hairs, left fighting right for control of his nose. The tangled nest, like brown steel wool, seems so intertwined as to be the very nerve center of Molotov’s existence. And in the end, when the unibrow rages uncontrollably, nobody wins.”

The essay itself was a confused bit of writing; no one knew what Poachtree meant by the piece, and he, of course, refused to respond to the speculation. The editors of TIME were criticized for even publishing something so bizarre, and naturally both sides of nearly each social debate raging at the time, from the Vietnam War to Civil Rights, proclaimed that Poachtree’s essay was a euphemism meant to support their side. The editors of TIME responded to the furor by stating that “when an up and coming philosopher speaks, we shall let our readers decide what he means. We are not in the business of censoring, we are in the business of news.”

The FBI paid little attention to the piece itself when it was published, but when Molotov’s wife wrote a letter to the editors of TIME Magazine a few days after the essay’s publication saying that she had been married to Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov for forty-five years and had never before noticed about her husband’s face what Harry Poachtree so brilliantly described in his piece, the FBI became aroused. For Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov’s wife (who it was believed had gone into hiding in 1930 and was by then rumored to be dead) to respond so publicly to an essay that few people even understood was even more perplexing than the essay itself.

Understand that Soviet scholars and the international press had for decades been trying to locate Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov’s wife, named Valentinna, for various reasons. It was speculated that she’d had affairs with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, it was believed that she had pictures of Stalin naked, and the simple fact that a high-ranking member of the Soviet government seemed to have disappeared without an explanation or a trace was enough to keep alive for decades the fascination with finding her. Her letter to the editors of TIME Magazine had on it a return address written in her hand and TIME immediately dispatched a team of reporters to Moscow where they found Mrs. Valentinna Molotov, wife of Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov, very surprised to learn that she had been considered missing since 1930. She’d been living in the same apartment with her husband from 1925 to the present and claimed that she’d never been contacted by any member of the government or the press in regards to her whereabouts. The confusion was finally ended when it was realized she spells her first name with two “n”s. She issued a statement to the international press saying that she apologizes for the misunderstanding, but she never met Hitler or Goebbels and she never saw Stalin naked, nor has she been in hiding. She simply chose to write to the editors of TIME Magazine at this moment in time because she genuinely never noticed her husbands unibrow until Harry Poachtree wrote about it.

All of this was too much for the FBI to make sense of and so they asked Harry to come in for an interview. He issued a statement through his attorney saying that while he was a “proud American citizen, I will not be ratting out my Soviet brothers and sisters anytime soon.” This added more fuel to the rumor that Harry was a secret communist, but when the FBI spoke to the Postmaster General (Harry had been a mail carrier for three years by this time) and asked him to intervene, he did so, ordering Harry to meet with the FBI. Harry immediately agreed and issued a second statement saying that “I am not a communist by any means. I am a proud American and a dedicated U.S. Postal Worker. My loyalty begins with the US Flag and ends with the safe, reliable delivery of the U.S. Mail. When the Postmaster General calls me to duty, I shall be present.”

The FBI interviewed Harry for hours and then he was sent home. Harry’s attorney had the FBI issue a statement saying that Harry was not of interest to them, and the matter was forgotten. Why the Hungarian bomber had a copy of Harry’s essay was never discovered and if it was, the FBI kept that information to itself.

My friend in the Bureau faxed me a transcript of Harry’s interview with the FBI from 1971 (the transcript had been declassified and was available to the public as part of the Freedom of Information Act) and it was in this transcript that I read the odd comment by Harry to an FBI agent stating that, “Bombs frighten me. Any loud noise frightens me. My young daughter often frightens me during my quiet contemplation when she has some, uh, intestinal reactions, if you will. She gets gassy from breakfast food.”

I realized that Miranda was just a child when Harry made that confession, but I had no way of knowing if it was still true. Something told me I would find out sooner rather than later.


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2009 Blog: Poncho & The Love Machine

Here are the complete blogs... well, except for the final blog which I've yet to write. Readers who are blind can call me on the phone and I will read to them the blog. Readers who are deaf can call me and I will yell it.


Pre Blog One:

Titled: There is beauty in proficiency.

Well, once again the time draws near to my annual sojourn across the country. This time, for the first time in a decade on a cross-country trip, I will have a riding partner. A friend, a pal, a freakin’ nuisance who will no doubt annoy the living hell out of me by virtue of his simply being in my presence. Hey, what can I say? I’m a solitary dude.

My old friend Chip will be joining me on this journey, and like me, he requires his own alone-time. Hopefully, this means we will not kill each other by the time we reach the Ohio border. For if either of us were the type who didn’t know how to shut up, surely this trip would include a homicide (or at the very least, a “Uh, I’m gonna take a ride around town.. you check us in to the hotel. Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon.”).

I’m kidding, of course. We are very old friends and have done a GREAT deal of riding together, beginning when I was 19 (and Chip was… let’s see, about 35, back then? HA HA!).

The riding will of course not be a problem. We are both extremely experienced motorcyclists who can ride at any speed on an any road under any circumstances with our motorcycles inches from each other. In fact, we take great pride and receive great enjoyment from our precision riding.

Allow me to explain. Riding down the road like a couple of goofy weekend warriors, looking around, going slow, oblivious to the traffic, oblivious to the road (every road has its own personality), riding at the speed limit or below, is not our style of riding. No thanks, grand pop.

Not that we ride balls-to-the-wall all the time, but the slow, meandering, lazy style of riding is for squares, man. If you’re old-school, you have to push it. You have to be riding near the edge of your abilities, testing yourself, testing your relationship with your machine. Every curve is a challenge, the perfect lean, the perfect acceleration. Not that we think about it, necessarily, or focus too hard on it. It’s just part of who we are. And it’s fun!

Yes, we go slow sometimes and just cruise. But for us, going slow means ten over the speed limit.

As a young rider, after many miles of solo riding, and when your confidence in your abilities is secure, you turn it up a notch by riding in tandem with a friend. Not with him thirty feet behind you so he gets stuck at the traffic light while you make it through. Not with him fifteen feet behind you and riding in your blind spot so you can’t tell where he is. But right next to you. Now your lane is cut in half, your buddy is two feet from you, and you really have to stay sharp.

Everyone is a little tentative at first, but over time, over many miles, your trust in him and your confidence in yourself grows. A system emerges, not conscious and not deliberate, but born of necessity. You are not just watching your side of the lane for potholes or debris, you’re watching his side as well. You may have to back off and let him get on your side of the lane to keep him from slamming into a pothole or some gravel. Or you may speed up so he can duck in behind you for a moment. Or the guy on the left may swing out over the center line to let the guy on the right move to his left for a few seconds. And then they are quickly back in formation.

All of this happens without a word or a glance or a honk of the horn. You read the road, and you know each other’s riding style, and you both react in an instant. And it is beauty in motion, because the movements aren’t jerky or tentative, they are deliberate and smooth, as if it’s been rehearsed. And it is a beautiful thing in which to partake. There is satisfaction in proficiency.

I have traveled hundreds of miles in a day with a fellow motorcyclist and not said two words to each other. A point at the gas tank means stop for gas. A point at the stomach means I’m hungry. A point at the shoulder of the road means pull over. A wave of the hand forward means take the lead, a wave backward means get behind me. A rev of the engine means something. It may mean watch me, we have to turn off up ahead, or it may mean I think I saw a cop, slow down, or it may mean check your mirrors, I see a guy coming up fast behind us. All I do is rev the engine and my friend will figure out what I meant by it.

There are other rules of the road. Every so often I drop back and check the gear he has strapped to his bike, making sure nothing has shifted or come loose, and he does the same for me. Sometimes, if he’s worried about it, he’ll point to his gear and I know what he means. I’ll check it out and either give him a thumbs up or I’ll pass him, which he instantly knows means that I’m looking for a spot to pull over so he can check it himself. We keep an eye on each others bikes all the time, when we’re moving or when we’re parked.

Sometimes a flat palm waved downward means slow it down, we’re getting a little fast and I want to take it easy for a bit. It’s easy to get used to traveling at high speed, seventy-five or eighty, so much so that sometimes you slow down to, oh, sixty-five miles-per-hour, let’s say, and it feels like you’re hardly moving! We take turns keeping our speed in check.

It’s great fun to ride side-by-side on two-lane twisties, but when the curves are simply too tight to take side-by-side at the higher speeds, one of us drops back, we go through the curve at single file, and then we come out of it side-by-side again. Fuckin’ cool.

On the highway it’s even more fun. Leaving your lane to pass a car and getting back into your lane in perfect unison. Or splitting cars, one of us passing on the right, one of us passing on the left, and reuniting in the lane ahead of the car at the same time.

And we read the traffic the same way. We know when to pass and when not to pass. The key to side-by-side riding is to not get separated. If you guys get split up all the time, you don’t know how to ride in tandem. I don’t want to have to pull over as traffic whizzes by me because my idiot pal didn’t make the light and now we’re separated. Go through the lights together! Go through stop signs together! Pass together! I don’t want to leave my buddy stuck out in the left lane of the interstate as I get off at the next exit and he doesn’t know where I went! Or he has to risk life and limb to catch me! Or a there’s a big space between us and some idiot squeezes his car in there.

I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard of guys getting separated and not being able to find each other. Chip and I have traveled in packs of twelve or fifteen bikes or more and not a single one of us has gotten separated from the pack.

Of course, the other key to tandem riding is to not get each other killed! That’s why I don’t ride with people I don’t know, and I if I do, we ride single file. Me and Chip (and Ragnar, and Mountain Bill, and Youngblood, and Sporty Mike, etc.) can ride motorcycles in our sleep (and I think some of them have!). I feel safer with any one of those guys two feet from me at seventy miles an hour than I do with your asshole yuppie neighbor the accountant and his chromed out Harley fifty feet behind me at forty.

Another good thing about traveling with an old-school friend is knowing that he has your back. One might say, are you guys still in high school? Are you still exhibiting that grade-school, super-macho, extra-testosterone bullshit about who is the most bad-ass of the bad-asses?

That would be yes.

Sort of. We’re not trouble makers, and as long as one stays away from people consuming alcohol one can usually avoid trouble makers, but not always. Although we like fine restaurants and nice hotels, ours is still the world of the blue-collar worker, or the old-school biker, or the element of society to whom an occasional bar brawl is happened upon or the occasional traffic altercation may result in fisticuffs. When a couple of local shit-kickers arrogantly double-park their giant pickup truck, blocking in our bikes, for example, some motorcyclists would patiently wait for the shit-kickers to move the truck. I prefer to ask them with vigor to move that piece of shit. It’s nice to know that my homie won’t magically be in the restroom should they tell me to go fuck myself.

For years Chip has wondered at my apparent fearlessness to confront rude and ignorant people, regardless of how big and dumb they may appear. But what he doesn’t know is that my secret to confrontation is this: I have him! Chip studied martial arts for twenty years and can kick you in the head while standing nose to nose with you, or he can (and I have experienced this first hand) stand in front of you (while you are completely PREPARED and WIDE-EYED) and he will smack you upside your head while you fail to see which hand he used. Ouch. What just happened? I was smacked but yet I didn’t see his hands move. Hmmm.

So anyway, should the shit kick off, as they say, my plan is to fall to the ground, assume the fetal position, and after Chip has kicked their asses I will jump up and yell at the defeated miscreants, “You want some more of that?”

I’m nothing if not resourceful.

Oh, and I’m not worried about Chip reading my blog and discovering my secret, or for that matter the rude, distasteful and mocking things I plan on writing about him, because Chip does not like to read. I once asked him to read a 400 page manuscript I’d written, which he did somehow, and then said to me, “Next time, ask me to paint your house or help you move. That’s much preferable to reading.”

So because my traveling companion will not be reading the blog of OUR trip, I plan to grossly exaggerate my influence on our travels, to take full credit for any daring exploits in which he may be responsible, and to blame all mishaps and misadventures on him, portraying myself as the hero in all situations. I will get to smack him without his seeing it!

Ah, it’s good to have a scapegoat.


Pre Blog Two

All good trips deserve good titles. But rather than choose the title of our upcoming adventure, I will let the title choose us. As events unfold, I’m certain a theme shall emerge and from that, a title. Nicknames, however, are another matter entirely. Those should never be left to chance. Chip shall be known as Poncho and I shall be known as the Love Machine.

This is far from Poncho and the Love Machine’s first motorcycle trip together, but the last trip we took was to the coast of Nova Scotia in 1998, and then again to Nova Scotia in 1999. (Although we may have taken a trip to Atlanta shortly after that—I can’t recall if the Atlanta trip was before or after we went to Nova Scotia.) From 1999 until now I have been traveling alone while Poncho remained home with one of those terrible, horrible afflictions that men sometimes acquire, despite their best efforts to avoid being stricken. An affliction that prohibits them from a wide variety of entertaining enterprises, not the least of which is riding motorcycles around the country for weeks at a time. This affliction, and it pains me to type it, is commonly known as a wife.

I’m kidding, of course. Chip married a wonderful woman named Cindy who would have no doubt let him take as many trips as he wanted. But alas, it was Chip, the romantic at heart, who always wanted to stay home with his lovely bride. And who can blame him? Why visit the country side on your shiny machine when you can stay home and do lawn work or take the trash out? Kidding again. (It’s a good thing Cindy has a wonderful sense of humor... or it’s a good thing Chip told her to ignore every thing I say. Probably a little of both.)

So, considering I’ve taken many trips since Poncho and the Love Machine last ate up some asphalt, I’ve acquired a pretty good knowledge of our country’s roads, and although I tend to forget a great deal of things, I still recall enough to take Poncho on a guided-tour of some of the best scenic roads in the country. Poncho has kin in Vegas and he told them he would be there about nine days after we leave out from Philly. And what a nine days it shall be! It’s taken me many miles of trial and error, but I can get him to Vegas in about nine or ten days by traveling almost entirely on fantastic back-roads... no major cities, no interstates, and lots of great restaurants.

I have a wide variety of routes from which to choose, and as always, I shall let the weather decide. We may go across the top, the middle, or the bottom. Going across the bottom means hitting my beloved Naw Lins, and I don’t want to do that until the ride home because I’m somewhat concerned that Poncho may find his first visit to Naw Lins so intoxicating that he might not leave. For weeks. I would not blame him. Red beans and rice... voodoo shrimp... jambalaya... blackened chicken... blackened catfish... sweet mother of god Naw Lins is heaven on earth!

Going through the middle is my first choice. Back-roads through West Virginia, and then back-roads through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois (with a stop at The National Motorcycle Museum, in Anamosa, Iowa, a place I love). Then Sturgis, the Black Hills, ride the Bear Tooth into Yellowstone (stopping in Gardiner, Montana for the best prime rib I’ve ever had), and then down to Colorado, ride The Million Dollar Highway, then the amazing southern Utah, and then head to another place I love, The Glen Canyon Dam, in Page, Arizona. Then it’s off to the Grand Canyon, and finally Vegas. Nine days should be plenty, and depending on the type of mileage we do each day, we can add a few scenic detours along the way.

While Poncho stays with his family in Vegas for a few days, the Love Machine will stay in a hotel for the night and then probably keep riding, returning to Vegas when Poncho is ready to roll, or meeting him somewhere.

Poncho’s family graciously offered me a spare bedroom while I’m in Vegas but I never, ever, EVER stay with people when I travel. No way, no how! I get me a hotel room and put my feet right up on the bed. And I leave my dirty towels on the floor. And I spill things on the rug without concern. And I sleep late. And in the morning, there is no one standing over me offering my blueberry pancakes or wheat germ, and I don’t have to feel bad when I spit their food into my palm. And anyway, isn’t part of the fun of traveling staying in hotels?

Poncho, who started building motorcycles when he was a teen, and has been riding Harleys for thirty years, has, a mere two weeks ago, purchased his very first Jap bike... a Kawasaki Concours, in black. (Don’t ask me why there’s no letter “E” at the end of the word Concours, ask Kawasaki.)



This is his very first time riding a sport-touring bike on a trip(for those who don’t know, his new bike is more like a crotch-rocket than a cruiser like my Harley) and we both hope he likes it... or it’s going to be a LONG road trip. Either way, he is going to have to endure my constant references to how fast his bike is--it gets up to sixty miles an hour in second gear in about five seconds. My Harley can get to sixty miles an hour in second gear in five seconds, provided it’s in second gear when you drop it from an airplane.

Well, time to make out my will. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but each time one throws a legs over a motorcycle and hits the road, especially for ten or twelve thousand miles over three or four weeks, one is taking a risk. Not a huge risk, maybe not even a risk greater than driving my plumbing truck around Northeast Philly each day, but a risk none-the-less. I will leave everything to my nephew Matteo, and I will ask that my body be covered in barbecue sauce for the viewing.

And though I’m not a sentimental man, and one not prone to displays of emotion, I would like to say to the readers of my blog and the folks on Facebook that should I meet my demise on the highway, I have found most if not all of you to be annoying. Don’t let this stop you from saying nice things about me.

Pre Blog Three

Riding crop... check. Tennis ensemble, including cashmere sweater and white knee-high socks... check. Brocade smoking jacket and Meerschaum pipe... check. Extra Torah (to establish Jew-cred, if necessary)... check. (Notice I said “extra” Torah?)

Any one can pack, but there’s a real skill to OVER-packing. Trust me, friend, the road can be a strange place. You don’t want to get stuck out there on the highway without a shoe caddy or a salad spinner ( ... check!).

The bags are packed, the bike is loaded, and I’m ready to ride. The countdown begins. It sounds a little dramatic, I know. I’m not really counting down. In fact, I don’t even get excited to be leaving anymore. I’m relaxed, patient, free of stress. Instead, I’m doing what all long-distance motorcyclists do before, during, and after a trip. I’m studying my maps.

Ah, the Rand McNally FULL-SIZE map! Porn for travelers! The only one I use and the only one I recommend. It’s big, I know, but it’s worth it. It’s the same size as the laminated trucker’s atlas (with the spiral binding, the one that sells for a hundred bucks), but I buy the non-laminated version that’s stapled together and I replace it each year. It’s much easier to highlight the pages when they’re paper (and then save the maps for posterity, a document of where you went). The Rand McNally full-size map is the one with the BEST green-dot roads. Green-dot roads are the scenic routes, and you want to spend as much of your trip on green-dot roads as you can. They are never wrong. Oh, how I love a green-dot road.

Map-gazing is one of my favorite past-times, and an integral part of any successful trip. Gone are the days when I merely needed a map of the interstate highway system to complete my trip. Back then, I wanted to cover as much distance as possible in as short a time. Having only a week or two to get away means that if you spend all day, each day, on back-roads, you will be only two states away when it’s time to head back. Not that that isn’t a great time. But if you live in Philly and want to have red beans and rice, blackened catfish, jambalaya, and voodoo shrimp while sipping a Hurricane in the French Quarter and STILL make it back to work NEXT Monday, you got to take the interstates.

And twenty years ago, even ten or twelve years ago, the intestates were no where near as crowded as they are today or as dangerous. Truckers, too, back then, were a helpful, professional bunch of folks on whom you knew you could depend. They kept their rigs at a safe distance from you and were respectful. (Me, Rags, and Little Gary were once hauling ass up I-85 in the left lane, when a trucker, a good ways ahead of us, for no apparent reason, came into our lane. He was far enough ahead that he didn’t cut us off, but we caught up to him pretty quick and he did force us to slow down. We were wondering what the hell was wrong with him, and were about to twist the throttle and pass him on the right, when he put on his right turn signal and got back into the right lane. Just as he cleared out of the left lane, we saw there was a state trooper with a radar gun looking right at us, in a perfect hiding spot. That trucker saved us three speeding tickets with his careful and expert driving. Now-a-days, a trucker in the left lane for no apparent reason means that he’s on the cell phone, oblivious to everything around him.)

And the cars today or smoother and quieter inside and more reliable then they ever were, and the brakes are phenomenal. These factors mean that more people are driving and they’re driving more and they’re driving faster. Today’s cars at 80 MPH feel like they’re hardly moving, and that you can stop them so quickly has given people a false sense of confidence. The interstates have become a dangerous hell-zone of madness with absolutely no margin for error. As long as you don’t have to stop suddenly, and as long as you watch for lane-changers, you’ll survive--barely.

Tailgating accounts for about a quarter of the forty-thousand people killed each year on our highways, and is, in my opinion, a national epidemic. Slam on the brakes on an interstate to avoid a frontal collision and you are guaranteed to be run over from behind by a driver whose foot will be getting onto the brake pedal at just about the time his hood ornament is entering your rectum.

I can say without shame that for the last ten years, if I’m east of the Mississippi River, I am downright afraid of riding the interstates.

But now-a-days, after years of interstate travel, I am finally in love with traveling the back-roads. And for traveling the back-roads, one must have a good map.

One doesn’t simply LOOK at a map and find a route. One must study a map... read the names of the towns, follow the bends of the rivers, note the elevations, the forests, the confluence of the interstate highways. One begins to learn things about a place by reading a map. You get a sense of how crowded it might be, or how rural, or how much of the land is farm and how much is urban sprawl.

Long-distance motorcyclists don’t look at maps to find a way to get somewhere, we look at maps for pleasure. Not for a few minutes, but for hours. And eventually, we find our path.

Looking at a map, not sure where to go or how to get there, not sure if we even WANT to go there, will eventually get us somewhere. Patterns begin to emerge from the mish-mash of lines and shapes. A route appears where before there was just disjointed scribbles. Ah, if I take 48 to 53 to 16, I’ll bypass two towns and ride beside the river. Actually, if I take 23 up to 48 first, I can skip the part near the interstate and add about twenty miles of green-dots. Yea, that’s how I’ll go.

One can’t simply choose an idiotic route with twelve million stops and starts and turns and merges (although I have!). One wants a sensible route, easy to follow, easy to navigate, but with the best scenery and the least traffic.

Which brings me to GPS. Fuck GPS. I have personally observed many motorcyclists riding down the road with their eye glued to the GPS unit mounted on their handlebars. Not safe, and if you ask me, not fun. Instead of their head being in the trip, it seems to me their head is in the GPS. I talk with them at gas stops, and everything we talk about has to do with distance, and coordinates, and the freakin’ GPS. They don’t know the names of the towns, or the roads, they only know what the GPS told them to do.

That’s the beauty of studying a map. You become your own GPS. I know to turn right in one mile because I recall from the map that my turn was one mile past the river... and I just passed the river! Or I’m looking for US 50, which is just past local road 72 south, and I just passed 72 south.

By writing down your directions on a 3x5 card and taping it to your windshield, you become part of the directions. You HAVE to study your map over breakfast, and lunch, and dinner. You HAVE to look around the towns, and the intersections, and you HAVE to read every road sign and compare the information with what’s on your 3x5 card and what’s in your mind. With GPS, you need do nothing more than ride the bike, oblivious to town names, road names, route numbers, etc. One might argue that this frees you up for sight-seeing and thinking about things other than did I miss my turn? or is route 68 up ahead?, and I’m sure there’s truth to that. But the experienced long-distance motorcyclist can navigate a maze of back-roads in a new state, in the rain, at night, with little effort. It’s just part of who we are.



I call my directions GPS, too, for Good Plain Stationary. Here’s where we’re headed Friday. Lots of green dots.


Pre Blog Four

The brilliant Chinese philosophers said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And I say a journey of ten thousand miles begins with a Piper Burger. And so despite my diet and my consistent weight-loss (15 pounds gone in just three weeks of eating healthy!), I shall dine on a Piper burger in a few hours, after which Poncho and the Love Machine will rendezvous and begin our journey.

Thursday afternoon... a perfect day! Blue skies, bright sunshine, eighty degrees with a slight breeze blowing... we’re not leaving till six o’clock. Say what? Well, Poncho’s lovely bride Cindy took the day off from work to spend it with her man before we depart, so I imagine the two of them are seated on the couch, staring lovingly into each other’s eyes, saying things like, “I wub you, schnookems” and “I’ll think about you every single second of every single hour of every single day” or whatever the hell it is married people say to each other. Lord, I hope I never find out. (You can tell they’ve only been married for four years. In another few years, not only will Cindy NOT be taking the day off from work before we leave on a trip, she will be getting up early to pack his bags and fuel the bike and say things like, “time’s a wastin’... better get moving! Here’s some money for tolls.”

I am at home, pondering what it will be like to travel with someone after so many years of solo travel. I can say from past experience that Chip (Poncho) and I are pretty similar travelers. We generally ride at the same speeds and for the same distances. Many times over the years people have asked to join me on a trip, even a weekend trip, and I say politely, fuck off. No way I’m getting chained to some douche bag who rides slow as hell, stops every hour for a thirty minute break, gets separated from me in traffic, and wants to spend as much time on a bar stool as he does in the saddle.

That being said, Poncho and I have traveled enough together over the years for me to know that he’s no walk in the park either. I’m considering bringing a can of fluorescent orange spray paint and painting a line down the center of the hotel room, especially the bathroom. He’s not quite as bad as John Candy in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, but he’s close. I, on the other hand, I am quite neat and clean and like things in SOME order. I’m not fanatical, but I do like clean. Maybe I’m a little fanatical when it comes to clean.

I also have a very simple routine when I travel. It takes me three minutes to unpack my bag and set up my few toiletries. I can shower, shave, and be on the bed, watching the Weather Channel and writing my blog on my laptop within twenty minutes of checking in to my hotel for the night. It takes Poncho twenty minutes just to unpack the bike. (Although he claims to have streamlined his system. We shall see.)

One of the absolute rules of the road is to stay hydrated. At each gas stop I buy two bottles of water and make sure I’ve finished them by the next gas stop. Usually, I pull into the gas station, park the bike, buy two bottles of water, and then fuel up. When I’m solo, I’m in and out in about six or seven minutes. Maybe a few minutes longer if do some stretches or wander around a bit.

Poncho, however, is another story. It takes him six or seven minutes just to wander around the store, looking at this, looking at that, buying this, buying that. He usually exits the store fifteen minutes later with handfuls of candy, gum, mints, peanuts, beef jerky, power drinks, little bottles of caffeinated something or another, and who knows what else. He spends another fifteen minutes walking around the bike in circles trying to find some place to stash all this stuff so he can easily reach it as we’re riding down the road.

Eventually he gets his bike to the gas pump where he forgets where he put his credit card. Upon discovering the credit card, he fuels the bike, and then unpacks half of the bike to dig out his other shoes which will work better with the sweatshirt he’s decided to wear instead of his jacket. By this time, I’m seated on my bike by the exit of the gas station and watching all of this in my rearview mirror. And I know we’re not done yet.

Next he will realize it’s too hot for the sweatshirt. It was a little chilly when we pulled into the gas station, so wearing the sweatshirt seemed like a good idea. But now that three hours has passed and the sun is high, it’s too warm for the sweatshirt. So he will again unpack half the bike, remove his light-weight sweatshirt, and possibly change his shoes.

Once he is attired to his satisfaction, he will sit on the bike in preparation of departure and then recall the candy, gum, mints, peanuts, beef jerky, power drinks, and the little bottles of caffeinated something or another that he bought (an hour ago) and he will attempt to open one of them and eat it before leaving. Naturally, the plastic wrapper will be too much for him to tear open with his gloves on, but rather than remove the gloves, he will dismount the bike and remove from his saddlebag one of the seventeen razor-sharp knives he carries at all times, and he will slice open the package, sending at least half of the contents onto his lap and his motor, where they will be cooked black on his exhaust pipes.

He will circle the bike a few more times, storing stuff here and there and making minor adjustments, and then we will depart. For the next ten miles he will continue to lag behind me as he consumes his candy, gum, mints, peanuts, beef jerky, power drinks, and little bottles of caffeinated something or another as we are moving. He will occasionally pull up right next to me, even at high speed, and hold out a package of something, offering me some. I usually take the entire package and throw it into the river. I always expect he will get mad at me, but when I look over at him he is already consuming something else and has evidently forgotten about the candy, gum, mints, peanuts, beef jerky, power drinks, or little bottles of caffeinated something or another that he had just passed to me and is now miles behind us.

Sharing hotels rooms, as I recall, wasn’t much more organized. Poncho seems to travel with a great many things that have need of being suspended. I don’t carry anything that needs to be suspended, unless something gets wet, but Poncho manages to hang things all over the hotel room. And somehow piles of stuff will appear that I don’t recall having seen before, and may not see again on the entire trip. Big, bulky clothes appear here and there, and I can’t imagine where he stores that stuff or when he plans to wear it.

He is, of course, a good friend and so I rarely get frustrated or annoyed with him, and not just because I have a slight suspicion that I have my OWN annoying travel habits and peccadilloes that he could describe, although I’m quite sure he wouldn’t use the word peccadilloes. It’s good to be tolerant of your friends, and that is why I have so few friends.

On the upside, Poncho, like me, likes good food and clean hotels and doesn’t mind spending an extra couple of bucks for this indulgence. When we were young, and broke, we found the CHEAPEST hotel and the ate at the CRAPPIEST restaurants. I’m not sure that back then we even knew the difference. We shopped by price and couldn’t imagine paying even an extra five dollars for one hotel room over another. Pay more money for a room with a bed? No thanks. Eat at someplace other than a diner? Why? Now-a-days we’re aware there really is a such thing as a fifty dollar steak and that it’s usually worth every penny of that fifty dollars. Back then fifty dollars would last three days on the road.

Which brings me to my next point. Every time I blog I get emails from folks asking me how I can afford to spend a month on the road. Although it’s true that if you combine Donald Trump’s net worth with mine it’s in the billions, most of that amount comes from him. The simple answer is this: For one thing, I don’t own a car, which saves me a lot of money. I own two motorcycles and my plumbing truck, which I, of course, use for work and which is paid for by my business. Secondly, the trip only costs about four or five grand... TOPS. I have a small apartment and my only hobbies are traveling and writing and playing the piano, so it’s not hard to work all year and save up five grand.

When I travel solo, I get 30 nights of hotels rooms that average 80 bucks a night, and because I stay at just one chain (Best Westerns for the last few trips) I usually get a free night. So 29 nights at 80 bucks a night adds up to less than 2500 bucks. Fuel cost has obviously skyrocketed over the last five years, but even last summer, when I spent 30 days riding the country while gas was four bucks a gallon, I only spent 1100 bucks on gas. An insane sum for a motorcycle trip, I know. But not unmanageable. (When I started traveling by motorcycle, I recall that I would average twenty dollars a day in gas cost! This was for an entire day of riding!)

Food costs aren’t that great, excepting the occasional fine dining experience. Breakfast, lunch and dinner can often be less than 40 bucks a day (take that, Rachel Ray!), and often only 20 bucks a day. And the only other things I buy on the road are some t-shirts or small gifts for folks back home. Of course, I usually wear out two tires on a trip and have to have them replaced, along with routine bike maintenance, which can be expensive now-a-days. But total expenses on these trips are never more than five grand. Unless I stop at a casino. Which I only do to be polite.

By living simply and traveling simply, it’s quite easy to afford to travel.

Oh yea, and the OTHER reason I can afford to travel is that I don’t have one of those things that burns money for you... a girlfriend. It’s not the flowers and the dinners that bother me, it’s the shoes, and the wardrobe, the grooming, and who the hells knows whatever else women require of you.

Imaginary girlfriend: “You can’t wear that shirt to my uncle’s barbecue. You have to buy a new shirt. You were wearing that same shirt last time we saw my uncle. I don’t want him to think you have only one shirt.”

Me: “So, if he thinks I have TWO shirts he’ll be impressed?”

Imaginary girlfriend: “It’s a nice shirt, but your boots are so out of style that they don’t match the shirt.”

Me: “Boots have to match a shirt? So I need new boots, but then I’ll still need a new shirt because your uncle already saw me wearing this one. Is that right?”

Imaginary girlfriend: “Why don’t we go shopping? It’ll be fun!”

Me: “Shopping? Wait a second, now. What happens if your uncle sees me in my second shirt and thinks I’m being a show-off. He might ask of you, ‘Who does your new boyfriend think he is, wearing a different shirt every time I see him? What is he, a Vanderbilt?’”

Imaginary girlfriend: “Well, we have to stop and buy something to bring to his barbecue, anyway. Maybe a fruit basket.”

Me: “We do? Why do we have to bring food to a barbecue? It’s HIS barbecue. Don’t you think he has food there? Should we bring food to a restaurant?”


See? I like being single. I can wear the same five shirts over and over again, sometimes the same shirt three days in a row. Not to mention that I’m aware one doesn’t bring a fruit basket to a barbecue, but I’ll be damned if I can think of what one actually does bring.

But I know what to bring on a motorcycle trip! And it’s brung! Look at the clock, y’all... it’s time to powder my balls and hit the road!


Blog One

This may be the most boring blog I’ve ever written. I, who can usually elaborate almost any minor occurrence into a full-blown adventure, has nothing to report. Zip.

Poncho and the Love Machine dined at the Piper, and after a warm and wonderful send-off by the lovely Alexis, Dottie, and Donna, we rode the PA Turnpike out to I-70, and took that down to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, where we now sit comfortably ensconced for the night in our Best Western.

It was a great ride, although the last two hours was in darkness. Poncho has never been around these parts and I’m glad we rode in at night. He is going to be in for a real surprise when we ride out tomorrow morning. This part of West Virginia is fantastic. Lush forest and rolling hills. We will jump on I-68, which is one of the best and most scenic interstates in the country, and take that to 219 south to 50 west. Tomorrow we will be on almost all green dot roads through Maryland, West Virginia, and then green dots roads all the way through Ohio, up to Mansfield, Ohio, our destination for tomorrow night.

It occurs to me that while this may be the most boring blog I’ve ever written, I can assure you it is not the most boring blog I’ve ever read. Good lord! I know that not everyone has a way with words, but do you really have to tell us exactly what you had for breakfast? Let be more specific. If you’ve had human brains for breakfast, we wanna hear about it. If you’ve had the intestines of a baby sperm whale, feel free to share the details. But if you’ve had a Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast with extra bacon and pancakes with blueberry syrup which was a little too sweet, do us a favor and spare us the details.

Blog Two


Far be it from me to offer advice on any subject other than plumbing or perhaps neurosurgery (advice on both subjects is the same: hire a professional) but I think this evening I discovered a piece of advice that others might find useful. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you have put on a few pounds (tell-tale warnings signs: people refer to you as “stocky”; single chicks with cats pursue you with vigor; and when your pager goes off people think you’re backing up) and after several years of being, well, stocky, you decide it’s time to eat healthy and lose a few pounds. Fifteen pounds, to be exact.

And then, after you’ve lost fifteen pounds, you set out on a cross-country motorcycle trip and spend eleven hours riding spectacular back-roads and when you arrive at your hotel for the evening—-any hotel will work, for the purpose of this example we’ll assume it’s the Best Western in Mansfield, Ohio-—you do something you’ve done many times over many trips and many hotel rooms... you put on your bathing suit and take a dip in the hotel pool.

But the knot in the string that holds the bathing suit in place was tied prior to your losing the fifteen pounds, and has never been untied. Cannot, in fact, be untied. And so despite the enormous NO DIVING signs, you dive into the hotel swimming pool with the knot in the string that holds the bathing suit in place having been tied some years before the weight-loss, and.. well, let’s just say there was a full moon in Mansfield, Ohio tonight.

And so my advice to you? Swim naked.

(The fact that Poncho and the Love Machine are covered in scary-looking tattoos is usually enough to clear out the swimming pool—-Come on, kids, let’s go back to the room and leave the Satan-worshippers alone to swim—-but the baring of one very white ass virtually guaranteed it.)

We left the Best Western in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia at nine AM or so, but before doing so I listened to woman in the breakfast room conduct an insanely loud conversation on her cell phone while she scarfed down some free calories at the complimentary continental breakfast, while Poncho was outside dealing with the Harley knuckleheads. (I made a point of loudly, VERY loudly, shuffling the metal knives in their container until she got the hint, and although I’m aware this might be considered passive-aggressive behavior, I can assure you it’s a wiser move than aggressive behavior. Am I the only person left in America who thinks cell phones are not be used loudly in public places?)

Poncho was outside loading his bike and listening to some Harley guys a few parking spaces away discussing his new Jap bike. He couldn’t make out much of what they were saying, but he did hear one guy loudly say that he’s ridden every type of bike there is. That is exactly the type of thing bonehead Harley guys like to say, somehow believing that others will be impressed by it. Poncho dislikes idiot “bikers” as much if not MORE than I do, and although these guys weren’t yuppies, they were still dopey enough to be annoying.

On the way out of town we stopped at a convenience store, where the reality of what being in West Virginia was all about was made clear to Poncho. On display were the accoutrements of hill-billy country (although I’m quite sure the word accoutrement was never spoken this far below the Mason-Dixon line): toothless; camo t-shirt; CAT baseball cap; eight-hundred NASCAR stickers on the rear window of the piece-of-shit van that belches blue smoke; sucking on a Big Gulp filled with more Mountain Dew than my motorcycle tank holds fuel; three-day razor stubble surrounding a moustache stained the color of chew; and a mullet that would embarrass a guy who loves mullets---and that was just the women.

A guy who looked like he just crawled out of the drunk tank after a three-day bender told me I had a nice bike. I thanked him, relieved that he didn’t offer to sell me some tools. Guys who look like him back in Philly are always offering to sell me some used contractors tools, tools that he no-doubt stole from the contractors truck within the last few hours. I never buy them, by the way.

We got on I68 west-bound and about five minutes later Poncho couldn’t get the grin off his face. I assure him that he ain’t seen nothing yet. The weather is perfect, and as far as the eye can see are enormous rolling hills covered with green and brown vegetation. There are streams, and pastures, and farmhouses, and log cabins, and moo cows, and the other assorted rural scenery that city guys like us love. We’re actually in Maryland, but Poncho isn’t big on geography, so I let him go on thinking we’re still in West Virginia. I could tell him we’re in Vermont and he wouldn’t know the difference. And why should he care, anyway? I’m doing the navigating, what’s the difference what state we’re in? (By the way, I do have big plans to tell him the incorrect names of the states in which we travel. This has been a practical joke long in the making, and should any readers of the blog meet Poncho, please do not tell him that there is no West Dakota. As far as he knows, we will be stopping there Wednesday or Thursday.)

We stop at scenic overlook, and along the guardrail that’s been installed to keep the moronic tourist from overlooking the edge and plummeting to his death, I see that someone has glued (in two foot increments) little cards advising people to accept Jesus, and to stop fornicating, and to stop taking the lord’s name in vain, and to stop all sorts of other stuff (much of which sounds like great fun) and it occurs to me that while Jesus may frown upon fornicating and using his name in vain, he is evidently ok with vandalism and destruction of public property and forcing your religious views onto others. I want to glue in alternating increments cards that read: FUCK. CURSE. CURSE WHILE YOU’RE FUCKING. and JERK OFF AND PICTURE A NUN.

We exit I-68 and get on an other road I love, Route 219. In the lovely town of Accident, Maryland, we stop for some lunch/breakfast at a little mom & pop restaurant. Inside, we spot a creature so foreign to where we live back in Philly that at first Poncho does not recognize it. He stares, he studies, he finally asks me what it is but I refuse to tell him. He attempts to look it up in the encyclopedia on his phone, but the encyclopedia on his phone only carries information dating back to the crustacean period, and this strange creature evidently went extinct at an earlier date than that. He vaguely recalls from his childhood tales of such a creature, and having been born and raised in the Philadelphia area, he was never really sure that such a creature ever actually existed, having never encountered one in person. Finally, after his puzzlement is no longer amusing, I explain to him what the strange creature standing before us is called. For I am a seasoned traveler, and I know that once we leave our hometown we will see that this creature not only existed, but still exists... a friendly waitress. Amazing!

Poncho orders breakfast and asks the friendly waitress if the home fries are good. She assures him the home fries are excellent, but a few moments later when she brings him his plate of food it is noticeably absent any home fries.

“I thought you said the home fries are good?” he asks her.

“They are excellent,” she says.

“But you didn’t bring me any?” he says.

“You didn’t ask for any,” she replies, and we find this hilarious.

Poncho tells her that in Philly we don’t have to ask, and she replies (with the best line of the trip so far): “Why? Are they mind readers in Philly?” And so he further explains that breakfast just COMES with home fries, one doesn’t have to ask.

Back on the road, we take two-lane twisties through Maryland, West Virginia, and all the way up to Mansfield, Ohio. These back-roads are fantastic. Scenic routes almost the entire way. A few small towns here and there, but mostly just countryside and sharp curves for hundreds of miles. While stopped at a traffic light, I hear a clanging sound and look over to see a part fall from Poncho’s bike. I reach down and pick it up, hand it to him, and say, it looks like the bracket that holds some cables in place, probably not a big deal. He wisely replies that it’s an awful big bolt to just hold some cables in place, and we pull over to check it out. Turns out it’s the bolt that holds the top triple tree tight around the fork. A rather important bolt at that. (For those who don’t know what a triple tree or a fork is, let’s just say that you don’t want those two items to become unattached while you’re moving... or you’ll probably crash.)

Needless to say, I made sure to make the experience of putting that bolt back in place as painful as possible for god old Poncho and his bran new Jap bike. Reminding him numerous times of his reply when I inquired before the trip if his bike comes with free road service. His reply to that question: “It’s not gonna break down.”

Tomorrow: the rest of Ohio, Indiana, and half of Illinois.



A bathroom break without the bathroom!


Blog Three

Another spectacular day of riding back-roads, and Poncho added two new states to his lifetime record, Indiana and Illinois. Although I was up until 2:30 in the morning writing my blog last night, I was nonetheless awake and on the road by nine AM. You might think that this astoundingly early wake-up was a result of Poncho’s noisy morning routine, and you would be right. He evidently had a cup of coffee around 7 AM, and by 7:30 AM he was a like a meth addict who just took a line of crank, drank a can of Jolt, ate a candy bar, swallowed a handful of NO-DOZE, did a shot of espresso, and sprinkled some amphetamines on his Frosted Flakes---with EXTRA sugar.

He was remarkably quiet in leaving and entering the room, and even in taking a shower. None of this disturbed my sleep in any way. But when he began to pack the 875 plastic bags he carries, the crinkling, snapping, stretching, zipping, and swooshing noises woke me up. He was apologetic, and assured me he’d be done in a minute and then he’d leave and go ride around town on his bike while I went back to sleep. I was, for some unknown reason, actually feeling pretty good despite the mere five hours of sleep I had, and so I made the mistake of asking him if it was raining out, which was like pulling the string on a Chatty Cathy doll.

Noit’sactuallyniceandsunny...butifitrainsIhaveathingImadeformybag...andI’llshowyoulater...andthenalsoIwasthinking...

So we rolled out of Mansfield, Ohio, at around nine AM. We stopped for gas twenty minutes later, where I chatted up the young girl working behind the counter. She was incredibly pretty and incredibly friendly, and I was surprised and a little sad to learn she is 27 years old, divorced, has three kids, and works three jobs. Once again I learn how different are other people’s lives from mine. I couldn’t imagine being in her shoes.

We hit the back-roads where Poncho marveled at the massive fields and the massive farm equipment that we passed. After an hour or two we stopped at a little road-side hotdog stand, where the hotdog I was given was the color of a cadaver. It was hideous, and after one bite I spit it out and tossed it in the trash. Poncho took the fried bologna sandwich he was given, took one look at it, and threw it in the trash without even taking a bite. Who in the world would eat a hot dog the color of monkey dick?

At the next town we found a little coffee shop and had some excellent sandwiches and coffee. Poncho was again startled at how friendly people are once you get away from the big cities. Where we come from, if you enter a store and the clerk even looks up at you you’re in luck. And if another customer looks up and asks how you are, your first reaction is to reply. “What the fuck is it your business how I am? Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it. Get lost.”

But out here in farm country, everybody says hello to everybody. It’s a little unnerving at first, and Poncho is going to have to get used to it. Cause it gets worse.

After the coffee shop, we rode more awesome back-roads, with plenty of stops for water. Believe it or not, I think the most important rule for long-distance motorcycle riding is to stay hydrated. Poncho could not believe how much water I was drinking yesterday, two quarts or more between every gas stop—-but today he was right there with me. Cramps, headaches, muscle pain, joint pain, can all occur when riding a motorcycle in the hot sun all day with not enough water intake. In the hot sun your body sweats out moisture constantly, but with the wind as you ride just as constant, the sweat is evaporated before you’re aware of it. Some readers may recall from previous blogs my visits to the Emergency Room on two different road trips to find out from where my stomach pain was coming, and both times it was the result of my forgetting to drink enough water. Although I suppose one could argue it was the result of my being an idiot.

At one of these frequent water stops, we were at a tiny convenience store/gas station where they had a glass case filled with hot fried chicken, potato wedges, fried corn fritters, corn dogs, and other mainstays of mid-western rural fast food. This type of thing is never seen back where we live, and I can’t tell you how many times while traveling I’ve had lunch AND dinner (on the same day) at a place like this. Understand that Poncho and the Love Machine are very picky eaters and will only dine at very clean, very good places. We don’t eat at truck stops, we don’t eat at convenience stores, we don’t eat at most chains (like Crapplebees or Fridays or the like---although some chains are good) and we don’t usually eat food from a glass case at a gas station.

But Poncho is no fool, and he took one look at that fried chicken and said, “Ya, know, that looks pretty good.”

“Hell yea, it’s good!” I told him, “I guarantee it!” But by then I had my nose pressed against the glass and was starting to salivate.

And so we sat at one of the two booths, amidst the shelves of canned Spam and cleaning supplies and pet food, and had that fantastic mid-western-rural-gas station-fried chicken that is better than any fried chicken we can get back home (if we can even find friend chicken back home) and that cost us about four bucks each.

An hour or so later we passed the “Cats of Indiana” wild animal sanctuary and stopped for a quick look-see. I really hate zoos, I think they’re cruel and sick and I won’t support them, and I feel the same way about these bullshit “sanctuaries” that “save” these animals from being released into the wild where (due to human interaction) the animals are no longer capable of surviving. I see. So a four-hundred pound tiger was abandoned by its idiotic owner who tried to domesticate it, and now that it can’t survive in the wild, you think the humane thing is to house it in a twenty-foot by twenty-foot cage with a truck tire as a toy. I think you’re selfish and twisted. I think the humane thing to do is to find the funding to house them properly.

If you’re going to provide shelter for an animal that cannot survive on its own, for whatever reason, I believe you have an absolute obligation to make that animal’s artificial habitat as close to its natural habitat as possible. If you’re going to do something nice, do it right.

Naturally, we didn’t pay to visit the sanctuary (our dollars would not be going to help the animals acquire better treatment, our dollars would just go to fund their poor treatment) but I did take pictures from the parking lot.



A short time later we saw dark skies ahead and pulled over to put on our rain gear. Two minutes after we suited up and were back on the road we hit torrential rain. Thirty minutes later it was sunny and clear and we had an awesome ride to our hotel in Normal, Illinois, where we arrived warm and dry.

We have ridden a little over a thousand miles since we left home, and I’m happy to report that Poncho loves his new motorcycle. He believes he can complete the trip without too much discomfort, which is a relief. The bike is INSANELY fast and agile, and it is effortless to operate. That goes a long way towards reducing fatigue. The seating position and/or the seat is not the best for really long days, but if we keep it between four and five hundred miles a day he expects it to be no problem.

I normally ride closer to five hundred miles a day when I’m solo, but we’re having so much fun at rest stops that it’s taking us all day just to do four hundred miles. I think I’ll start planning on four hundred mile days so we can keep having fun and not feel the pressure to get moving.

We are indeed having a blast. Poncho has dreamed of riding around the country on a motorcycle for just about all his life, and for me, the best part of the trip is seeing that his journey includes only the best roads and the best scenery and that the trip is as smooth as pie. It’s great to see him discover the things about our country that one discovers while motorcycling through it... and we haven’t even crossed the Mississippi yet.

Tomorrow, Cherokee, Iowa, with a stop (I hope) at the National Motorcycle Museum in Anamosa, Iowa.

Oh, and Poncho gets to ride 65 miles-an-hour for maybe thirty minutes at a stretch... past a single corn field. Then a house. Then another thirty minutes at 65 miles-an-hour past a cornfield. Then another house. I love Iowa.





Notice that Poncho has passed the Love Machine at a highly irresponsible speed, while the Love Machine had slowed to a prudent 70 MPH to snap some pictures.


Blog Four

I consider myself to be an expert on Native American culture, so it was with some degree of confidence that I surmised the name of the town in which we’d be staying tonight was somehow connected to Native Americans. The hotel clerk, a friendly woman who I’ll wager seventy-five dollars and a Sonic Care electric toothbrush has a fear of dentists, confirmed my hunch. Cherokee, Iowa, was indeed named after some bit of Native American history, although further details were not in her possession. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We left Normal, Illinois, by ten AM local time and hit the interstate for a few hours to the Iowa border. I happen to love riding the interstates in this part of the country. The scenery is the same as the back-roads, and you make great time while riding at high speed without fear of a local yokel and his radar gun sending you on your way a hundred dollars poorer. While cruising at about seventy MPH, a guy in a car behind us jumped out in the left lane to pass us. He stayed next to us for ten minutes, inching his way past, and when he finally got about two car lengths ahead of us, he pulls back into the right lane---no turn signal---and slows down. What the fuck? Now the two motorcycles are traveling at seventy miles-per-hour two car-lengths from the car in front of us---and we’re the only three vehicles for a mile. Naturally, we twisted the throttle and passed his dumb ass.

Crossing the Mississippi River as we went from Illinois into Iowa was a great treat for Poncho, and the Love Machine must admit he too gets a thrill every time he sees the Mighty Miss.

We stopped at a restaurant which had a deck overlooking the river. How can you not dig having lunch on the banks of the mighty Mississippi?



We watched the boaters come and go, docking their boats, wandering around in their Crocs and tank tops, a can of beer in one hand and a menthol cigarette in the other. The women were brown and leathery, with bleached blonde hair, and they dressed for water sports AND waterside dining. A bikini would be visible under the sheer white sheet-type garment (a sarong?) that they’ve wrapped around their bottom half (in order to meet the dress code of the restaurant), and I could never ascertain what kept the sheet-type garment from coming loose and exposing the thighs which jiggled and shook with each step. It appeared that the sheet had a hidden snap which could be unsnapped and the sheet removed at any second should a game of volley ball spontaneously erupt. The men appeared pathologically relaxed, like medicated Frat boys. The mere presence of water and a boat meant that life couldn’t possibly get any better. Both the men and the women displayed a variety of tattoos so unimaginative that they could have been applied at a Wal-Mart tattoo kiosk if such a thing existed. The men sported thin but very tan arms adorned with, say, a four-leaf clover, or a Green Bay Giants logo, or a barbed wire wrap-around, or a small Leprechaun holding a mug of beer; and the women had rainbows and butterflies and tramp stamps and angels with the names of their children above them. Sadly, the food at the restaurant was lame.

We hauled ass for about two hours on Iowa back-roads, following the mighty Miss for a while, and ended up in Anamosa, Iowa, home of the National Motorcycle Museum. Poncho had no idea we were stopping there and he was delighted. I love that place, and although I’ve been to many motorcycle museums all over the country, this one is my favorite. (And not just because it has the only remaining Captain America bike and an exact Billy the Kid replica (from the film “Easy Rider”)---although that would be a good reason.)







We left there and headed west on Iowa route 3, passing the farm where I once stopped to pet the cows and was rebuffed by those bovine ingrates. Sure, take the grass from my left hand but recoil when I try to get a pet on your noggin with my right. Eat more chicken, my ass.

Poncho was loving the massive farmland and massive farm equipment, as well as the rolling hills and beautiful blue skies, and he told me that Iowa was his favorite state so far. Most of Iowa route 3 is a smooth, curvy, hilly, two-lane cut right through the massive Iowa farmland. It’s hard to keep your speed down on a great road like this, and most of the time we were running 75 MPH in the 55 MPH zones. We pulled over to take a whiz, and two seconds later a sheriff who’d been headed eastbound flips a U-turn and pulls up behind us to see if we’re ok. Damn straight we’re ok... thirty seconds earlier you would have been pulling us over to issue some citations.

We got to shooting the breeze with him for a while, and he told us to keep our speed down, saying “We’re running a special program this weekend to crack down on traffic law violators.” After he left, Poncho asked me who he means by “we”? “Him and the governor?” Poncho asked. “He’s the first cop we’ve seen in three hundred miles.”

We stopped at a real Mom and Pop place for dinner and chatted with two older couples who were riding three-wheeled Gold Wings. While discussing rides we’ve taken and bikes we’ve owned, one of the old-timers mentioned in passing that his son had been killed in a motorcycle accident. Amazing that the old man still rides.

The food was excellent, as one would expect in the middle of Iowa, and one exchange Poncho had with the waitress was hilarious.

Poncho: “May I have ginger ale?”
Waitress: “We don’t serve alcohol.”
Poncho: “I don’t want alcohol. I just want ginger ale.”
Waitress: “Yea, but most people mix ginger ale with alcohol, and we don’t serve alcohol.”

We laughed our asses off, but it made perfect sense to her.

We also had a good time passing a pack of about thirty-five slow-moving, sloppy-riding, embarrassing-looking Harley-riding fools. The pack was spread so far apart, and the riders were so amateurish-looking and clueless, that they were a danger to themselves and probably us. They had no idea how to ride in formation, and cars getting on and off the highway were in and out of the pack. We threaded our way through a few of the boneheads in the left lane, and passed the lot of them at about ninety MPH. One slow-moving amateur had on the back of his shirt in huge letters WIDE FREAKING OPEN, and if I wouldn’t have passed him in a blur I would have liked to have asked him, What is wide freakin’ open? Your wallet? Did you really spend 20 grand for a 96 cubic inch bike to ride it at exactly 55 MPH in a 55 zone on a perfectly beautiful day? Bro.

We arrived in Cherokee, Iowa, tired, but we had a great day. Several times we got to laughing so hard at something stupid that we nearly couldn’t ride our bikes. Poncho achieved his first 500 mile day, and though he wasn’t sure he could do it again tomorrow, I knew he could. And just to make sure, I booked us a room 500 miles away for tomorrow night. Tomorrow... the Badlands.



Blog Five



I know that I’ve proclaimed myself to be an extremely picky eater, choosing to dine at only the best and cleanest restaurants and refusing to visit (you can’t really call it “eat”) at most of the big chain restaurants, but alas I must confess that this self-image is tossed in the garbage (literally) each morning as I line up with the other slobs to greedily scarf down the free calories at the complimentary hotel breakfast. This garbage is a step below hospital food, and two steps below prison food. Inmates from the kitchen smuggle sandwiches that have been concealed under their testicles that is of a higher quality than can be found at a Best Western. Powdered eggs... Synthetic bacon... English muffins that cost ten cents each... black water with a hint of coffee... I wolf it all down like a homeless man.

And the worst part is the filthy, dirty, nasty-ass hotel patrons who stumble out of bed and walk like zombies to the breakfast room, still in their slippers (nasty-ass toes hanging out) without brushing their teeth, without combing their hair, and without even washing their freakin’ face. The pillow indentations still visible in their cheeks as they jostle and grumble to get at the “food” that a starving, mangy dog who hasn’t eaten in days is liable to say... no, I’m good, thanks. And although I wash my face and brush my teeth before leaving the room, I stand right there with them.

We left Cherokee, Iowa, this morning (Monday) under brilliant blue skies and warm temperatures. We rode about 150 miles on scenic roads and couldn’t get the smiles off our faces. As Poncho is learning, those first fours of each day, when you wake up, eat, fuel up, and ride your bike through a state not your own, makes the last four hours of the day (when you’re tired and sometimes wet or cold) well-worth it. Those first few hours on the bike are awesome.

But soon after we entered South Dakota we hit a strong cross-wind. In this part of the country, strong winds are the norm. They may keep you leaning over at a 45 degree angle for 60 miles and then shut-off, or they may last all day. Strong winds don’t bother me a bit, and I don’t know if it’s because of the big fairing on my bike, or that my bike weighs nine hundred pounds, and over, eh-hem, a thousand with me and my gear on it. But when we stopped for lunch Poncho said the wind was tossing him all over the road and practically knocking him off his bike. He was hating it.

The route I planned to our hotel was clean across South Dakota on state route 44, but we were paralleling Interstate 90, and so he suggested he take the interstate for the last three hundred miles, thinking that even if it wasn’t less windy, he could at least cruise at 80 MPH (the speed limit on the interstate is 75) and get to the hotel at least an hour or two sooner than he would if he stayed on the back-roads. I gave him some directions, and suggested he take the interstate to a point 70 miles before our hotel, and then exit the interstate and rejoin the back-road through the Badlands State Park and take that to our hotel. If it was really bad he could stay on the highway, but it would suck to not ride through the Badlands.

We split up, and ten minutes down the road I hit an eighteen-mile stretch of road construction, and had to ride atop loose gravel and deep grooves for twenty minutes while I imagined Poncho cruising at a comfortable 80 MPH on the smooth highway. That bastard.

Half an hour later, I was riding closer and closer to black storm clouds and knew I was going to get pummeled. At the front edge of the storm I stopped to put on my rain gear and take some pics. I could see sunny skies about 30 miles to the north, and so now I imagined Poncho cruising at a comfortable and DRY 80 MPH on the smooth highway. That bastard.





Two minutes after I suited up I was riding through a tsunami, but boy was it fun! Riding in the rain is part of the deal, folks, I’m long past getting upset about it. In fact, with the gear available today, it’s possible to ride through torrential downpours for hours and hours and remain warm and dry. I feel like a spaceman in my full face helmet and rain suit. And despite what people think, there is very little additional danger in riding in heavy rain. The tires still grab, you can still slam on the brakes, you can take sharp curves, and you can ride at the speed limit. There are some considerations one must take (slick intersections, decreased visibility, and hydroplaning) but generally-speaking, riding in the rain is no big deal.

Typical of South Dakota, after ten minutes of riding through a wall of water I was past it. The sky was clear and blue with big white puffy clouds, and the air was warm. I kept the rain gear on for another hour or two to dry everything out, and I stopped to take some pics of some buffalo, as well as a snake that was sunning itself on the road. When I got the south entrance of the Badlands State Park, I stopped for gas removed my rain gear. Poncho had sent me a text message before the storm advising me to take the interstate if I could, because from where he was it looked I was heading into it.




I called and asked him where he was and he said he had just go to the north entrance of the Badlands. We met at the gift shop, and he was astonished that we had arrived at the same time to the park. How could he have taken the same amount of time as me to get here, when he didn’t hit a storm, didn’t take the back-road, and averaged 80 MPH the whole time? Glad you asked, friend! I figured out after we split up that the reason it’s been taking us all day to ride 400 miles when it usually takes me all day to ride 500 miles, is because when he was with me I was riding much slower than I usually ride when I’m alone. We ride pretty fast when we’re together, but I realized that when I’m alone I FLY! I take a lot of those long, empty stretches at 80 or 85, and for the last couple of days we’d been taking them at 65 or 70. He obviously was riding faster when he was alone, too.

As a result of our splitting up, we ended up with a 500 mile day and got to our hotel room an hour before nightfall (although it helps that we’re now on mountain time, which gave us an extra two hours of daylight!!!). I’m just glad we solved the mystery, because I know very well this part of the country and how long it takes me to get places, and I couldn’t figure out how us goofing off at rest stops was adding two hours to my usual day of travel. It never occurred to me that I was riding considerably slower with a partner, and I’m glad we figured it out.

Let me add, as I always do when the subject comes up, that Poncho and the Love Machine are not mileage junkies. We are not these douche bags who only want to tell you how many miles they rode each day, or how many miles they rode on their trip. I average 500 miles a day because I like to get places. I don’t want to be four days from the house and still in Ohio. I don’t want to have six hours to kill in my hotel room before going to sleep because I rode three hundred miles and arrived at four PM. I want to arrive exhausted at the end of the day, just as the sun is going down, and I want to have spent that day riding FAST! Yes, I love the scenery, I love to stop here and stop there, but really, I love to ride. If you don’t dilly-dally, and you know how to ride hard and fast, you can ride between 450 and 500 miles each and every day and still see plenty of stuff and still get to your hotel room before nightfall. It’s really not that difficult if you do it right.

And anyway, for people who think I ride a lot of miles, try meeting some of the Iron Butt guys who ride a THOUSAND miles a day, every day, for ten days.

At the gift shop at the Badlands, in fact, we met a fellow who had ridden his Triumph Tiger from Wisconsin, having left that morning and rode 600 miles to get there. He’d already set up his tent, and we shot the breeze with him for a while. I was glad Poncho got to meet a guy like him, because I’ve been telling Poncho for years about the types of fellow motorcyclists you meet in the road. The knuckle heads who only want to tell you how much money they have in chrome, or the knuckleheads who want to tell you how many miles they’ve ridden that day or that week (usually only a fraction of what I’ve ridden), or the kindred spirits like this guy. We talked about bikes, and gear, and great roads and great restaurants, and we never bragged about our fancy chrome (his bike had none) and we never tried to impress each other with our mileage.



We wished him a safe journey and headed off through the Badlands park. The scenery was spectacular and the roads (thankfully) were almost entirely free of slow-moving cars and RV’s and yahoos from New Jersey slamming on the brakes to take pictures of a cow or a duck or any other type of perceived “wildlife”. Readers of my past blogs are well-acquainted with my disdain and dislike of our nation’s parks. The roads are slow-moving, crowded, and filled with bonehead drivers who are so spellbound by being there that they’re oblivious to the three-mile line of cars behind them. And there are rarely any passing zones.

At one point, Poncho took the lead crossed the double-yellow, leisurely passing a slow-moving minivan. When we pulled over later at a scenic overlook, I asked him why he passed so slowly, telling him I was ready to let it rip but I had to back off when he passed that minivan like a turtle. I told him I don’t like being out in that lane for any longer than I have to. I laughed my ass off when he replied, “What’s the hurry? You afraid someone is gonna come around the next curve and slam into you at 15 miles-an-hour?”

We were laughing so hard we almost fell off our bikes, talking about how I would have time to call my mother and tell her I wouldn’t make it, and how the NTSB would examine the black box on my bike and recover the crash data for the last three and half terrifying minutes of my head on collision, in which I suffered a sprained ankle and the other vehicle was scratched.

I once again displayed my extensive knowledge of Native American folklore, telling Poncho that legend has it that in the ancient days before the white man came and displaced the Native Americans, Indian teenagers would come to the sandstones in the evenings and fuck.

We wandered down amongst the rocks. Ah, who am I kidding. We walked about ten feet into the sandstone and then said, “Let’s go eat.” And I can assure you it had nothing to do with the BEWARE OF RATTLERS sign.



After leaving the Badlands we rode through some National Grasslands. Grasslands. Really? Where I come from it’s called a fucking lawn. And you have to mow it, and trim it, and no one ever comes over to hang out and admire your lawn. But out here it’s a big deal, I guess.

We hauled ass for the last fifty miles down I-90 to out hotel, and it’s great fun to pass a statie in the median while we ride at 79 miles an hour. Suh-weet!




Blog Six



As most of you know, I consider myself a humanitarian, actively seeking out opportunities to help others (provided it’s not too much of an inconvenience for me and so long as it costs me nothing). So it was in character for me to book a hotel room which was less than one mile from a Kawasaki dealer, enabling Poncho to get up early this morning and get his bike serviced. I don’t mention this because I want praise or accolades—-although feel free to shower me with both---I only mention it so I might inspire others to be charitable and spread happiness. (See, there I go again... doing good!)

So while Poncho went to the Kawasaki dealer in Rapid City, South Dakota, I put on my Red Wing boots to go for a stroll... and while doing so broke the zipper on the side of one of the boots. A quick check on the laptop and I discovered a Red Wing store less than a mile from our hotel. Fifteen minutes later my old boots were in the trash and my feet were happily wearing a new pair of boots. It was obvious that if there is a god---and surely there is not---he had rewarded me for the kindness I bestowed upon Poncho by getting us so close to a Kawasaki dealer. (I say that god is a “he” because years of philosophical pondering have brought me to a conclusion so incontrovertible and irrefutable that even the staunchest atheist---and I am one---would have no choice but to agree: God cannot be a woman because a woman would NEVER have created breasts. Only a male would have created breasts. Now, that, my friends, is a plain fact.)

I sat for a spell in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for Poncho and watching the Spanish language channel, laughing and shaking my head occasionally at the TV screen so the pretty girl behind the counter would think I understood Spanish. Poncho returned and we lunched in the hotel restaurant, and it was well after noon, local time, when we left Rapid City. I told Poncho we had at least four hundred and forty miles to ride, but we were first stopping in Sturgis so he could have a look around. He commented that we probably wouldn’t get to our hotel until midnight. I didn’t tell him I had a secret weapon which would get us to our hotel even before the sun went down.

We rolled into that massive tourist trap of Sturgis, South Dakota, about thirty minutes later. It’s like the Disney version of a biker town. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like Sturgis. I’m not going to apply my usual cantankerous sarcasm and surly attitude to my description of Sturgis, mainly because the town of Sturgis has been created by locals cashing in on the phony biker lifestyle as opposed to corporations cashing in on the phony biker lifestyle. At least these are real people making a living from the Harley wannabes, not guys in suits who live for market research and demographics.

Then again, maybe it’s not really phony. Maybe the biker lifestyle has been redefined to include people who spend thirty grand for a bike (There is no such thing, people! It’s an eighteen-thousand dollar bike and you bolted twelve grand worth of shit on it), or it’s been expanded to include guys who trailer their bikes to Sturgis (bikers ride their bikes---unless there was three feet of snow in your hometown when it was time to leave for Sturgis, there is no reason to put your bike in a trailer. You are a bitch.).

I guess the thing about Sturgis that I don’t like is the way it feels forced. Everything HAS to be about bikers. The Road Kill Café, the Full Throttle Saloon... every place advertises that it caters to bikers, that it’s a biker joint, a biker hangout. Good lord, man. I know I’m a biker. I don’t need to have that reinforced by only doing “biker” things and going to “biker” places. When it’s a part-time lifestyle, you have to advertise your identity and you have to stay in character. When it’s just who you are, you don’t have to do anything but be yourself. And you can go anywhere you like and wear whatever you want and you’re still a biker (or in my case, a motorcyclist).

(Sorry to once again been beating up on the new breed of Harley riders---I know many of them are good people who love bikes. I just miss the days when a biker town sold chili and cheeseburgers and dollar shots and draught beer---they didn’t sell t-shirts and stickers and hats. Now-a-days every single merchant from the gas station to the doughnut shop sells commemorative t-shirts and stickers and hats---items you can buy to prove to your friends back home you are a real biker who was in a real biker town. Biker towns used to be places where the locals didn’t like us that much and the cops didn’t like us at all. Now we’re all one big, happy, fucking family.)

Poncho tired of Sturgis after about six minutes, and so after topping off our fuel tanks, I unleashed my secret weapon: I-90 from Sturgis, South Dakota, to Ranchester, Wyoming. It’s a roughly two-hundred-and-thirty miles of clean, smooth interstate that one can ride from end to end at ninety miles-per-hour. Now, at ninety miles-per-hour, mind you, it’s like your gas tank has a hole in the bottom. So you stop for fuel.... oh, an hour and a half later, in Buffalo, Wyoming, and then get right back on the highway and blast to Ranchester.

The speed limit on I-90 is seventy-five, but one can see at all times there’s no cops for the next two miles because at all times you can see for about two miles ahead of you! Of course, with laser, a cop can have your speed long before you see him, but I’ve made this ride a few times and it seems like everyone runs the highway at eighty-five or ninety, and I’ve never seen any cops out here anyway.

So about two and half hours later, we had two-hundred-and-thirty miles under our belt, plenty of sunlight left, and about two-hundred miles of fantastic Wyoming and Montana back-roads to get us to our hotel. Suh-weet.

We stopped to top off the tanks in Ranchester because I could not recall how far the next town was, but I knew it was far. Right next to the gas station was a new restaurant and we gave it a try. Jackpot! Ranchester, Wyoming, is a small, dusty, Wyoming town. Nothing touristy to do here, and not a whole lot of traffic passing through. Yet this restaurant would be at home in a row of stores and shops along an upscale, riverside-type of town or in the downtown of a major city. The staff were attired well, the napkins and tableware were high-end, and New York strip steak with frizzled onions and blackened salmon with mango salsa were the types of twenty-dollar entrees they had on the menu, as well as homemade gnocchi and homemade deserts. The food was excellent, but it was five o’clock sharp when we walked in and we were the only ones in the place. We wondered who in the world would be their clientele. Would the local cowboys drop forty bucks for dinner a couple of times a month in this joint, or would the tourist traffic keep this place alive? I wish them luck.

We left out of Ranchester on Route 14 headed to Route 14A. I’ve already written quite a long essay about this road, and just as I expected, Poncho loved it.

He loved the way the road corkscrewed up the mountain to ten thousand feet, where it was fifty degrees... and then flung us down the other side to the Wyoming desert and eighty-eight degrees! Along the way we saw elk and moose. His jaw dropped when we reached the very top and he saw for what looked like hundreds of miles across the giant rocks and flatland of Wyoming. What a view!

We made it to our hotel in Laurel, Montana, just as the sun was going down. The hot tub and the pool looked like they were filled with dirty bath water, so I skipped my favorite late-night pastime. Well, second favorite.

Poncho told me that the ride over route 14 and 14A was one of the best of his life. I assured him that he ain’t seen nothing yet.







Blog Seven

Today is the big day. Three or four times over the years I have attempted to ride the Beartooth Pass from Montana into Wyoming, and each time the road has been closed, either because I arrived too early in the season and there was still snow and ice on the pass, or because the weather was too bad in the surrounding areas, or once, when I arrived in late summer, it was closed because of an avalanche. For a long time now, every time the subject of motorcycle travel comes up in conversation, before I can even boast and brag of the forty-nine states in which I’ve ridden, the trip I took to Alaska (riding to the Arctic Circle), or any of the other dozens of roads I’ve traveled in this country and Canada, the first thing someone asks is, “Oh, so you travel by motorcycle, huh? Have you ridden the Beartooth?” That shuts me up right there.

Because I am the tour guide on this trip, and because I want Poncho to see the best scenic roads there are, I am mostly covering ground on which I’ve already ridden. Not that I mind, of course, these are phenomenal roads and I’m having a blast, but I won’t be breaking any new ground... except for the Beartooth. I have the phone number to get road conditions for the Beartooth in my cell phone, and as of yesterday, the pass is open.

We rolled south out of Laurel, Montana, and made good time to Red Lodge, Montana, the last town before the Beartooth. Half-way through town I spotted a custom chopper shop called Bonedaddy’s and stopped in. Poncho wanted to buy for our friend back-home, Youngblood, a t-shirt from somewhere along our route. This was to repay him for a t-shirt that Youngblood brought back from Daytona for Poncho about twenty years ago.

(Youngblood is also the mechanic who services my bike---and does a masterful job---and has been telling me about the Beartooth for a long time, saying it’s the best road he ever rode. (And that means something coming from him, because he’s done a lot of riding.) I figured a t-shirt from Red Lodge would be just what Youngblood would like. He always checks my bike out thoroughly, and nothing escapes his attention. I can travel the country with complete confidence that my bike will make it, thanks to his watchful eye. He’s an old-school biker, and we started riding together about twenty-three years ago. I will not be sharing any details of the hell we raised in our early twenties, and not because the statue of limitations hasn’t expired or because I can’t recall the details, but simply because I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must have us confused with two other guys.)

Anyway, this, eh, “motorcycle shop” in Red Lodge didn’t actually have any motorcycles on display... but there were rows and rows of t-shirts and hats and sweatshirts and stickers, all adorned with the cool Bonedaddy logo. Remember folks, it ain’t what you ride or how, it’s how you look when hanging with your bros. Stylish motherfucker that I am, I bought a t-shirt, too.

We fueled up in Red Lodge and hit the pass. Wow! Youngblood was on the money! What a road! Curvy two-lane through trees, alongside streams, by log cabins, and rolling hills, and scenic vistas, and all sorts of rural animal life... and then we began to climb.

And climb.

Sharp, sharp curves deliver us higher and higher up the mountain. It’s getting colder now and there’s snow everywhere, but the sun is bright and warm. In that curious sensation that is often and best experienced on a motorcycle, there are two, yes TWO temperatures around you. There is the warmth of the sun, high in the sky, and you can feel it warm your dark clothing or exposed skin when you stop or go slow. And then there is the surface air around you, air that WOULD be warm thanks to the sun, but is instead being cooled by the snow, snow which blankets the ground as far as the eye can see and is growing in depth the higher we climb.

In fact, as we ride higher and higher, the snow takes on a life of its own. It’s not just laying in flat sheets, covering everything, it’s also along both sides of the road---straight, flat walls of solid snow, eight-feet high. Not PILED there, but CUT there by the monster snow-plows as they punch a hole through the snow banks to clear the road. At times all you see is the black ribbon before you and the walls of white on either side.

As we near the top, the road continues to corkscrew up the mountain. Sharp switchbacks slow you to ten miles an hour as you begin the next climb. But now, instead of looking back down on the valley below, you are looking at enormous snow banks---and I do mean enormous! The snow is being supported by the natural topography of the mountain, and actually spanning from mountain peak to mountain peak, many football fields wide. You can actually see how the snow banks were formed, layer upon layer, the previous layer freezing solid before the next layer falls as snow and then turns to ice. The brilliant blue layer at the bottom is solid ice, and clearly supporting the fifty feet of snow atop it.

The wind has sculpted the snow and now the word snow “bank” isn’t the best choice. It’s more accurate to call them snow shapes, or snow geology. Some sections have been curved by the wind, made to look like giant race car tracks with their steep, curved lanes.

It’s a vast, white wilderness, with isolated pockets of green trees here and there. It is really something to see as you reach the top and survey the mountain peaks all around you, almost close enough to hit with a snowball. The road twists this way and that, and all around you are massive geometric shapes of snow, mountain, rock, and above it all bright, blue sky. It’s crazy-cool!

We are freezing our asses off, but refuse to stop flying through these curves long enough to pull over and put on our cold-weather gear. The highly accurate digital thermometer on my dash read eighty degrees half-an-hour earlier in Red Lodge. At the top of the Beartooth Pass it reads forty-eight degrees.

And the reason we won’t stop is not just because we’re too stubborn and too dumb (we are both of those things) but mainly because we know (or hope) that in a few moments we will begin our descent... and the lower we get the warmer it gets. And that, my friends, is one of the best things about riding a bike. Freezing your balls off for twenty minutes at some outrageous altitude with incredible views so that you can thaw out as you ride down the side of a mountain.

And that’s what happened. There was no traffic, and gravity helped us haul-ass down the steep western side of the Beartooth Pass. With each mile, the snow was replaced by rock-face and trees. And then, again, streams, log cabins, rolling hills, and scenic vistas... and eighty degrees! Hot damn! That was fun! It feels good to actually feel your body thaw out as warm and then hot air finally washes over you.

We stopped for lunch at a small town and had some great food. I had planned on skipping Yellowstone National Park, but at the last minute decided that Poncho should ride through it at least once. I’ve written in great detail in my blogs on previous trips about why I can’t stand many of our national parks. They are crowded in the extreme. It takes forever to get through them, and along side the nice scenery, at every turn, is a dozen RV’s and minivans and campers and tour buses, and each of them moving at a snails pace, except when they see some wildlife (or perceived wildlife), in which case they don’t move at all, but instead stop dead in their tracks to tumble out and take photographs. It is a wonderland for the unimaginative.

Meanwhile, in the areas surrounding many of our national parks (such as Yellowstone and Yosemite), the scenery is just as nice, just as spectacular, but devoid of tourists. And although I will admit that to see the really incredible scenery you have no choice but to travel through the park rather than around it, for the hardcore motorcyclist, it’s just not worth it.

About fifteen minutes after we entered Yellowstone, Poncho was hating it as much as I was. How the hell can you call it “nature” when all you see is cars and buses and minivans and RV’s and fat fucks in plaid pants lined up along side the road to take pictures? Yes, the views were great. Yes, the herds of wild bison were awesome to see (especially the big ones that crossed the road right in front of us!). And to see the occasional fox or wolf and whatever other animals we saw were cool, but it’s hard to really enjoy it when you’re riding a motorcycle at twenty miles per hour. I’ve said it before, it’s easier to PUSH a nine-hundred-pound motorcycle than it is to ride it for an extended time at slow speed. Constant clutching, shifting, and braking in the hot sun fatigues you in just a few hours.




Meanwhile, you have some knucklehead behind you so busy looking around for bear that he keeps riding up on your ass, and you have the idiot in front of you so busy looking for moose and bald eagles that he’s doing ten miles an hour below the speed limit for mile after mile, oblivious to the line of cars and trucks and bikes behind him, never once considering that he could pull off at the turnout and let some of us past (despite the signs advising slower to traffic to use the turnouts).

And every other mile is a car or RV haphazardly pulled partially off the road, having just stopped because the wife thought she saw a sasquatch or a tit-mouse and just HAD to have a picture, and now Pops is trying to get back on the road and into the line of traffic. But because of the awkward angle of his vehicle to the road, his side view mirror isn’t showing him the traffic coming up behind him and the motorcyclist must remain vigilant lest these Einsteins throw caution to the wind and hit the gas---which they do all the time.

It takes us hours and hours to get through the park, and Poncho and the Love Machine are in complete agreement that this will be the last time we do that. Poncho was glad he saw it, but he also wants to get moving.

We ride past the Grand Tetons, and take 191 down to Rock Springs, Wyoming for the night. This was the route I had planned to take, even writing down the directions on my 3x5 card, until changing my mind and riding through Yellowstone. I’d taken this route before and knew the scenery was great, the road was great, and there would be little traffic and plenty of passing zones. Had I stayed with my original plan, we would have reached these roads hours earlier when the sun was high and we had plenty of time. Now it was late afternoon, and with two-hundred and forty miles to go, we would want to keep the hammer down.

We came upon a one-lane section of road that had about twenty-five cars and trucks all bunched up. After the construction zone opened up, the car at the front of the pack was doing exactly fifty-five miles-per-hour, and although it was a fifty-five mile-an-hour zone, this was intolerable. All the time we wasted getting through Yellowstone was forgotten when Poncho and the Love Machine jumped out into the empty lane of oncoming traffic, twisted the throttle as far as it would go, and passed that entire line of cars and trucks, praying to god that none of them would decide to do the same thing until AFTER we’d passed them, or that a truck wouldn’t come around the bend and right at us until we got to the front of the pack. Even though we were hauling ass, it took a long time to pass them all, but boy was it fun!

The sky was a brilliant and the clouds looked incredible. Washes of white amongst a sea of orange and blue. I took a picture as we rode down the road. It was getting chilly and we were tired, but I was glad I finally got to ride the Beartooth Pass. Poncho said our ride today was incredible (I was getting used to hearing that from him each night), and I told him he ain’t seen nothing yet. He was getting used to hearing that from me.








Blog Eight



We woke up this morning after a good nights sleep in the Best Western Outlaw Inn, in Rock Springs, Wyoming. That’s right, the Outlaw Inn. Only serious bad-asses can stay here. In fact, if you ain’t got what it takes to be a real outlaw they make your ass sleep in the parking lot. But if you’re man enough, come on in and rest your head on a hypo-allergenic pillow and enjoy some white chocolate mints, maybe even soak in a nice warm bath infused with sea-salt and an essence of cucumber.

Poncho went to wash his bike this morning while I had breakfast in the hotel restaurant. I’ve been learning to eat a BIG breakfast each day, which has drastically reduced the amount of food I eat for the rest of the day. This whole eating-healthy-thing has had quite a learning curve for me, but I’m getting there. And I’m even liking it!

When Poncho returned, he informed me that a gas station attendant had told him there is a much quicker and better way to get to Vegas than the route that I had planned, which for today’s portion is down Route 191 to Colorado. The attendant told him that 191 is a boring road and we would hate it. I informed Poncho that the gas station attendant is a moron. I’ve ridden this route before and I love it. Twenty minutes later, as we whizzed by the spectacular Wyoming scenery, Poncho gave me the thumbs up. Route 191 is a spectacular scenic two-lane, with long sweeping curves, plenty of visibility, little or no traffic, and a hundred miles worth of this stuff before you have to touch the brakes.... except for the pee-stops, which thanks to the seventeen gallons of water I pour down my throat daily occur every fifteen minutes. I spend so much time on the side of the road urinating that I think I should probably put sunscreen on my Johnson.

(I am also a shameless pee-er, whipping it out almost anywhere when the need occurs. I will simply stand next to my bike and point with one hand upward, diverting attention, as I open the faucet, so to speak, with the other hand. I do, however, carry a plastic container in my side-bag for when exposing myself might result in arrest or perhaps attract the attention of sex-starved senior citizens who might interpret my natural bodily function as an amorous invitation---it COULD happen, ya know. I simply insert my you-know-what into the container and make my deposit. To all but the closest observer it will simply appear as if I’m holding a container in front of me and nothing more. Back in Ohio, while parked along side a gas station and not wanting to go inside to use the restroom, I brought out the container and went to work while Poncho, to my surprise, opened the door to the restroom... which was right next to me!)




Back to our story. Poncho adds another state to his list as we cross into Utah. As usual, I’m trying to come up with as many Mormon jokes as I can, and on a serious note, wondering why Mormons are so crazy.

We stop for gas and water at a convenience store and parked in front is a monstrous-looking and VERY bad-ass-looking sport bike (although I later learn it’s classified as a sport-touring bike. Yea right! Although I suppose it might be considered a touring bike because you can go coast to coast on it in about three days if you have enough Red Bull). From out of the store walks The Black Widow... a beautiful blonde carrying a full-face helmet, and before she can climb aboard this rocket-ship and pilot it away, I ask her what the hell it is. She tells me it’s a Kawasaki Hayabusa, and then for about fifteen minutes answers all of our dumb questions.

I'm guessing they call her the Black Widow because she puts a lot of male egos to death... and it takes her about 9.78 seconds. That’s right... 9.78 seconds to reach about 143 miles an hour... in a quarter of a mile. She comes from a family of racers, and she has totally customized her bike: stretched, custom paint, air shifter, other really cool mods---and soon she will have to find a way to attach the back tire to the rim. She showed us the marks on her tire that indicated just how far the tire was actually rotating ON THE RIM due to the incredible force. Yes, rotating ON THE RIM! (I thought about suggesting Gorilla Glue---it worked wonders on my shoe lace---but I wisely kept my mouth shut.)

She was the prefect combination of passionate and knowledgeable about her bike, but without being arrogant or obsessed. She was friendly and had great spirit, and she was gorgeous! Plus, she goes faster in less than ten seconds than I could go if I had a week! I really liked meeting her, and I hope her racing sponsors put her schedule up on the web so one day I could come and watch her race. I would love that.






We left Utah and Poncho added another state as we entered Colorado. We passed by the Dinosaur Baptist Church, and I thought that was an odd name for people who believe dinosaurs are a myth and that the earth was created roughly three-thousand years ago.

We unhurriedly rolled down Colorado back-roads, and though Poncho was enjoying the scenery, he had no idea what was in store for him.

Before leaving on our journey, Poncho told me that Mexican food was his least-favorite type of food. I told him I eat Mexican food eight times a week when I travel, and I predicted he would, too---willingly. Mexican food, I told him, is not what they serve at Chili’s or any of those other ridiculous chain-restaurants. Even a bad Mexican restaurant in Ohio is better than a “Mexican” restaurant back where we live. In Montrose, Colorado, Poncho saw the light. Enchiladas, tacos, red beans and rice, tortillas---and all of it covered with guacamole, sour cream, and hot, hot, hot sauce. Poncho ate so much Mexican food I expect he might take a job as a landscaper when we return home.

Our tanks were full, our bellies were full, and we hopped on Route 550 south-bound. I wrote in great detail (don’t I always write in great detail?) just this last summer about Route 550 in Colorado. Known as the Million Dollar Highway, I discovered it by accident.

Hauling ass down Route 550 last summer, not sure where I was going and not caring, I saw ahead of me some very large mountains. I was wondering how I would be getting past them... through them? Around them? Surely not over them? Oh, yes, some readers might recall. Over them.

I pointed them out to Poncho as we rode, and then made the sign with my hand that we would be climbing them... he saw the snow-covered peaks and the high altitude and thought I was kidding.

At the base of the mountain we rounded a curve and observed along side the road a raging torrent of water. Poncho recalled me telling him about a road where at the bottom is a huge river, but as you get higher and higher the river dwindles down to small creeks, and you can actually see where it begins its life as tiny tributaries of melting snow. He correctly deduced this was that road.

A few seconds later, I was reminded of another stunning feature of this road... the shoulder. Well, the LACK of shoulder. There is the white line at the edge of the road... and then a sharp ten-foot drop. Around the next curve, as the road steeply climbs, it becomes a fifty-foot drop. And then a hundred-foot drop. Then a three-hundred foot drop. And I’m telling you folks, there is no shoulder. No guardrail, no curb, no nothing.

For reasons I cannot produce, it feels like you are about to get sucked off the road and into the abyss... except it’s not an abyss. As the road curves, you get a very clear look at the next five hundred feet of road you are about to travel, and below the road surface you can see in great detail upon what the road sits: a straight wall of sharp rock that you will plummet past should you take that one giant leap for mankind. As the road curves even more, you can see almost down to the bottom, and it’s obvious that this is one long, painful drop. There are no second chances here.

You wonder how the road can even be supported, teetering as it is on the very edge and top of a straight wall. Can’t it be undermined a bit and then collapse? Worse still, is the insane sensation that you will almost certainly ride off this thing. I don’t know what type of tricks this road plays on your mind, but my heart was beating a million beats a minute and I was giggling like a school girl. It’s freakin’ scary as hell, is all I can say. I have no idea what makes me think I would round a curve and somehow just fly off the edge of the road when that has never happened to me on any other road, but it looked like that happening here was not just possible (which it certainly is), but probable.

I dared a glance in the mirror and I could see that Poncho, like me, was hugging the yellow center line! We got to a stretch that was less treacherous---with a shoulder on either side of the road---and I saw a Goldwing headed down the mountain, parked, with no rider around. We pulled over, and Poncho and I were both laughing---partly out of fear and partly out of relief that we hadn’t plummeted to our deaths!

The Goldwing rider came walking out from a low spot where he’d been taking pics to tell us he was ok and to thank us for stopping. He also told us that ahead of us, at the top of the mountain, they’d gotten some snow and ice on the road. He’d ridden through it and figured we’d probably make it, too, assuming we were both experienced riders. We told him if we weren’t, we were about to become some. I took a few pics with his camera of him standing by his Wing, and wished him a safe journey.

We put on our cold weather gear and our rain gear, and agreed that if the sheer drop-off wasn’t enough to scare the piss out of us (it was) adding some rain, snow and ice would surely do the trick.

We continued to climb the mountain, and though the curves were every bit as sharp, the sections of the road that had absolutely no shoulder were becoming less and less frequent, finally disappearing altogether... just about the time we reached the snow.

There was lots of fresh snow around, and the road surface was wet, but as near as we could tell it was not frozen. My digital thermometer hovered around forty degrees, and though I was pretty sure this meant the water on the road surface would not be frozen, I wasn’t a hundred percent certain. Could there be isolated spots of ice? Every so often the digital thermometer---which is highly accurate---would drop to thirty-eight degrees. Might it suddenly drop to thirty-two around the next curve and we would go careening off the road? Neither one of us knew---and we were continuing to climb higher and higher.

We kept it at about forty miles-per-hour and continuously tested out brakes for signs of ice. It appeared that the storm that brought the snow and ice had passed, and the roads were now simply wet, but again, we couldn’t be sure.

We finally arrived at a sign that read: Summit 10,990 Feet, and we hoped this meant the decline would bring us to warmer air. The view at the top was amazing, looking out at the mountain peaks around us, close enough to touch, and looking down on an abandoned mining town. Very cool! Very cold, actually. We got the hell out of there after about fifteen minutes.



As we rolled down the other side of the mountain the thermometer slowly clicked upward. Unlike our descent of the Beartooth pass the other day, which brought us to eighty-degree temperatures and bright sunshine, I had no idea what coming down this mountain would bring us to.

The sun was setting and it was time to really watch for animals. This was pure Colorado wilderness around here, lots of trees alongside the road to hide the deer. We saw a herd of mountain goats, or rams---neither of us knew what they were. It was still cold, and we were riding faster than we should have been, when a massive deer (or possibly an elk) running at top speed, shot out from the tree line like a bullet and crossed ten feet in front of my bike. I looked right into his eye as I grabbed the brakes, far too late to do anything. It was pure luck that we didn’t collide.

(So far on this trip, we have met two experienced riders who told us about deer collisions they’ve had, and one who told us about an experienced rider he knew who hit a deer while riding at forty miles-per-hour and was killed. My biggest fear when I ride is tailgaters, but I have a feeling my biggest fear should really be deer. Especially considering I live in a place very appropriately called Bucks County.)

We continued down the mountain and the temperature rose to about fifty degrees and stayed there. It was cold, we were tired, but the exhilaration of riding Route 550 was keeping us happy.

We entered the town of Durango, Colorado, where I inadvertently played a terrible joke on Poncho. Each night we enter a small town somewhere, and when Poncho sees me headed towards the Best Western sign he knows we have arrived at our destination for the night. No Best Western sign, and he knows we will keep rolling. Half-way through the town of Durango, cold and tired, I went from the right lane to the left just as we were approaching a Best Western sign. I only did it to pass a car, but Poncho breathed a sigh of relief thinking that he would soon be soaking in the hot tub... and then wondered why I kept riding right past the Best Western sign. When I pulled over a few minutes later to take a leak, he thought I was kidding when I told him OUR Best Western was still, oh... sixty miles away. I had deflated his stamina and determination by accidentally making him think we had arrived! Oh, man. Sorry, buddy. That’s gotta suck.

We arrived in Cortez, Colorado, at the CORRECT Best Western, and Poncho said that riding Route 550 up that mountain was the most amazing and exhilarating ride of his life. Not only was the scenery spectacular, but riding near that edge was insane!

Once again, we ended our day by my telling him that tomorrow would be even better. And I congratulated him on his first 3400 mile week.






Blog Nine



We left Cortez, Colorado, and hauled ass down a nice stretch of Colorado road. Each day I’d been telling Poncho that the scenery today was going to be better than it was yesterday... but today was going to take it to a new level.

Scenery is a funny thing. It’s like food or movies or music. Everyone has their own opinion and there’s no right or wrong. Well, there’s SOME right or wrong. If you like eating at Appleby’s or listening to Celine Dion sing you’re wrong. Way wrong.

Some people can ride through forests all day and love it, some people prefer to see the ocean. Some people HATE riding long straight roads through the desert, and other folks (like me) love it. Some folks don’t care what type of road it is or how fast they travel, as long as the scenery is nice they’re happy (like the people who love riding a motorcycle through Yellowstone or Yosemite, not caring how slow they have to ride and how long it takes them).

And some people are only looking for dramatic scenery, things you can only see in specific places, like the Grand Canyon or the Beartooth Pass. I’ve been hearing about the Beartooth for years, and yes, it was an amazing ride with spectacular scenery. If you want your jaw to drop, ride the Beartooth. But you can also ride The Million Dollar Highway in Colorado, or the Going To The Sun Road in Montana, or the North Cascades in Idaho, or Mt. Washington in New Hampshire and be similarly blown away. These are all places you should visit, but in my opinion, the really great rides are in between these places.

Some people will ride the interstates for hours to get to these destinations spots. They’ll ride the most boring roads they can find, ride directly to, say, the Beartooth Pass, and then after they’ve ridden the Beartooth, turn around and ride directly home. Nothing wrong with that. These places have big, huge, dramatic scenery that is truly amazing.

But I prefer to find the far-less-traveled roads the locals use, away from the traffic and the tourist spots and the places that sell T-shirts. For me, a great ride has to include more than just great scenery, it has to include a great road. A great road has little traffic (but plenty of passing zones just in case), a clean smooth road surface, few tourists or places that cater to tourists, and plenty of local culture in it’s natural state (not over-the-top local culture designed to attract tourists). And the other important factor that makes a great road is distance. I don’t want to ride a great road with spectacular scenery for forty-five minutes and then I’m done. Or even for two hours. I want to ride all day! Hundreds of miles. I’ll sacrifice some of that big, amazing, dramatic scenery, if I can see scenery that’s ALMOST as nice but I can keep the throttle twisted from gas stop to gas stop.

Southern Utah, my friends, is in my opinion the greatest place to ride in this country because, as Poncho discovered today, southern Utah has it all... big dramatic scenery and HUNDREDS of miles of clean, smooth road with a minimum of traffic and tourists.

We stooped for gas and water just before entering the Utah desert and I told Poncho to get ready to be blown away. He was still reeling from Route 550 yesterday, and was quite skeptical that we could improve upon that experience. Though I told him we would not be riding inches from death like we were yesterday (except for one short section), the scenery and the sheer volume of the scenery---hundreds of miles worth---would make up for that.

And away we went.

When we began passing those huge crevices of red rock he gave me the thumbs up. When the crevices became the size of football fields, and the wind-sculpted sandstone surrounding us grew enormous and more intricate in design, I could tell he was loving it because we slowed down. Normally we don’t slow down for anything.

I’ve written about this road previously and so I’ll limit my commentary, but suffice it to say that Bryce Canyon and the Capitol Reef National Park are spectacular.

There was a short section of road that was similar to Route 550 in that it has NO SHOULDER and a sheer drop hundreds of feet to your death should you ride off. It’s only about a quarter mile long, and it is truly an experience. You round a curve and suddenly find yourself atop a mountain peak... literally. Not next to it, ON TOP of it! There is nothing, not even a tree around you that is higher than the road itself. You feel like you are on the very top of the world, and because you can see nothing except the road itself, you feel as if the road is suspended in midair. Freakin’ awesome.

We stopped many times to admire the view of this extreme terrain, the outlandish rocks and sandstone looking like drops of melting plastic. And we stood high atop a mountain and looked out at hundreds of miles of Utah desert. We rode until the sun went down and arrived at our hotel just as it got dark.

We stopped for the night a few miles short of Zion National Park, and once again I promised Poncho that tomorrow the scenery would be better than today. Of course, tomorrow we ride through Zion National Park, and after Zion National Park I will have to stop making that claim each night. But he doesn’t know that yet.







Blog Ten




Poncho and the Love Machine woke up to beautiful skies, perfect temperatures, and the need to refer to ourselves in the third person. Hey, if our names were Morton and Harold we’d let it drop, but when you call yourselves Poncho and the Love Machine you want to work it into conversation as often as possible.

We are about to ride through Zion National Park and then down to Las Vegas, where Poncho would visit with his family for a few days and the Love Machine would hole in up in a Vegas hotel for the night and then roll out through the desert to who knows where, reuniting with Poncho somewhere on Monday or Tuesday.

Turns out Poncho’s lovely wife wasn’t feeling so well and Poncho was distracted, wanting to pull over and call her a few times. He suggested I go on ahead and we’d meet up in Vegas. I left him in Zion National Park on his cell phone and twisted the throttle. I hope his wife feels better soon (she did) and I hope he’s not so distracted he doesn’t enjoy Zion National Park. Zion is in my opinion the crown jewel of our National Parks, and I shudder at my stupidity when I think of the first two times I rode out this way and had no idea what Zion National Park was... and so I skipped it. What a moron. It wasn’t until 2006 that one of my customers---I forget who or I would thank them---convinced me to come visit here.

After riding through Zion and good old Hurricane, Utah, I got on my favorite section of interstate in the whole country... I-15 from Utah into Arizona. Unbelievable curves surrounded by giant rocks and fantastic desert views. It’s a short section, but awesome.

Nearing Vegas, I stopped at Nellis Air Force Base hoping to see some military aircraft engaged in practice dog fights or some Stealth bombers doing touch-and-go’s, but I was out of luck. Not a good thing to be out of when you’re headed to Vegas.

Back on the highway, I entered America’s urinal cake and immediately sat in traffic. There was the familiar gaudy, tacky, boisterous, over-the-top city-scape that is Las Vegas; the last stop on a long train ride from hell. The sea of humanity ranged from last-chance hopefuls from Boise, street urchins with half-closed eyes that missed nothing, degenerates with barley-functioning livers who expunged Remy Martin from their pores, to families from Ohio with the kids in tow who genuinely believed Vegas was family-friendly, and of course the usual parade of prostitutes proudly displaying their collection of sexually-transmitted diseases, their wardrobe hastily adjusted for daylight hours but their for-sale sign still clearly visible.

Much of Poncho’s family lives here, and the plan was for him to stay with them for a few days and I would stop by, say hello, and then go back to my hotel and do laundry, catch up on blogging, hit a casino, get a good night’s sleep, and then roll out Sunday morning. I’m not the most sociable motherfucker on the planet, so Poncho’s family understood I wouldn’t be staying with them (although they graciously offered) and that even my visit wouldn’t be very long in duration.

One look at Vegas and I realized I wouldn’t be visiting them at all. I texted him and told him to tell Pops, the sisters, and all the creepers and crawlers thanks, but I would see them next time. My Best Western was awesome, and I spent an excellent evening in solitary bliss, never even visiting a casino.

Now, I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I’m not one of those motorcyclists who parks his bike right smack in front of the lobby of the hotel and leaves it there all night. I prefer leaving it in a parking space, although on occasion I will leave it in front of the hotel when the parking space doesn’t seem like a good idea. Most riders think the desk clerk will keep an eye on the bike all night if it’s parked out front, but I’ve visited my bike in the middle of the night to get something out of the saddlebags or to check something and never once has a desk clerk said anything or even noticed me.

But on this day I left the bike off to the side, out of the way, but still in front of the hotel. As the sun was going down, I wandered outside the hotel to get some air and watch the lights a few blocks away on the strip. I was standing at a corner of the building when I saw two guys standing by my bike looking it over. One reached out and gently tapped my fairing. Or maybe he didn’t tap it, maybe he just pointed at it. The other guy was wearing a Harley jacket and I figured they were riders just talking about how insanely filthy my bike was. Then he touched my hand grip and I got a little pissed. But I watched for a while, far enough away that I don’t think they even saw me. The one wearing the Harley jacket tossed his cigarette butt onto the ground right in front of the door to the lobby despite the ash tray that was four feet away. This got me even more pissed.

Now I’m trying to decide whether or not to walk over and say, “You fellas don’t mind keeping your hands off my bike, do you?” But I’m torn. They didn’t really touch it, and I don’t want to be a dick to guys who might very well be nice, harmless guys.

Then a third friend of theirs walks over and touches my saddlebag! Then he places one finger on the luggage rack as he stands there. He’s not really supporting himself with my bike, he’s just kind of steadying himself. Now I’m pissed. But I’m still torn. Maybe they all ride Harleys and they feel a sense of kinship with my bike, that it's ok to stand around shooting the breeze with some stranger's bike as their coffee table, some more of that "all one big family" bullshit. I really hate being a bully or being mean to people unnecessarily, but I also think it’s just a law that you don’t touch someone else’s bike. Then the third fellow takes his finger off my saddlebag, walks around the other side of my bike, and places his palm on the luggage rack for support. Now I’m definitely pissed.

So I walk up to them very quickly and ask him where he’s from. In broken English he says that they are from Lithuania. I ask him if they touch bikes that don’t belong to them in Lithuania and he doesn’t know what I mean. So in the universal language of I’M FUCKING SERIOUS, I tell him this is my bike and NOT TO TOUCH IT. That he understood. He recoils and is very apologetic and of course now I feel bad. I ask him where he’s going and he says Route 66. I hold out my hand and he shakes it and I wish him good luck, hoping my smile will make up for the menacing tone I had a few seconds earlier.

They all seemed like nice guys, and every time I travel I meet Europeans who come over here, rent Harleys and ride around the west. I suppose I should have been a little nicer, just saying in a friendly way that this is my bike and I don’t like people touching it, but that’s not exactly my style. And truthfully, you really shouldn’t touch someone’s bike without their permission. But I still felt bad.

I moved the bike to a parking spot and then sat outside the hotel under the beautiful Vegas sky. I was wondering what that orange glow was above me... moonlight through the clouds, perhaps? Then I realized it was the Vegas smog glowing with neon from the strip.

A homeless guy came over and tried to hustle the Lithuanian guys, who were still gathered outside the lobby doors. They found him amusing, but I was still a little pissed about the guy touching my bike, so when the homeless guy wandered over to me I stared a hole in his head and he kept walking.

It was time to get the fuck out of Vegas, first thing in the morning.










Blog Eleven

Although Poncho and I have been having a great time on this trip, it felt good to roll out of Vegas on my own. For Poncho, however, being without the Love Machine must have been agony.

After fifteen minutes of light traffic, Vegas was behind me and ahead of me was a place I love... hundreds of miles of Nevada desert. It would be fair to ask what the hell there is to love about the Nevada desert and I’m prepared to answer that.





For one thing, it is uninterrupted riding. There are no deer out here to dart across your path. There are no blind curves to slow you down just a bit. There are no cross-streets, no potholes, no hills to climb, no traffic lights or stops-signs or railroad crossings, and no traffic! The scenery is not the most spectacular... it’s a desert. But there are still big rocks and the fact that you can see for fifty miles in either direction is actually very cool. The sky is enormous. It’s always hot out here, but never humid, and as long as you drink plenty of water it’s not uncomfortable.

The vastness and desolateness of this place makes it a singular riding experience. It tests your resolve and your love of motorcycling. Or if you’re like me, it strengthens it. Out here, if you don’t love riding a bike, you will hate life. There is nothing to entertain you, nothing to distract you. If you ride a bike to impress your friends and they are not here to see it, you are in trouble. If you ride a bike because it’s the “in” thing to do then you will want out... as quickly as possible. If you can’t bear to be alone with your thoughts and your machine, you’d best turn back now. Your thoughts and your machine are all you have for hour after hour and mile and after mile and you won’t even stop for gas until you’re almost out of gas... because it’s not until then that you will find the next gas station.

But what really makes the Nevada desert amazing to me is the people and the buildings. What people? What buildings? Well, that, my friends, is the question.

As you cruise through the desert at eighty-five miles per hour, scanning the vast miles of sand around you and contemplating whatever it is you like to contemplate, you may see ahead of you a building. Hmmm. You haven’t see a building for forty miles, why is there one out here? And as you get closer you see that painted on the side of the building are the words “Live Music... Cold Beer” and you wonder when in the hell this was place was built and who in the world drank cold beer there and heard live music! There is nothing, and I mean nothing around for forty or fifty miles in either direction.

And then twenty-five miles later you spot some ramshackle houses. Two or three, maybe, and bunched together. They look like they’ve been made from scraps of other houses and they’re surrounded by junk cars and junk trucks and other types of junk machinery. How did this machinery get out here? Who lives here and why? How did they get title to this land? Do they work for a living? Surely they don’t commute, say, one-hundred-and-forty miles through the desert each day to work at the Quickmart?

And these houses are most definitely lived-in. You see the people standing outside as you fly by. And the people look exactly as you would expect people living in the desert of Nevada to look... scary.

You ride for another fifty miles seeing no sign of human life and then come to a few mobile homes, dilapidated and old-looking, and again you see people in the yard. How is this possible? Do these structures have electricity? Water? Air conditioning? HBO? Have these people seen the Sopranos or Rock of Love?

At a dusty crossroads I came to a convenience store with a few gas pumps out front. I walk inside and am not surprised to see it’s the general store that time forgot. The shelves are stocked but barely... one or two of each item, items like small jars of spaghetti sauce next to a few containers of Pinesoil, a few boxes of microwave popcorn next to a few boxes of light bulbs. There is an old man standing by the counter and I can tell he’s been wearing those jeans and that tattered leather belt and that vintage western shirt for many days in a row, possibly years.

Attached to the back of the building like an afterthought is a bar. I wander back and the place is empty, except for a pool table and six stools. Through an open door I spot the bartender/short order cook/dishwasher standing at a stainless steel sink washing a pan. He is in his sixties, razor thin, and with a long, scraggly gray beard. He looks beaten down by life in the desert, or maybe just life, and I would love to know how the hell he got here and who his customers are---assuming he has any, and I’m skeptical that he does. Of course, I romantically invent a tragic story for him, that he stopped at this place in the 1950’s on his way to Vegas, his car broke down and he took a job as a cook to earn enough cash to fix it and continue to Vegas where he’d heard they were hiring for all sorts of fascinating careers. One thing led to another and he sold the car to a man with a flatbed truck who offered him cash. The owner of the store let him build a room out back, and he’s been here even since.

His real story is probably nothing like that, but I would so love to know his real story. And the story of the guy out front. And the story of the people who live way out here in the desert, in ramshackle homesteads surrounded by rusting relics. I would love to travel with a photographer and write a book telling the stories of these people if I could get them to tell me, and I’ll bet I could.

After a good long stretch of Nevada desert I got to the start of Death Valley. Interestingly, I’ve been on this road before. Twice. And each time I said the same thing, Why in god’s name would I want to ride a bike through Death Valley? And each time I could arrive at no good answer, and so I kept on riding, right past Death Valley. But since I was going to be reconnecting with Poncho in a few days I didn’t want to get too far adrift. California seemed like a good place to visit, and riding through Death Valley would get me there.



The ride into Death Valley is pretty much like riding through the Nevada desert... but then the road gently slopes downward. And this is strange because you aren’t at a very high elevation to begin with, how far down will we be going? And then you see the sign that tells you that you are four hundred feet below sea level. Ah, that explains it.

It was ninety degrees and tolerable in the Nevada desert. In Death Valley it’s now ninety-eight and slightly uncomfortable. A few more miles into Death Valley it’s one hundred degrees and I’m starting to feel it. It’s like riding through a pizza oven. Another few miles and it’s one hundred and five degrees. It’s like a blast furnace here. Brutal hot. Everything is hot... the ground, the sand, the road surface, the sunlight. And it’s concentrated heat, no mistaking it.

The scenery is similar to the desert, except you see more of those interesting rock formations. So far, Death Valley is nothing more than a deep basin in the desert, a concave section of earth that is extremely hot.

I don’t realize how hot it really is until my mind plays tricks on me and I begin to hallucinate. I imagine that I see a jogger way ahead of me. A few seconds later I realize I’m not hallucinating. There is a man dressed in all-white clothing and a white hat and he is jogging through Death Valley. Surely, there is only one man in the world who would be so insane as to jog through... and then I see a woman jogging through Death Valley. It’s still one-hundred-and-five degrees and I think, they must be married. They say there is someone for everyone, and evidently these two kooks and their insane fetish have somehow found each other, the only two lunatics in the history of the world crazy enough to jog through.... and then I see a third jogger. What am I missing here, folks?

Death Valley, as it turns out, is not that big of a deal. After about 20 or 30 minutes in pretty intense heat and desert scenery, the road climbs up out of the basin and you reach sea level... and the temperature drops to around ninety-five degrees or so... and amazingly... it feels downright cool! The scenery now becomes a bit more interesting, strange rock formations, different colored sandstone. And then the road continues to climb and the temperatures stabilize in the mid-nineties. There are some fantastic curves on this road, and at one point, you climb pretty high and get a good look down at those rock formations. Very Mars-like. Then you begin a long descent with lots of great curves. It’s a fun ride.






I made my way on back-roads to my motel for the night in Lone Pines, California, where I visited a film museum in town that displayed props and various local artifacts that had been used in a great many westerns. Saddles, guns, costumes, cars... all sorts of stuff that we’ve all seen in the great westerns, many of which were shot in this area.

Back at my hotel, I was sitting at a table outside under a spectacular blue sky writing my blog, when a guy on Harley pulled in to the hotel parking lot. I saw that his right saddlebag was missing and the right side of his bike was smashed up, and so I wandered over to ask him what happened. Turns out, a few weeks earlier he had joined a large pack of motorcycles from all over the country who came together to ride from California to Washington, D.C., to honor our fallen soldiers on Memorial Day. It was called the Ride To The Wall, and similar packs were converging on Washington that originated in other places throughout the country.

He was riding with people he didn’t know, and as the pack grew in size (totaling out at over six-hundred bikes by the time they reached Washington), he found himself having a few disagreements with the “road guards”. They kept telling him to tighten up, meaning to ride closer to the guy in front of him. A huge pack of bikes is a difficult thing to get down the road. The pack tends to function like an accordion, tightening up and stretching out as braking and accelerating messages gets passed bike to bike, from the front of the pack to the back. There is a long time-delay, and the front of the pack can already be accelerating away from a green light as the back of the pack is still hitting their brakes for that same light when it was red.

Everyone in the pack had been told to follow the two-second rule, which is to keep a two-second following distance. But at sixty-miles-an-hour that is about two hundred feet of following distance! No one EVER keeps two-hundred feet of following distance in a pack.

Despite that they had state and local police escorts from county line to county line, he was still apprehensive about traffic and of course, the other motorcyclists. There is no way to tell (unless it’s obvious) how much riding experience or how good of a rider the guy in back, in front, and next to you has or is.

While he was traveling at about fifty miles-per-hour, the guy behind him, doing about eighty miles-per-hour to catch up with the pack (the accordion thing), slammed into him. He was knocked off the bike and tumbled down the interstate at fifty miles-per-hour, his bike sliding on it side, while the guy who just rear-ended him also went down.

He always wears a full-face helmet and protective pants and a protective jacket, and it was those things that kept him from getting seriously hurt. A few scrapes was all he suffered. The guy who hit him, however, was seriously hurt, though he’ll survive.

He shared a few more stories of crashes he had, and it always makes me think what a dangerous hobby this is. But then again, if it were a just a hobby I could give it up. It’s a passion, however, and so giving it up is not an option. But I think his story is a pretty good example of why I won’t ride with people I don’t know, ESPECIALLY in packs.

Tomorrow... California roads over to Bullhead, Arizona. Should be fun, provided no one slams into me.


Blog Twelve



I left Lone Pine, California, and headed south. It was a great ride, with desert on one side of the road and trees on the other. Oh, and also those strange brown hills I’ve seen all over California. These are not mountains, people, they’re really not even hills. They’re huge PILES of dirt, if you ask me, and I don’t think they look very nice. They are brown like dirt, probably because they ARE dirt, and they’re covered with brownish and greenish plants or vegetation or whatever it is. But whatever it is that covers these piles of dirt, to me, it looks like hair. Big, brown, hairy hills all over California. Like the humps of a camel. Or the testicles of a mulatto. (Ok, so I’m no Steinbeck.)

For years people have talked about the beautiful California hills, and having ridden the entire Pacific Coast Highway in 2006, I finally realized that these piles of hairy dirt were the “beautiful hills” to which they were referring. Nonsense, I say. These piles of dirt are not the least bit attractive. Where we come from, a big pile of dirt along side the road means they’ve started construction on a mall. In California, it means an extra fifty-grand to your property value. But that’s California, for you.

Along a stretch of I-40, I hopped off the interstate to check out a section of Historic Route 66. Don’t be fooled, though. There’s very little of the original Route 66 left in our country, and sadly what remains isn’t very impressive. Back in 1996, I rode on Route 66 in every state in which it ran (except California) expecting to find some really great stuff and was slightly disappointed. There are some deserted buildings that have the distinct look of the 1950’s, and there are numerous Route 66 museums in many of the states, and there are even some stretches where the buildings have been restored to their original splendor and style, but basically, Route 66 is a road like any other, and one cannot even be certain that you are traveling on the same path as the original Route 66. I recall learning in 1996 that the modern day “Historic Route 66” is often several yards or more away from the original location.

I stopped at a little café in Ludlow, California, that was on Historic Route 66, and the place STUNK of mildew. Foolishly, I sat down at a booth, read the dirty menu, and when the ancient and rather scary-looking waitress finally wandered over to take my order, I said I wasn’t hungry and I left. I rode a section of Route 66 for a while, and then rejoined the interstate, hauling ass to Bullhead, Arizona, where as I arrived in town the temperature on my digital thermometer read 109 degrees... AS I WAS MOVING! Far hotter than Death Valley!

I got to my Best Western in Bullhead early in the day. It was too hot to ride around town, so I stayed writing in my air conditioned room until the sun went down. Then, when it was a comfortable 93 degrees, I rode across the river to Laughlin, Nevada, where I made a donation to Harrah’s Casino. A small portion of the millions of dollars of profit that the casino collects each year is donated to charity, usually about a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a percent, which doesn’t sound like much but can actually add up to hundreds of dollars that go to the needy. As many of you know, I have devoted my life to helping others and will rarely pass up a chance make a cash donation. As usual, sensitive to the pride of the poor, I prefer to make my gift anonymous, seeing it arrives in their hands by means other than simply handing them dough---why embarrass them?--- and the casino allows me to do this. When I felt that I’d given enough (don’t want to spoil them!), I left frustrated and sad---I mean proud of the work I’d done for those less fortunate, and I took a ride up highway 163, a road I really like but had never ridden at night.

The plan was to ride out through the desert until I saw the glow from the massive lights of Las Vegas miles and miles ahead of me. I’ve always wanted to do that but have never got around to it. Tonight was no exception. After about thirty minutes of awesome night-time riding through the desert and those great curves on Route 163 I was getting tired and so I turned back.

Back in Bullhead I answered my favorite emails, the ones that ask, “So how are you and where you headed?” Hmmmm.... I’m busy writing my ten-page daily blog, ya know, the one that tells you how I am and where I’m headed.



Blog Thirteen




I don’t take that many pictures when I travel and I’ll tell you why (after all, such a provocative statement demands an explanation---What? He doesn’t take pictures?).

Pictures blow. For one thing, I don’t care how a great a picture it is, it will never convey the feeling one gets when encountering that view or that sunset or that object in person. It might be a really cool shot, but it will never be as cool as seeing it in real life. Even photographs taken by professional photographers cannot transport you to that moment that took your breath away or made you smile. Granted, it’s nice to return from a trip and see the photos you took which will then remind YOU of what you felt at that moment, but for god sakes, man, don’t bore the hell out of your friends with that crap! (The only exception to the rule is if you have kids. Take lots of pics of the kids smiling, posing, whatever. Pictures of kids make everyone smile. And please, I said take pics of the kids, not your spouse. All kids are adorable; spouses?... well, some are, some aren’t.)

But the other more serious reason to take a minimum of photographs when you travel is because taking too many photographs removes you from your trip! You’re not even there! Your camera is there, and you are operating it, and so every moment becomes about the photograph. Each view and each camera angle is in competition with the last, and heaven forbid you should not get THIS shot or THAT shot! And soon, you spend each moment setting up the shot and looking for the next shot. And what happens is that you see the trip as merely a book of photographs even as you are on the trip!

I’ve seen it a million times. As I sit on a bench somewhere digging the scene, I watch the tourist with the camera hanging from his neck as he takes photo after photo after photo. He’s oblivious to me watching him, he’s oblivious to his sweating and long-suffering children (who are of course forced to pose in front of every conceivable background), and he’s oblivious to where he’s at and what it means to have traveled there. How about putting down the fucking camera and just standing there for a while? How about some quiet contemplation? Maybe ask yourself why you chose the black socks and the sandals. Maybe ask yourself who has walked these paths before you, before this place---wherever it is---became the tourist spot that it is.

Nope, that would never do. Instead, they tumble out of the motor home and immediately begin taking pictures, judging each view not for it’s own value, but for it’s value as a photograph. They jostle, they bustle, they squeeze here and there, they get in the way of others, and they dominate the terrain as they loudly and obnoxiously set up the shot.

I will never forget being at the Four Corners Monument watching grandpa force his two grandchildren to pose separately... then together... then one behind the other... then pointing this way... then pointing that way... then switching sides again... then kneeling... then hugging each other... while a bunch of us patiently waited out of frame for him to complete his photo shoot so we could get a picture. Yes, a single picture. The Four Corners Monument is a small round circle on the ground... why in god’s name would you need seventeen shots of the grandkids standing over this thing? Grandpa waited in line as the tourists ahead of him stood over the circle, took a picture, and then moved on. When it was his turn, he didn’t give a flying fuck how many people were behind him or how long he spent holding up the line. And to me the worst part (aside from his rudeness), is that the kids and grandpa didn’t really get to just take in the fact that they were standing in four states at once, which is a pretty cool thing to have done.

So anyway, my advice is to take a few pics here and there, try to capture a few nice views, but mainly just think about where you’re at. Look for the things that no camera lens can capture, and let it all burn into your memory. In a few years, when the memories are not as sharp or gone altogether, come back. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a memory is worth a thousand pictures.

Oh, and if you’ve traveled but have never noticed plenty of these oblivious and self-absorbed tourists about whom I am writing, then you, my friend, are one.

I rolled out of Bullhead, Arizona, on a great road over to Kingman, Arizona. From Kingman, I took Historic Route 66 to Seligman, and then hopped on interstate 40 to Flagstaff. Along I-40 eastbound I saw dozens and dozens of tractor-trailers pulled over by dozens of Arizona State Troopers. There were also in the rest area dozens of tractor-trailers being inspected by dozens of Arizona State Troopers... and yes, I do mean dozens and dozens. It was BY FAR the largest tractor-trailer roundup I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen many. I wish I knew what was going on.





Every time I’ve been in Flagstaff it’s been a chilly. After the one-hundred-plus temperatures yesterday in Bullhead, the high seventies in Flagstaff felt like winter. I dropped my gear off at the hotel, washed the bike at a car wash, and rode down to Sedona, Arizona.

Good old Sedona. What beautiful scenery! What great red rocks! What brilliant blue streams! What douche bags who flock there to be amongst it all! I’ve already in this blog beaten up on the humble tourist who merely wants some photographs of where he’s been, now it’s time to beat up on rich people. If you know me or have read my previous blogs (ya know, when they used to be funny), you know that one of my mottos is rich people are dicks. Rich people flock to Sedona like Bernie Madoff’s former clients flock to bread lines.

There is only one road into Sedona, and as with most tourist spots, the single road leading into it is perpetually clogged with tourists driving at a snail’s pace, the wife hanging out of the passenger window with a camera and the husband slamming on the brakes every twelve feet so she can take another picture. But because Sedona is also a Mecca for those who have money but little or no imagination, the road is also inhabited by these self-important dicks driving their massive Escalades and Range Rovers, ever-cognizant that they’re paying five-hundred bucks a night for their room in Sedona and not wanting to waste a moment out here on the road when they could be enjoying an Effin Vodka and cranberry on the veranda overlooking the “scenery” and calling comrades who are on the golf course to tell them they’re in Sedona and the weather is perfect.

The rich people---and let’s be honest, they are better than the rest of us---drive as if they own the road. They tailgate in the extreme, they pass cars and bikes at will, and they believe that speed zones and cautionary signs are things for other people to observe. They feel that it’s their prerogative to speed and if they get caught then they’ll pay the fine. (This is one of the stupidest attitudes to have, and of course, wrong, but welcome to America, kids.) (I, of course, speed, pass at will, and occasionally slam on the brakes to harass tailgaters, but I, my friends, am not rich!)

So along the way to Sedona I observed these cell-phone-yakking, SUV-driving fools, and watched a few close calls, amazed, as I always am, at how close we who drive come to dying each time we take to the road.

In Sedona I wandered around town, trying to put a page number to the clothing I saw being worn by the rich dicks, but to no avail. I guess I don’t know the LL Bean or Cabella’s catalog as well as I thought. (My personal favorite is the hiking/mountain climbing gear worn by people who have never and will never hike or climb a mountain.)




I rode back up to Flagstaff to find Poncho at the hotel, refreshed from his stay in Vegas with the family and ready to rejoin the Love Machine in our cross-country journey. We outdid ourselves with lies of events that transpired while the other was gone, and had dinner seated outside at a restaurant in downtown Flagstaff.

Tomorrow, Poncho sees a big fucking canyon.



Blog Fourteen





We hauled ass out of Flagstaff, Arizona, this morning and headed up to the Grand Canyon. Along a stretch of straight road, I started to pass two cars just as a deer began to run at top speed across the road ahead of the lead car. Poncho, in the rear, didn’t know if I saw the deer or not and his heart momentarily stopped as he expected the worst. I had in fact seen the deer and it was far enough ahead for me not to be concerned, but from Poncho’s perspective it must have looked like I was a goner!

When we’re not riding side by side, I’m usually in the lead because I’m doing the navigating and because Poncho’s new Kawasaki is so insanely fast that no matter who I pass or how, he can, with the twist of his throttle, instantly catch up to me. In fact, my big Harley is usually slowing him down while we’re passing cars (which we do frequently). He’s had to hit the brakes a few times because he’s caught up to me so quickly---a strange thing for him to have to do with his bike considering that my bike is giving me all its got! A few times in fact, although I jumped out into the lane before him and was a good distance ahead of him, he has passed ME and THE CAR and gotten back into the lane while I’ll still trying to pass the car! Good god, his bike is fast!

We are serial passers, by the way, although we’re rarely reckless or inconsiderate. Now that everybody and their brother rides a motorcycle, there are a large number of riders who are addicted to this idea of “safe” motorcycle-riding. Their definition of being safe may be wearing a full-face helmet and a one-piece riding suit every time they ride, or it may be taking the advanced rider-training course every two years. And for some people it may mean only operating their motorcycle in full compliance with all traffic laws. These folks don’t believe in exceeding the speed limit, they only pass cars when lawful and with little or no risk, and they generally ride like fucking pussies.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think you should ride beyond your ability. If you feel more comfortable obeying all the traffic laws then do so. One should not take risks while riding a motorcycle. But for people like me and Poncho, it is well-within our ability and virtually without risk for us to pass a whole line of cars while we ride our bikes at one-hundred miles-an-hour, even around a curve. We know how to brake, we know how to corner, and most importantly of all, we know how to read the traffic.

People ask, well, what if a driver doesn’t see you flying up on their left side and THAT DRIVER pulls out to pass the guy in front of him just as you’re riding by? It never happens, folks. Why? Because we’ve been watching them from behind. We can tell who’s looking to pass, who’s ready to pass, and who’s about to pass. And, at one-hundred miles per hour, we are past them in a little less than a second. It takes longer than that for the car to cross the yellow line and enter our lane. However, we’re prepared at all times for that car to cross the yellow line and enter our lane and we’re ready to honk the horn, hit the brakes, or shoot even further to the left in the blink of an eye. Not only are we prepared for it, we fully expect it at all times.

I’m not encouraging unsafe or unlawful motorcycle-riding, and I definitely believe in being considerate to other drivers, but don’t think that just because YOU don’t know how to ride a motorcycle at high-speed and we do that WE’RE being unsafe or because YOU don’t know how to pass cars and we do that WE’RE being unsafe.

Personally, I think the people who think we’re “unsafe” are the people who are unsafe. There is a big difference between CHOOSING not to ride at high speed or pass cars and being INCAPABLE of riding at high speed or passing cars.

Case in point. As we got closer to the Grand Canyon we came upon a white pickup truck following a pack of about fifteen motorcycles. The pack of bikes was traveling at exactly fifty-five miles-an-hour, which was the speed limit. After about ten minutes this started to get annoying because the road was perfectly clear, no sharp or blind curves, the weather was great, and there was absolutely no reason for these bikes to be not be going at least a little faster than fifty-five. At each curve or each upgrade, me and Poncho and the white pickup truck would have to hit the brakes slightly because the pack would slow down a tad, spread out like an accordion, and then tighten up again. )Riding at fifty-five means riding at fifty-three or fifty-four much of the time.)

Poncho and I were trying to figure out if the white truck was with the pack (their chase vehicle) because if he wasn’t, we expected him to jump out and try to pass them at each passing zone. It was obvious to Poncho and I that we were going to pass as soon as we could and we didn’t want this guy pulling out in front of US as we did!

There were several passing zones, but each time we didn’t chance it because this pack was so sloppy and spread out and that we might have had to cut back into them if a car came towards us before we got ahead of the pack---something we are loathe to do.

Well, it didn’t take long before we were being followed by several cars, all of us being kept at the pace of this idiotic pack of bikers. The problem with this, folks, is that no one ever travels at exactly the speed limit, and the people in the back of the line get fed up pretty quick with this slow pace and they start looking to pass. These people might not have the skill or the patience to pass all of us safely. and when they try it they put us all at risk.

Naturally, the Camaro behind Poncho and me starts riding our butt---he can’t quite see past the white pick-up truck in front of us---and then he starts crossing the yellow line to peek out around us and see what’s in front of the white pick-up truck. By now he can tell there’s a pack of bikes up in front but it doesn’t look like he cares: he wants out.

Then it get worse. Way worse. These are long, straight roads with plenty of visibility on either side for the road to see for animals. The curves are long, gentle sweepers, and the speed limit is now sixty-five miles per hour... but the pack stays at fifty-five.

Now, there is a long line of pissed-off drivers behind us trying to figure out why we are going ten miles-an-hour below the speed limit in the Arizona desert. This fucking moronic pack of bikers is oblivious to all of this because, frankly, they don’t know how to ride their shiny expensive motorcycles. They are a fucking menace and an embarrassment.

A pack riding like this INVITES cars to pass them. It practically begs drivers to floor it and try to pass all of us at once. As a direct result of their inexperience and stupidity, Poncho and I are now in danger. The guy behind is growing more and more impatient, and the guy behind him is showing signs of it himself. We are now stuck in the midst of angry drivers constantly tapping the brakes and getting angrier.

There are some very long passing zones, but each time we don’t take a chance because the pack is so spread out that we’ll need twenty seconds to pass them all at once (and we’re still not sure what the white pick-up truck is going to do).

Finally, when it looks like the guy behind us is going to go for it---we don’t want to be around for that, especially if he has to cut back into the pack in a hurry---we see our chance and take it. Normally I would be giving them the “jerk-off” hand signal as I ride past, but I’m up to about a hundred miles-an-hour and I want to keep both hands on the bars. We safely make it past them and haul ass. Some miles later we can see in our rear view mirrors that the car that had been behind us also passed them.

When you ride in a pack of motorcycles at such a slow speed that you practically force irate drivers to pass you, you are unsafe. And you have put yourself in far, far greater danger than Poncho and I were in when we passed them at one-hundred miles-an-hour.

One might argue that the drivers behind the pack should simply respect the bikers right to travel at that ridiculously slow speed and they should patiently wait until the bikers turn off, but that’s not reality. No one is going to sit patiently behind a pack of bikers doing ten miles-an-hour below the speed limit for eighty miles of perfect road. If the bikers don’t know how to ride at sixty-five miles-an-hour on perfect roads, they should pull over and let the traffic that’s bunched up behind them and because of them get past.

We got to the Grand Canyon and I hoped I would still be there when that pack showed up. I would have liked some of them to come over to tell us how reckless we were for passing them, because they would have gotten an earful in return. Naturally, Poncho and the Love Machine were long-gone before that slow-ass pack arrived, and it’s even possible they’re still not there yet!

We hung at the Grand Canyon for a while and watched large groups of Japanese tourists walking by, each of them speaking loudly in Japanese. As they walked by our bench I would yell at them, “Hey! I can hear you talking about us! We’re sitting right here!”

Poncho had the same reaction I did upon seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. Wow. That’s a big frickin’ canyon. So, anything to eat around here? Look, I get it, it’s a big canyon, it’s cool, but what do you expect me to do there after the first thirty minutes?

We were there forty-five minutes and then hit the road, heading down to Sedona for lunch, where some rich dick at the table next to us took off his shoes, crossed his legs while sitting sideways in his chair, and stuck his bare foot into the aisle so the waitress would have to walk around it each time she passed and Poncho and I would have to avoid staring at it. He wisely put on his shoe back on before we addressed the issue, and it’s hard to say whether or not he did so because he heard us loudly discussing rich dicks who take their shoes off in restaurants.

From there we rolled down to Jerome, Arizona, a town built directly onto the side of a mountain, and then rode some serious twisty roads to our hotel in Prescott, Arizona, where I soaked in the hot tub and swam in the pool. Perfect weather today and lots of great roads. And one big frickin’ canyon!


Blog Fifteen




In Prescott, Arizona, we had a delicious and FREE breakfast of powdered eggs, hash browns, as well as some bacon that bore such little resemblance to actual bacon that even an orthodox rabbi would say, “Go ahead, have some”. In the breakfast room, Poncho marveled at the cowboy in the skintight Wranglers with multiple cell phones clipped to his belt, while I considered that Prescott is the perfect first name for a rich kid.

We hit the highway and blasted down to Cave Creek, Arizona, where Poncho had his bike serviced at the Kawasaki dealer and I rode a block away and had my bike serviced at the Harley dealer. Both bikes were completed in record time, and we then took back-roads through the Arizona desert, stopping along the way at huge dam whose name I always forget. We rode through Globe and various other mining towns, and I always like it out here. It’s mostly long stretches of straight road through pure desert, but there are a few spots of higher elevations and twisty roads. At times the temperatures as we WERE MOVING hovered around one-hundred-and-five degrees, and for a spell it was one-hundred-and-eight. Poncho was not digging this desert riding very much, but he survived.




Often in the morning Poncho will ask me how far we’re riding that day and I rarely know. I usually guesstimate... three-hundred-and-eighty miles... four-hundred-and-twenty miles... but since I’m liable to alter the route halfway through the day or because I simply chose a route on the map that looked doable, I really don’t know. And I don’t care to know. The night before, seated comfortably in my hotel with the Weather Channel on, I will find a bunch of scenic roads on the map that lead to a town roughly four-hundred miles away and I’ll book a hotel there. If it turns out my guess is off and I ride four-hundred-and-eighty miles, that’s ok with me. Sometimes when I’m alone it ends up being five-hundred-and-fifty miles and I arrive at ten PM, and that’s ok with me, too. But I’ve made sure that hasn’t happened on this trip because I don’t want to wear Poncho out. A five or six-hundred mile day on back-roads can be brutal.

Traveling with a companion is much different than traveling alone. Obviously, it’s good to have a friend you know well along to share conversation over meals about the days events, and of course we spend a great deal of time being facetious and silly, which is also fun. (Though we’re both in our forties we are capable of extremely immature behavior. Not just capable, we actually prefer and excel at it.) But traveling with a fellow rider also makes for a longer day and slightly more concern.

When I’m alone I don’t care about the mileage I ride each day, I don’t worry about finding a great restaurant, and I don’t even worry about weather. Though I take time to study the weather forecast and plan a route accordingly, I don’t obsess over it. Same goes with finding a great restaurant. Some days you get lucky, some days you most assuredly do not.

But because I am Poncho’s tour guide for the You-nited States, I’m a bit more attentive to things that I would normally leave to chance, such as making sure we only ride GREAT roads, as well as not overdoing our daily mileage. But sometimes I screw up.

I told Poncho in the morning that after getting the bikes serviced we would have an easy two-hundred miles to the one place in the entire country he gave a hoot about seeing... Tombstone, Arizona. But I hadn’t expected the bikes would be done so quickly, and it was still before noon when we were ready to leave Cave Creek, so with a quick look at the map I chose a new route that would bypass Phoenix and most of Tucson. We would skip all interstates and stay on back-roads all day. Except I forgot to mention to Poncho that I changed the route and hence the mileage, so the poor guy rode through two-hundred miles of blazing-hot Arizona desert joyfully thinking he’d arrive in Tombstone at any minute. At around two-hundred miles he asked how much further it was to Tombstone and I calculated about... oh, another two-hundred miles. Basically, he had bravely endured the desert awaiting his prize, and just when he thought the brutal ride was over he learned he was only at the halfway point. I quickly improvised (lied), telling him that getting to Tombstone in the mid-afternoon was idiotic and that thanks to my brilliant planning we would arrive just in time to watch the sun go down! What a far superior way to arrive in Tombstone, and my gift to him! He didn’t buy it for a second.

Really, the only place Poncho gave a hoot about visiting on this entire trip was Tombstone, Arizona. All those westerns he watched as a kid really had an influence on him. When we arrived (in time to watch the sun go down over Tombstone, I might add!) I could tell he was in heaven. When I tried to convince him the actual OK Corral was in Camden, New Jersey, he didn’t buy that either. I then told him that Wyatt Earp had once stayed at our Best Western, and I think he only believed that because he wanted it to be true.

I’ve been to Tombstone before and it’s a great town, but I left Poncho alone to wander the dirt streets and wooden sidewalks while I went back to the hotel. He was like a little kid on candy and soda when he returned, filling me in on all the cowboy history and all the big plans he had for tomorrow. Have fun, I told him. I’ll book us a hotel not far from here for tomorrow night and you can spend all day in Tombstone. I’m riding down to Bisbee tomorrow, and then taking some back-roads that I love to our hotel. My route will be about two-hundred miles, but when you’re done in Tombstone you can take the direct route, which will be about a hundred miles.

“Unless you get caught in a gunfight, which could happen”, I told him, and man did he love that!




The dealer washed my bike after the 60,000 mile service! Yee haw!


Blog Sixteen

Poncho was up and out the door long before I was, this morning. For we were in Tombstone, Arizona, and Poncho was in heaven. I rolled south down to Bisbee, a really cool old mining town that has a great vibe, while Poncho stayed in Tombstone to wander around, visit here and there, and interact with the old west re-enactors, folks who really get in character. No, no, I mean they REALLY get in character.

After Bisbee, I rode awesome Arizona back-roads to within a few feet of the Mexican border, and then took my time over to Safford, Arizona. I arrived in town early enough to do laundry and locate a steak house that looked promising. I texted Poncho to let him know a steakhouse awaited his arrival in town. He replied that he was hanging out with Doc Holliday.

I was in the hotel room writing my blog and wearing my headphones when I looked up to see two giant rows of teeth standing over me. Land-shark? No, it was just Poncho arriving in town after his day in Tombstone with a smile a mile wide. He’d toured the entire town and had a blast, but when he met Doc Holliday he lost all semblance of biker-cool and became a twelve-year old kid. I told him not to feel bad, he wasn’t that cool to begin with.

We rode over to the steak house, which was new in town, and hit the jackpot! The place was owned and operated by a husband and wife and the food was great. Finally! Good food and good service (except for the teenage busboys who would stop by the table every three minutes to mumble something about removing our plates... Uh, we’re still eating, Jonas Brothers, get lost, will ya?).



Before dinner, Poncho handed me an awesome gift. In Tombstone, there is a little shop that makes custom patches while you wait. While there, Poncho had made for me a patch that reads “I’ve pissed in all 48 states.” One must stay hydrated, and I drink a ton of water out here, and so the patch is a reference to my frequent urination stops on the side on the road. It’s a point of fact that I have most definitely pissed on all forty-eight contiguous United States, and I’ve actually pissed on forty-nine states, having ridden to Alaska in 2005... and pissed on it.



Poncho knew that I’ve ridden in and pissed on forty-nine states, but while trying to decide what to write on the patch, the guy making the patch asked him if he should maybe write that I’ve pissed in all the contiguous United States or perhaps write that I’ve pissed on the continental United States. The whole thing got confusing and they finally settled on the number forty-eight. It’s still an awesome and thoughtful gift which I will wear with pride.

Over dinner, Poncho filled me in on more of what he learned about Tombstone, and told me the story of his meeting Doc Holliday... again. Apparently, even Doc had trouble staying in character when he saw how giddy Poncho was, but he pulled it off. Poncho said that the guy playing Doc Holiday was better than Val Kilmer. The guy had the walk, the talk, and the look.

Poncho was extremely impressed and loved the town of Tombstone, and I’m thinking that as a way to repay him for the patch he had made for me, when we return home I will spike his ginger ale with a splash of tuberculosis, which he can then tell people he caught from Doc Holliday.


Blog Seventeen






We rolled out of Safford, Arizona, and took a great road through the forests of Arizona and New Mexico. Lots and lots of sharp curves and switchbacks. Amazing curves, high elevations, cool air, and an enormous gold and copper mine in active operation. The mine is massive, and for miles you ride through the midst of it, gawking at the enormous machinery... the giant crushers, the conveyor belts suspended high in the air. There are storage yards with new diesel truck engines on stands ready to be swapped out and dump truck bodies lined up, ready to be bolted on and put to work. This is a massive operation, as big as a small city.

As you ride, the road climbs higher and higher and you look down into the mine---a stunningly large hole in the earth. The sides of the hole have been carved into steps, which are actually roads that corkscrew up the inside of the mine. You marvel at those absolutely enormous dump trucks scurrying around with their tons and tons of rock on their backs. They dwarf regular-sized trucks, which you can also see, although the regular-sized trucks appear very tiny because they are far below you. They look smaller yet next to those monster dump trucks. The scene is so odd it looks like a scene from a movie, some kind of science-fiction film. You cannot make out people, just machinery, and it looks other-worldly.

We are riding through curve after curve as we climb higher and higher, leaving the mine behind. These are thick, lush forests here, and the smell of pine is in the air. The road is deserted of people, traffic, and towns, and we are taking the curves fast, laying the bikes low; but there are plenty of spots with loose gravel on the curves, and more than a few times we chicken out, not willing to scrape the floorboards when there’s this much gravel around.

The views are magnificent, more like you’d expect to see in the Rockies than in Arizona. You look out on steep mountains and thick forests and then, around a curve... whoa! A black bull standing on the shoulder munching his breakfast. He looks up at us but is not impressed. I know nothing about cattle, but I’m pretty sure this is a bull because I don’t think moo-cows have horns.

A few miles later we round another sharp curve and a momma boar and her baby take off running into the grass. Wow! That was cool. They look quite fierce, to me, little, powerful pigs with horns. Crazy.

Eventually we come down the mountain and leave the forests behind. The terrain around us is now New Mexico desert. I know it well. Windy as hell!

We come to a small town and stop into a Mexican restaurant. It smells dirty, is dirty, and we leave. We find a slightly less dirty Mexican restaurant and have lunch.

We ride for hours through the New Mexico desert, the wind is relentless but tolerable. We pass that massive array of radio telescopes in the desert (the place where they filmed the movie “Contact”). It’s really cool to see several dozen of those huge radar dishes in the middle of the desert with nothing around. They’re pointed to the sky, but it’s not the sky they’re listening to... it’s space... deep space... and they’re listening for intelligent life, to be precise. (Although I don’t know why anyone expects to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe when I’m not so sure we have it here.)




Along a stretch of straight desert road we stop at a little road side picnic area. There is a fence separating the rest spot from the desert, and just on the other side of the fence we spot two deer carcasses. Actually, they’re not exactly carcasses. All that’s left is the deer skins... everything else has been eaten, removed, and picked clean. We can see that the legs have been torn off and are scattered a few feet away. To us city boys it looks like a monster has come along and slaughtered and devoured these deer in a blood thirsty rage. It was probably wolves or coyotes, but the remains of these deer, their flattened skins and severed legs, are quite scary-looking.

At the next town we see a sign warning us there’s a “congested area” ahead, which turns out to be two buildings and a side street. Our skill and experience allows us to navigate this treacherous traffic nightmare with ease.

At the next town, only slightly larger than the congested one, we see a coffee shop and we stop in. Way cool! The coffee is made in a Mr. Coffee machine behind the counter---no lattés or double cappuccino here---but the western-style furniture is really cool, and the place has a great vibe. Two little white dogs greet us, and Poncho lays right down on the floor and gets some doggie loving. We have excellent cake and coffee and chat with a few locals.



Eventually we make it to the town of Roswell, New Mexico, sight of the supposed Alien visits and home to the UFO Museum and Research Center (or as I think of it, the “research center”). I’ve been to and written about this place before. It’s a joke. There’s as much “evidence” there of an alien landing as there is evidence that Stedman will marry Oprah. (Stedman... I swear to god if you don’t marry Oprah I will!)




We visit a gift shop across the street and it’s all I can do to keep from laughing when I see the proprietor. He looks more like an alien than any rendition of an alien I’ve ever seen! Fuckin’ hilarious! He has swept back hair, big, bushy eyebrows, and a long, steep nose---and make no mistake... he’s not TRYING to look like an alien, this is just how he looks!

I would have so loved to have taken a picture of him and put it on my blog, but he is such a nice guy that I can’t do it. This proves, once again, that despite my reputation of having zero compassion for anyone at anytime for any reason, I am, as I have long professed to be, a deeply caring human being worthy of the highest accolades and the loftiest praise. Mark my words, though, someone has taken a picture of this guy and placed it on the Internet.



Poncho illegally and irresponsibly trying to start an avalanche while I, the Love Machine encourage him to mend his ways.



Blog Eighteen

We left Roswell, New Mexico, under sunny skies. Goodbye, Roswell, you Mecca for the genetically gullible and paranoid. I won’t bore the reader with my long-winded and detailed explanation for why I believe some people are neurologically predisposed to be conspiracy theorists, mainly because I don’t want the government (who I am aware reads my blog) using that information to counter-program my thinking on that subject (and other subjects) with the use of gamma rays, which I know they do because I can prove it. I will, however, bore the reader with long-winded and detailed stories of our day’s ride.

We hit long, straight roads through the New Mexico desert, far less windy today, and early enough in the morning that the sun hadn’t yet begun to scorch us. It was quite cool and comfortable.

After an hour or two of riding eighty-five to ninety miles-an-hour on these desolate roads, free of traffic, free of buildings, Poncho is about a football field’s length behind me when I think I see a black pickup truck behind him. I didn’t notice anyone coming up behind us, and I have no idea where this guy came from. Maybe it’s not a truck, I think... maybe it’s the sunlight shining off Poncho’s black saddlebags which hang on either side of his bike... it’s hard to tell. A closer look in the mirror and I realize that there is indeed a pickup truck on his ass, about a car length behind him, it appears to me, and we are traveling about ninety miles-an-hour. What the fuck? A cop, maybe?

I have written many times about tailgaters, who I consider to be people pointing a loaded handgun at my head with their finger on the trigger. I don’t allow myself to be tailgated, not even for ten seconds. When I realize my eyes are not playing tricks on me, I immediately brake to about seventy and move to the right side of the lane. Poncho sees me slowing, but doesn’t want to brake because he doesn’t want this guy running him over. A second later, Poncho, riding at about ninety miles-an-hour, and this black pickup truck, about ten feet behind him, blow past me straddling the double-yellow. After they’re past, Poncho moves to the right of the lane and waves the guy around him. The guy floors it and passes Poncho on the double-yellow. Unbelievable!

We have no idea if the guy was being a dick and looking for trouble, or just a typical clueless moron who had no idea he was doing anything wrong or dangerous. Had one of those huge, black birds we often see along side the road taken flight and flown into Poncho’s path, requiring a quick brake, the guy in the pickup truck would almost certainly have killed Poncho.

I discovered that the plastic bottle I keep in my side bag for urinary purposes is just as effective at high speed! So no more pulling over every twenty minutes to take a whiz! Now I simply wave Poncho to the lead, unzip, and fill the bottle. When Poncho learned what I was doing, he wasted no time in getting in front of me when he saw that bottle come out!


There's nothing like going when you're going at niney miles-an-hour! Ah, sweet relief!


We entered Texas and had lunch at a mom-and-pop restaurant in a little town, checking out all the cowboys at the other tables. Cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and faded Wranglers were the required dress code, and it was great fun to see that every person in the place knew every other person... except us. We ate and hit the road.

At one point, Poncho quickly pulled to the shoulder and stopped, removing his full-face helmet in a nanosecond. I knew what that meant... bug in his helmet. As he dug the thing out I pulled up next to him and berated him mercilessly, telling him he should have waited till we got to the hotel some hours later to remove the bug instead of pulling over and slowing us down. I informed him that real bikers aren’t bothered by bugs in our helmets and that I had a live hornet in my helmet stinging me for the past three days, and that the hardest part was catching it each morning in our hotel room to reinsert it in my helmet for the day’s ride.

We stayed on back-roads all day to Wichita Falls, Texas, and while Poncho went in search of Mexican food, I took a dip in the pool. It was a great day of riding! Texas, you big bastard, I love ya!


Blog Nineteen

Ah, good ole’ Wichita Falls, Texas. Last time I was here I stayed at a Best Western just outside of town which could have passed for a hotel in Manhattan... marble floors, cherry wood furniture... what a joint! This time... not so much.

We rolled out of our hotel parking lot in great spirits, once again under beautiful blue skies and white puffy clouds. Three seconds later I was lost. Now, as Poncho will testify, I don’t get lost very often and when I do it’s for about a minute. I saw the sign for 287 South, the road I wanted, but the sign was pointing towards the ramp for I44 west, which didn’t seem right. I didn’t feel like getting on the interstate if I was going to be lost, and so I trusted my instinct and stayed on the back road. Ah! There it is 287 South. Five minutes down 287 South I spotted a sign indicating I was on 287 North. How the hell did that happen? We made the dreaded U-turn and were promptly informed by a sign that we were now on 287 North. What the fuck? Texas! You whore! You’ve never misled me before! What in the world is going on! How can both directions of the same freakin’ road be 287 North?

Back at the ramp to I44 West, I confirmed that 287 South does indeed run for a few miles with I 44 West, and we realized that the signs we’d seen for 287 South and 287 North were actually indicating that we were ON A LOOP HEADING TOWARDS 287 BUSINESS!... North and South bound. Maybe the arrow signs were missing, or maybe some traffic engineer in Wichita Falls needs a good ass-kicking.

287 South took us to my old friend 82 East and some great Texas riding. Haulin’ ass, y’all! Texas is that great big slab of terra firma that is a world unto itself, and I love it. We stopped at a few dusty, deserted Texas towns to ride around the town square while Poncho marveled at the closed-up shops. These are the types of town squares that they don’t have where we come from. They look right out of an old Western movie, the store fronts, the wooden railing where one might hitch a horse, the double doors leading into the saloon. Like most deserted towns, they weren’t completely deserted. There is always sandwiched between the empty stores at least two or three that are still operating. Hanging on by a thread, no doubt, but still open for business. You wonder what this town was like in it’s hey-day. What caused the boom, here? And what brought the bust? Where did everyone go?

We stopped at a German deli, not something you expect to see in Texas, but those sausage sandwiches and homemade bread might be found in heaven! Mamma mia! We sat in the shade, eating our sandwiches and watching the Texas locals come and go. I think you can learn a lot about humanity by watching people park. Some are excellent, some are so-so, and some appear to be blind. And some have their head so far up their own ass they need a colonoscopy to check their teeth. It’s amazing to me that people who probably wouldn’t describe themselves as ignorant fucks will merrily take up two parking spaces---well, I’ll only be a minute---or park so close to or just over the white line that they may as well take up two spaces.

We wound our way through Texas on back roads, carefully avoiding any big towns, and hopped on the interstate just before the Loosiana border. Somewhere in Texas I’d spotted a billboard for a western-wear superstore in Loosiana, far in advance of our arrival, and so when we crossed the state line I took that exit and delivered us to a huge western-wear joint. We wandered around and admired the rodeo gear and leather horse-apparatus. I wanted to buy something for my friend Alexis who ride and keeps horses, and the sales girl suggested some fancy chrome thing one puts into the horse’s mouth. I had no idea what it was, and I informed her I didn’t think it was a good idea to buy Alexis a part for her horse.

I asked the sales girl if she knew an excellent restaurant that served real Cajun food, not a tourist place, but a place to which the locals go. Now, as any experienced traveler will tell you, asking the locals for recommendations on ANYTHING can lead to some smashing successes or some dismal failures. Just because they were born and raised in, let’s say, the bayou, doesn’t mean they don’t consider Appleby’s the pinnacle of fine dining. Trust me friends, somewhere in Texas is a cowboy who will direct you to Outback when you ask him for the best steakhouse in town.

The other problem is that plenty of people all over the country judge the quality of food by the price. You ask them for the BEST restaurant in town and they direct you to the cheapest. It’s hard to get good dining advice from people who consider $14.99 for a steak and lobster dinner about right.

So, not only is the quality of the advice often in question, but sometimes even the methodology can be problematic. People seem incapable of saying they have no answer for your question even when they have no answer for your question. In their effort to be helpful (can’t blame them there) they will strive to produce ANY answer. So, for at least ten minutes I stood there while a detailed discussion took place between the three sales girls over which local restaurant had the best Cajun food. The one at the strip mall, or the one that was more like a bar, or the one that didn’t open till five.

Damn, ladies, just pick one.

Well, the one at the mall is expensive, but the crawfish is good. The one that is like a bar also has good crawfish, but they don’t have great steaks. If you also want a great steak you should go to the one at the mall or the one that opens at five, but the one that opens at five doesn’t have great crawfish. I mean, it’s GOOD crawfish, but you have to shell them yourself. The one at the mall they shell for you, and the one that’s like a bar they also shell them for you. But they don’t have great steaks. And it can be dirty. Well, not dirty, but crowded. And it can get loud on karaoke night, which is every night except Friday, when they have a band. Which is also loud.

I told them we were headed to Monroe, Louisiana, about fifty miles away, and asked if maybe there was something along the way that was excellent. Finally, one young lady told us about a steak house on the way to Monroe that was the best in town. Turns out it was pretty good.

Arriving at our hotel in Monroe we saw about ten young kids hanging around the pool and being loud. We wondered if they were guests of the hotel or trespassers and if our bikes would be safe. Let’s just these kids looked like the words parole or probation would soon be permanent parts of their vocabulary. About fifteen minutes later I was in the front office buying some laundry soap when the kids were ordered off the property by the desk clerk, who had caught them sneaking into the breakfast room and stealing food.

With the pool now free of miscreants, I took a wonderful swim. It was a hot day and the water felt great. The outdoor hot tub, however, looked like it was filled with dirty bath water. Hot tubs are like women, no two are alike, and it’s amazing to me how they range from pristine to disgusting from one hotel to the next. I don’t know if it’s the chemicals or what, but they vary wildly.

We were half a day’s ride from Naw Lin’s, but I wanted to keep up the leisurely pace all the way home and I knew a stop there would mean staying there for an extra day and THAT would mean having to haul ass to get home through some congested parts of the country. If we headed through Mississippi tomorrow and into Tennessee, we could stay on back roads for another couple of days and take our time.

Plus, I’d promised Poncho’s wife I’d get him home safe and sound and I knew that when Poncho sat for the first time on Bourbon Street and had blackened catfish, voodoo shrimp, jambalaya, beans and rice, and buttered corn bread I might not be able to get him home at all.


Blog Twenty... coming soon!

2006 Blogs: Uh-oh

Blog One A Pre Blog

Once again the time draws near to my annual sojourn across the country. Thirty days of freedom, to ride, to dine, to observe, to find out what the word sojourn means and if I’m using it correctly. Thirty days of hotels and back-roads and matronly waitresses named Ida asking me if I saved room for a slab of pie---“It’s fresh, hon.” Actually, Ida, I did save room. There’s a six inch section of my stomach bag, just above my lower intestine that’s wide open.

Thirty days of going where the wind takes me. (Of course, I’m on a motorcycle not a sailboat, so “going where the wind takes me” doesn’t make any sense. Thirty days of going where The Weather Channel says it’s not going to rain is more like it.)

Interstates, back-roads, toll-roads, speed-traps, State Troopers and local yokels. Tailgating mini-vans driven by soccer moms on cell phones. (Actually, EVERYONE is on a cell at all times, everywhere. And everyone tailgates, always.)

Truckers in the left lane, running seventy-five in a fifty-five zone, amped up on coffee and nicotine, fifteen hours out of Boston (we’re now in Houston), with a thousand miles to go and determined to get there by morning.

Retired people in enormous motor homes or towing enormous motor homes. Hey, Pops, aren’t you the same guy who couldn’t parallel park his Chevy Lumina? What are you doing towing that freakin’ whale behind your shiny new dual-ee pick-up truck? Oh, seeing the country, are ya? I didn’t realize the country consisted of Interstate Highways and KOA campsites! How about shutting off that left blinker when you get a sec, it’s been on since Cleveland!

Thirty days of hotel hot tubs and people who shouldn’t even own bathing suits much less wear them in public. Pardon me, are you aware that your varicose veins are an exact duplicate of our nation’s interstate highway system? Remind me not to take Rt. 80 on the way home, I don’t like where that’s headed.

Thirty days of questions from friendly strangers along the road. “Say, is that your motorcycle?” What gave it away, Doris? The helmet, the leather jacket, the maps spread across the table, and the fact that you and I are the only two people in the diner except Ida and the cook?

“My heavens, did you ride that thing here from Philadelphia?” No, m’am, I had it shipped to Camden, New Jersey, and I rode it from Camden, New Jersey, to Ashville, North Carolina, where I then had it shipped to Kennesaw, Georgia, and I rode it here from Kennesaw.

“Doesn’t your butt get sore?” It does. But not from motorcycle riding. It gets sore from the weekly colonoscopies that my doctor, Bruce, assures me is necessary for proper preventive medicine. That reminds me, do you have a flashlight and a mirror I can borrow?

And thirty days of hotel cleaning people who think the DO NOT DISTURB sign means I want them to run the vacuum cleaner into my door at eight AM as they vacuum the hallway outside my room. Hey, don’t worry about the hallway, try cleaning that shower curtain. I’m ready to call CSI in here to check for DNA on that thing!

And thirty days of motorcycle-crashing advice. Why do people, upon learning that I ride a motorcycle, immediately feel the need to tell me about someone they know whose face was torn off in a motorcycle crash, or who ruptured a spleen in a motorcycle crash, or who was ran over by a tractor-trailer while riding a motorcycle and is now just a head and torso—no arms, no legs, and no funny-stick (if you know what I mean by funny-stick).

It’s not like I say to them, “I ride a motorcycle. Do you think anything bad could happen to me?”

Imagine if I had the same attitude when meeting people. Oh, you just got married! My friend was married. His wife was banging every guy on the block. Ever see a fella with genital herpes?

And what’s with the all the unsolicited advice on how not to crash? Everyone has to first tell me how dangerous it is and then remind me to be careful. People who’ve never ridden a motorcycle in their life and who can barely drive a car somehow think they are letting me in some Zen-like secret to safe motorcycling with one ridiculous comment or another. They like to say, “It’s not you I worry about, it’s the other guy.”

Do you think I don’t know about the other guy? I’ve been watching out for the other guy my entire life! The other guy NEVER sees me. In fact, YOU’RE probably the other guy!

Another one I like is. “I’m sure motorcycling is fun, but you hit one rock and you’re dead.”

One rock? One rock will kill me? Uh, yea, if it’s the size of a water-buffalo, maybe. But don’t you think I’d SEE a rock the size of a water buffalo and ride around it or STOP before hitting it?

I’ve hit plenty of rocks and they haven’t killed me. What I’d like to do is hit some of these people with a rock and then say, See! You didn’t die!

And don’t get me started on the helmet debate. People who don’t know ANYTHING about motorcycling (except that their friend’s uncle’s neighbor hit a rock and lost his entire spine and now lives in a drawer in his mother’s house) seem to be convinced that anyone who doesn’t wear a helmet while riding a motorcycle is insane. I, of course, pretty much agree, but these people are really passionate about making their point and will do anything to get me to agree that helmet-wearing is the most important thing in the entire world.

Yea, yea, I get it, the helmet protects the brain, etc., etc., etc.. But so does safe riding. And so does educating other drivers to be safe. And so does vigorous law enforcement. There are a lot of things that will make riding a bike safer, but these people only seem to know about the helmet.

Hey, folks, when YOU ride a bike, YOU wear a freakin’ helmet! Until then, leave me alone. (Oh, and watch out for the other guy!)

And don’t let me forget thirty days of my fellow motorcyclists, many of whom are great, but some are, well, annoying. Like the ones who ask you a question about your bike not because they want an answer from you, but because they want to tell you about their bike. “Is that a Kawasaki?” Well, yes it is. “Oh, I have a blah blah blah at home and I just had the local shop put on some chrome blah blah blahs and this weekend I’m going to buy a blah blah blah which will give me three more horsepower, even though I had it on the dyno last week and the mechanic said it’s the fastest and most powerful bike in the entire history of motorcycling and certainly on the face of the planet at this moment and... uh, excuse me, are you sleeping?”

Yes, I’m sleeping! I have my own motorcycle, why do I care about your motorcycle? Why in god’s name would I be impressed about how much money you spent on chrome? I’m on a cross-country road trip and the only information you can share about your hometown is that you have a bike at home with a ton of useless chrome on it? How about suggesting a good restaurant for me? Or some great roads? Or letting me know where the cops like to hide out with their radar guns?

Or the mileage freaks who insist on telling me how many miles they have on their bikes about three seconds after I meet them. “Yea, my blah blah blah is only three years old and I already have four thousand miles on it. How many miles do you have on your bike?” Only five hundred, I tell ‘em. But for three hundred of them I was riding a wheelie!

Oh, and allow me to mention the other mileage freaks. The ones who tell me how few miles they have on their bike. “I have a blah-blah-blah at home... three years old... only has 400 miles!” Hmmm. Isn’t this a little like saying, See my wife over there, the beautiful blonde with the huge knockers... we’ve been married three years... I never even kissed her!

Blog Two Leaving The House A Day Early

Everyone complains about the weather yet nobody does a thing about it. I decided to change that. Hurricane Ernesto was moving in tomorrow and looked to track right through my planned route through West Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas. So I left a day early and hauled ass, nearly 700 miles due west, ending up tonight (Thursday) in Carrollton, Kentucky, fifty miles past Cincinnati, and well west of the anticipated path of Ernesto. I would have to skip my first big stop, The President Clinton Library, in Little Rock, Arkansas, but no big deal. I just feel bad I won’t be able to get the souvenirs I wanted to get, like the official President Clinton Meat Thermometer for my friend the chef, and the official President Clinton “Eatin’ Ain’t Cheatin’” Tee-shirt for my friend who’s having an affair with his much-younger secretary.

Today was a pure mileage day---interstates and 80 MPH the whole way. The only time I wasted was an extra twenty minutes in the Cracker Barrel spent trying to convince the blonde at the next table to come join me in the hot tub at the Super Eight. I think she was ready to give it a shot when I mentioned I’d be wearing my souvenir Ohio... Oh Higher... thong that I’d purchased on a previous trip. She turned an interesting shade of gray and left without saying goodbye. Doesn’t anybody have any pride in their home state anymore?

Friday

Today (Friday) was when my trip really began. There were some clouds and light mist when I left Carrolton, Kentucky, this morning, so I put on my rain gear just to be safe. True to the golden rule of motorcycling (a rule that is as well-proven as the law of gravity), once the rain gear was on, the skies cleared up.

Later, while removing my rain gear, I broke yet another zipper on my Joe Rocket rain pants. This time it was the zipper that runs the length of my leg and without this zipper the pants are useless. I stuffed them rather forcefully into a trash can while using some language that would make a sailor blush. I would have stuffed them up Joe Rocket’s ass had he been present. A few hours later I passed a Harley dealer and I stopped to buy some new rain pants. Never mind that I was only interested in buying rain pants and not an entire motorcycle, the salesman didn’t let that get in the way of his trying to turn an 80 dollar purchase of some rain pants into an 18 thousand dollar sale of a new bike! Hmmmm... you know what, I do need some new rain pants, I might as well pick up a new bike while I’m here. Let me just run home and get my checkbook. I only live about 40 hours away. Even after I assured him I would not be buying a new bike, just some new rain pants, he valiantly hung on, trying a new approach. “So, what do you do?” he asked. I’m a former food biologist. I invented the McDonald’s Thick Shake, went the dialogue in my head. But when a little girl in Wisconsin collapsed a lung trying to drink one of my shakes through a Twisto Straw I was overcome with grief. Now I travel the country buying rain pants and searching for people in need of the Heimlich maneuver.

Anyway, now that I had clear skies I decided it was time to hit the back roads. I took a route through Indiana that followed the river between Kentucky and Indiana. It was slow-going, not very scenic, lots of towns, traffic, big trucks, a Wal-Mart every mile and a half, and needless to say, I never even got a glimpse of the river (although I occasionally smelled it). I did however ride through a town named Santa Claus, which was kind of neat. It was sunny and 80 degrees so I wasn’t exactly in a Christmas mood (not to mention that I’m Jewish) but it was cool seeing the Kris Kringle Supermarket and the Noel Hardware Store, although I was slightly disappointed in not finding the North Pole Urology Office.

Most of the day was spent getting through Indiana and feeling bad for West Virginia. West Virginia is known for having lots of toothless, inbred, redneck, Hill-Billy, coverall-wearing, tobacco-chewing, backwoods, backwater, Podunk hicks. But truth-be-told, Kentucky, Missouri and even Indiana have just as many toothless, inbred, redneck, Hill-Billy, coverall-wearing, tobacco-chewing, backwoods, backwater, Podunk hicks as West Virginia does. And let’s not talk about Arkansas! (Last time I rode through the Ozarks I was convinced I was riding through the largest Hollywood production ever made! But where were the cameras? Where were the makeup and wardrobe people? After all, I see the beautifully recreated sets designed to look like run-down, Hilly-Billy shacks—in fact, I’ve seen dozens of them for scores of miles. And I’ve seen the extras, hundreds of them, wearing the well-worn overalls supplied by the wardrobe department. And I’ve noticed the clever way the extras appear to have no teeth, somehow accomplished by the special effects department. And yet I see no director, no camera man.)

I finally made it out of Indiana (Hoosier Daddy!) and into Missouri (a helmet law state). Around sixty miles into Missouri I called ahead and booked a motel in a town called West Plains, another hundred miles west from where I was (or “wester”, as I like to say). Highway 160 ran right into West Plains and I saw on the map that a fifty mile or so section of it was marked “scenic” so I gave it a shot. Well, let me tell you it was a PERFECT motorcycle road! Stunning, amazing! If you can find a way to ride Missouri 160 from Poplar Bluff to West Plains (around 100 miles long) DO IT! Hundreds of tight curves, dozens of switchbacks, no stops, no lights, no towns really (hardly any gas stops or restaurants either, I might add), and 55 MPH the whole way. (Actually, only that fifty mile bit that is marked scenic is completely devoid of stops or services, there is some stuff before and after that section. The fifty mile bit, which is the best part, runs from Doniphan to Alton.)

The scenery is awesome and the road is in perfect shape. This area skirts the edge of the Ozarks, so the view as you ride is of the mountains and the forests and the rolling hills. There are misty fields filled with sheep and low-land lakes. The road runs through the Mark Twain National Forest for a spell, and crosses a river or two, and the entire road is perfect. Just like I saw in Arkansas on a previous trip, this road provides a view of houses (I use that word loosely) and people (I use that word loosely as well) that us city-folk just don’t ever get to see (except when watching the film Deliverance).

Most of the road is natural scenery, but occasionally you see the locals and their shacks. Shacks! Actual shacks that people live in! Where I come from if someone has a shack he keeps his lawnmower in it. These people live in their shacks (which made me wonder where they keep their lawnmowers---until I spotted their lawnmowers either on the porch or somewhere on the lawn, usually at the end of a single swatch of mowed turf, the mower itself surrounded by overgrown lawn, abandoned in mid-mow as if the person using the mower had to take a call, oh, about two years ago, and was still on the phone. (If this was the case, it was probably a call from my Aunt Reese who could easily keep you on the phone for two years.)

And junk! Where do they get all that junk to put around their shack? Old school buses, rusting cars, refrigerators---oh sorry, one of those refrigerators has an extension cord going to it---they actually use that one---but what about the six others? And fifty-five gallon drums, road signs, piles of construction debris? Where did they get all that stuff? There’s tons of it! I would assume that these people are poor, but if I had to go out and buy all the stuff they have surrounding their shacks I’m not sure I could afford it. And I don’t mean buy it new, I mean buy it in the condition it’s in.

And why are there so many abandoned shacks and mobile homes right next to shacks and mobile homes in which people are living? Five feet away from an abandoned mobile home is a lived-in mobile home. And I know what you’re thinking, how do I know they’re abandoned? Little things give it away, like there’s a wall missing. Or two walls missing. Or the roof has collapsed into the living room. Or someone has parked a car in the kitchen and then placed another car, upside down, on top of the first. Or part of the mobile home has burnt down and the other part has a tree growing out of it. (Actually, you’re right. I don’t know that they’re abandoned, I’m just assuming. How presumptuous of me.)

But still, why are they in such close proximity to each other? What did they do, first decide it was time to move and then have a house delivered and parked right next to the old house? “Put the new one on the left side of the old one, Marlin. Henry wants to be closer to the coast.”

Anyway, the point is, if you don’t love the natural scenery and the amazing curves and hills of Missouri 160, you might at the very least be fascinated, as I am, by a lifestyle which completely amazes me but which seems to be average as far as the Ozarks go.

The only thing I didn’t see was wildlife. No deer, no moose, no raccoon, skunk or groundhog. I didn’t even see any road kill, and I was wondering why. And then it hit me. This is the Ozarks, baby! The locals ATE all the wildlife!

Tomorrow, off to Oklahoma.
Blog Three Saturday

I headed out through Missouri on Highway 14, another twisty two-lane through scenic backwoods. I saw more of the interesting lawn ornamentation that I wrote about previously, a truly impressive collection of rusting machinery and unidentifiable objects. I can’t help it, I’m dying to know where one would get a huge metal trough and why one would fill it with three truck tires and the hood of a car and let it sit for years right next to the front door of one’s home.

The weather was great and traffic was light. As I neared the Oklahoma border I knew I was getting close to the heartland of America when the Wal-Mart’s began appearing every ten miles instead of every mile and a half, and when I began getting the one finger salute from oncoming motorists. For reasons unbeknownst to me, drivers in the Midwest keep one hand on the steering wheel at the twelve o’clock position---I don’t know where they keep the other hand---but the one that is on the steering wheel at the twelve o’clock position is usually hanging limply over the wheel or occasionally gripping it lightly with all five fingers. But in either case, as the driver and I pass each other in opposite directions he or she will raise their index finger at me by way of acknowledgement. One finger, that’s it. Very subtle, very relaxed. No smile, no wave, just a slightly-raised index finger. I don’t know why this is, but I certainly don’t mind it. (Drivers where I come from also frequently raise a finger at each other, but I can assure you it is rarely the index finger.)

As for the Wal-Mart’s appearing every ten miles, I am only slightly exaggerating. And there are some things that baffle me about Wal-Mart. Such as, why do people shop there? Why do people buy that crap? It’s crap, isn’t it? I’m not the most sophisticated shopper, but it seems to me that if you pick out three pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, four dress shirts, and a one-hundred-and-five ounce container of Sloppy Joe Mix and your bill comes to eighteen dollars there’s a good chance that the stuff isn’t the highest quality. You can buy two pairs of shoes at Wal-Mart for nine dollars. If you put on one pair at the checkout counter they might wear out before you get to the car (but then you can always put the other pair on for the ride home). I don’t know why people would want to buy stuff so poorly made, whatever the price. I know that people who don’t have a whole lot of money tend to shop at Wal-Mart, but I would think that people with less money would be even more interested in quality. If you don’t have enough money now to buy a quality product I’d guess you won’t have enough money to buy a replacement when the cheap one breaks or wears out in three months!

This, I think, is a clear example of the flawed thinking of the American people, or as I like to think of them, the American Sheeple. Not to belabor the point, but Wal-Mart really does sell crap. Absolute junk. It might be a brand name they’re selling, but it’s not manufactured buy that brand, it’s manufactured by a copycat company who has licensed the product for sale in Wal-Mart.

It’s disappointing to me that Americans aren’t smart enough to take one look at the merchandise in Wal-Mart and turn and walk out. Of course, these are the same people who wait outside in the cold on a Friday night for an hour to get into Appleby’s or some other restaurant chain that serves dog food, and I can’t understand that either.

People like to think that Wal-Mart (and similar companies, such as Home Depot) have low prices because they buy in volume and because they’ve streamlined their inventory and shipping methods. Of course there is some truth to that and they should be commended for these innovative ideas. But the real truth is that these innovations only account for some of the lower cost of their products. The lower manufacturing standards are the real cost-cutters. The stuff is crap. And that Americans don’t seem to know or care that they are buying crap is the reason the whole thing works.

Technically, it should not work. Americans should buy a product at Wal-Mart or Home Depot and when that product stops working or wears out in six months, the customer should feel cheated and foolish and should vow to never do business with that store again. But that’s not what happens. The stuff wears out or breaks in three months and the people return and buy a replacement---the exact same thing.

Another thing that never ceases to amaze me is that Wal-Mart has a jewelry counter. A jewelry counter at Wal-Mart! I’ve never known much less dated a woman who wouldn’t strangle me to death in my sleep if I purchased for her a piece of jewelry at Wal-Mart. (And if she didn’t, her mother would.)

The only good thing I can see about Wal-Mart is that it provides a nice summer job for college professors working on their doctorate dissertations in quantum physics, as I’m assuming most of the Wal-Mart employees are. (Well, those Wal-Mart employees who aren’t working on advanced mathematics degrees, that is. If I hear one more gum-chewing checkout clerk talking on her cell phone about Euclidian geometry and the sum-total of zero integer equations while ringing up my Sloppy Joe mix I’ll just... I don’t know what! And you can’t complain to the manager because the managers are all astronomy majors and they need the math nuts to help them with their Big Bang projections and light particle theories.)

Crossing into Oklahoma I took off my helmet and twisted the throttle. I like Missouri, but I love Oklahoma. The people are great, for one thing. They’re private people, not too gabby, not too uppity. They know they live in Oklahoma and they act like it. In the other mid-western states, as well as some southern states, I’ve encountered people who like to think they live in the East. (As if!) These phonies drive something other than a pick-up truck, they wear things other than cowboy hats and boots, they smoke cigars rather than chew them, they don’t ask for coffee, they ask for latte, and they carefully avoid the wearing of clothing not licensed by NASCAR. Oh, and they use shampoo rather than a bar of soap to wash their hair. God damn it, this is rural America, not Cherry Hill, N.J., and you live in the middle of the country, act like it!

I took a little detour through Tulsa where like most mid-western towns after five o’clock and on weekends you can take a nap on any street without fear of molestation. It’s a ghost town. No one around, every place is closed. I roared up and down the streets of downtown Tulsa listening to the pipes echo off the big office buildings. As much as I love riding back roads, I also occasionally love to ride through big cities, either late at night when there’s no traffic or as in Tulsa today, when the place is deserted. (I hate to ride anywhere near big cities at any other time.)

From Tulsa I took OK 64 to Perry, Oklahoma, where along the way I saw a curious sight. A long stretch of one side of the road was lined with quite large, handmade and hand-painted, multi-colored metal signs reading, “diseasedeath theykilledmycattle conspiracysickness youwilldie” and a whole bunch of other bizarre and frightening words and phrases. There were dozens of these signs, with dozens of words and phrases, each letter probably a foot high! A ways back from the road I could see a well-fortified house that would make you think a crazy person lived there even without those signs. There were also some enormous yellow flags in the field, just blowing in the wind. Even the flags looked crazy! When I got to the motel I asked the clerk about what I’d seen and she had no answers for me, except to say that the signs had been there for years and years and that the guy was crazy and I would be well-advised to stay away from that property. I, of course, fear no man and would have boldly gone back to get a better look at that lunatic and his signs were it not for the fact that I had just finished dinner and vaguely recalled my mother telling me to always wait at least two hours after eating a meal before confronting a mad-man in the middle of prairie country where the state police are at least three hours away. When the two hours were up it was dark, so maybe I’ll go back tomorrow. I did a search on the internet and didn’t find anything about this lunatic, but I’d sure like to know the story.

Tomorrow I think I’ll take a dip down into my old friend, the Great State of Texas. It would be rude not to stop in and say hello when I’m so close, and then I’ll probably end up in southern Colorado. The weather channel is predicting clear skies along my route for tomorrow, hence my route for tomorrow!


Blog Four Sunday 9/3/2006

I had no choice but to go back to the crazy guy’s house in Perry, Oklahoma, this morning and get a better look at those signs. It’s not really a house, it’s more of a compound, and one most definitely gets the impression that the guy who lives there should be avoided. I snapped a few pictures of those crazy signs with my cell phone camera and hit the road, the vague sense that I was being watching through a pair of cross-hairs not leaving me until I was well down the road. I stopped for gas when I got back in town and was now determined to talk to a local or two and get the story on this guy.

One thing I learned about getting the inside scoop on the town’s secrets from the locals, whatever town I’m in, is that I just can’t start asking questions about things that are none of my damn business. So while filling up my tank I asked the good ole boy at the pump next to mine if he knew a good restaurant in town.

“No. We don’t really have any restaurants, and it’s Sunday, they’d be closed anyway. We do have a Mexican place out by the highway. Don’t know if they are open for breakfast, but it’s a pretty good place,” he said slowly, very slowly.

“Ok, thanks,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just head west and see where I end up. This is a nice town, ya got here.”

“It is,” he agreed, and proceeded to tell me about the people in the town, and the plant he works at (they make the Ditch Witch there), and how good they are to work for and how the owner is a real regular guy, “even though he flies all over the country and is a millionaire, you’ll sometimes see him over at the Dollar General just like you and me,” and how the people in this town really stick together and how “Millard owns this gas station and the convenience store across the street but that he’s a real regular guy, too.” (Yea, well maybe the guy who owns the Ditch Witch company shops at the Dollar General, but you won’t see me there.)

After five minutes of his extolling the virtues of Perry, Oklahoma, and it’s inhabitants (every word of which I believe to be true) I asked him nonchalantly about the signs I’d passed on the way into town. He told me that the guy who lives there and put up those signs is in fact a nice guy, he just went over the edge a little (that’s putting it mildly) and that he’s harmless. Years ago people had killed his cattle and he felt the sheriff was in on it and he put up big signs saying so. The sheriff sued him for slander and won, and the guy had to sell off a chunk of his farm to pay off the sheriff, who has since left town.

Now I felt bad for the guy. Clearly he really was disturbed, not just some white supremacist or conspiracy theorist who was looking for trouble. The most amazing thing, however, was when I asked the local if he ever sees the guy around town and he replied, “Heck, yes, he works at the Subway out by the highway.”

The subway? Perry, Oklahoma, has an underground train? Impossible. Oh, wait. I think he meant the fast food joint. Subway? SUBWAY! Holy cow! The crazy guy who had his cattle killed and now lines his compound-like ranch with enormous scary signs and had to sell off a huge chunk of his land to pay the sheriff when he was sued by him for slander and lost in court is the SAME GUY WHO HELPED JARED LOSE TWO HUNDRED POUNDS?

Anyway, I thanked the local, who was a genuine nice guy and a shining example of the type of people in our country’s heartland: direct, honest, unsophisticated, and evidently a fan of NASCAR (if the seventy-two NASCAR stickers on the back window of his pickup truck is any indication).

I stayed on back roads out of Perry and eventually rode through Oklahoma’s Painted Desert, a spectacular area filled with those huge red thrusting chunks of earth, the remnants of mountains long-since eroded. It was very cool. (Good job, Oklahoma, but let me suggest that if you’re ever at a party with Colorado and Wyoming and the subject of red rocks comes up, let Wyoming do the talking.)

Sometime later I crossed into the Great State Of Texas and the weather was perfect. There’s no place like Texas, as Texans will remind you repeatedly, and I love being in Texas. There is great scenery in this part of Texas, huge crevices, deep gorges and ruts, some lakes, rivers---this part of Texas has a similar landscape to that of South Dakota and Wyoming (in the same way that I often think Tennessee has the same look as those parts of Kentucky that look like the parts of West Virginia that remind me of Pennsylvania, which is similar to Kentucky except for where it reminds me of the Carolinas, but only the parts of North Carolina that are indistinguishable from South Carolina, and of course those same parts of South Carolina. Same goes for Virginia. Ya know what I mean?).

I had planned on riding a ways through Texas (“a ways” out here could mean anything from five miles to two-hundred miles, like when you ask someone where the next gas station is and he says “just a ways down the road” and eighty-five miles later you coast into it) and then I would head back up through Oklahoma into Colorado and spend the night in Colorado. But the weather was perfect, so I figured I’d just keep riding through Texas. I stopped at a little town and called ahead to book a room for the night in Lubbock, Texas, which is about a hundred miles below Amarillo.

Somehow, I had forgotten the reason I had planned on heading back up out of Texas and into Colorado today. It was because the Weather Channel was predicting heavy rain as far up as Amarillo, but everything above Amarillo (uh, like, say, Colorado) would be clear and beautiful. So thanks to my failure to recall the weather report, I ended up riding the last one hundred miles of the day in heavy rain. I’m happy to report that the Harley Davidson rain pants performed flawlessly and I was thinking of calling Harley to let them know. (Harley riders don’t actually ride that often, and certainly never in the rain, so I thought that the Harley Davidson Motor Company might like to know how the pants worked.) (Just kidding, Harley-guys. I know you guys ride every Sunday---to the local bar and then home again, provided the temperature is above seventy-five degrees.)

Along the way to Lubbock the road was cut into a mountain and I slowed for a sharp curve that had a wall of rock on either side of it, each wall probably one hundred feet high. There was a sign that read CAUTION FALLING ROCK, but then again there are ten million signs in our country that read CAUTION FALLING ROCK and since I’ve never actually seen any falling rock and only occasionally have I seen a few rocks on the road I wasn’t concerned. Rounding the curve I became somewhat concerned as there were some huge boulders blocking the right lane! I had time to get into the left lane so it wasn’t a big deal, but around the next curve I met a State Trooper coming at me and he hit his lights and came into my lane to stop me. “I didn’t do it,” I said, when I pulled along side of him. “Rock slide ahead of you,” he replied, reminding me that my attempt at wit was a complete waste of time since all state troopers have their sense of humor surgically removed upon graduating from the academy (as well as their sweat glands).

“Rock slide ahead of you, too,” I said and then thanked him and took off slowly. Around the next curve I found the road littered with rocks from one side to the other. I carefully navigated a path through them and silently thanked that trooper again for the warning.

An hour later, still raining heavily, I was running about 85 in a 70 zone when I slowed slightly to look at a dead armadillo on the shoulder (hey, I’m a city guy, we appreciate ALL wildlife) and just as I do a trooper rounds the curve coming at me. I’m doing about 74 or 75 now and he slows as we pass but he doesn’t come after me. (So now I thank the dead armadillo for saving me from getting a speeding ticket.) About five minutes later I roll into a town and stop for gas. An old-timer filling up his car at the pump asks me if I like to ride fast. “I do,” I reply. “How fast were you going when you met that trooper?” he asked with a grin.

The gas station was closed but I could use my credit card to operate the pump. Interestingly though, the bathroom was unlocked. I got a kick out of that because back in Philly if you close your gas station for the night but leave the bathroom unlocked for your customers to use you will find that about five minutes after you leave your toilet and sink and possibly even the tile floor will be missing.

I finally arrived in Lubbock and entered the office at the Super Eight. No one was there, but I was greeted by the overwhelming stench of curry. Gee, I thought, I wonder if perchance Indians or Pakistanis own this establishment. Now I know some folks will say that was a racist thought or at the very least prejudice. After all, plenty of other types of people eat curry, such as British people or people from New Jersey. And to those folks who think I was being prejudiced in assuming the motel operators are Indian or Pakistani I say you are correct! I was prejudging the situation, despite that I could very well be wrong about my conclusion. Perhaps a British person does own the Super Eight in Lubbock, Texas, and perhaps this British person consumes curry in such massive quantities that it emanates from his pores and the stench imbeds itself in the carpets and walls of his motel office---and then a Pakistani woman came out to greet me and I wondered how she would react if I held my nose while she processed my credit card. I don’t know about you, but I find that particular smell repulsive. And the worst part is, I can assure you that if the motel office stinks to high heaven from curry the rooms in the motel are going be dirty. If there’s one thing in life I know, it’s that. True to form, the room was dirty. However, she and her husband were very nice people and I don’t want to sound like I’m disparaging them just because I think they reek and are filthy.

Blog Five Monday Labor Day

I left Lubbock, Texas, this morning the same way I arrived at it last night, in heavy rain. I was reminded of my own stupidity a short while later when I got up around Amarillo and the skies cleared and the road was dry. As a result of my forgetting the weather report yesterday and changing my plans on the fly, I ended up taking a four hour detour for the sole purpose of... riding four hours in the rain! (Hey, I never said I was smart, I merely said I was good-looking.)

Sticking to two-lane roads, I came to a crossroads in a little Texas town. (Mind you, this is a big event when one rides 80 miles without seeing any structures other than silos.) Turning off my route, I figured I’d take a quick ride through town, see what was there, and maybe get lucky and find a restaurant. Jackpot! The Longhorn Diner was open for business. (When riding through Texas you don’t eat when you’re hungry, you eat when you get to the next restaurant. Same with getting gas.) I counted twelve vehicles in the parking lot, and twelve of them were pickup trucks. Walking in was like something out of a movie, and one of those moments that I generally enjoy. The whole place stopped talking and turned around to look at the stranger—me. I’ve seen this happen before and was ready for it. As soon as I had their attention I said hello to no one in particular (which was good because no one in particular said hello back). I’ve done that before, and sometimes the whole place will say hello back to me! It’s great when that happens, but it didn’t work this time.

Half of the patrons were cowboys, old-timers with skin like leather, each one wearing a cowboy hat, seated at tables of four but speaking with cowboys at other tables when necessary. (Sadly, I was sitting too far away to eavesdrop, something I do unashamedly and regularly.) The other half of the patrons were Mexican families, Mom, Dad, the kids, and a group of stray uncles. What was interesting was that the Mexicans and the cowboys were all speaking to each other and obviously knew each other well. There was much laughter and discussion between both groups, and it was obvious that the Mexicans are very much a part of this Texas community. When one group of well-weathered Mexicans left I heard shouts of “take care”, “see ya Tuesday”, and the like from the cowboys. This was, of course, very cool to see, and I would have liked to have asked some of these Texas locals what they thought about the Mexican immigration issue.

As I paid my check I noticed a jar at the counter stuffed with dollar bills, but instead of it reading “tip jar” it read “vacation money”. I found that amusing and began to wonder if other servers should list on their jar what they intend to do with their tips: New Bra and Panties... Nose Job... Cocaine Fund... Get This Boil Removed From My Ass Money. Well, maybe not.

Hitting the road I continued through Texas and crossed the Rio Grande!, and then cut across a corner of New Mexico. And why shouldn’t I pay a visit to New Mexico while I’m out here? After all, it’s like Mexico, only newer!

(I thought about heading down to Tucumcari, NM, since I’m a Little Feat fan, but then I remembered that I rode through Tucumcari a few years ago and there wasn’t a damn thing there.)

The weather was perfect and those long, and I do mean long, stretches of two lane road are a joy to ride. The landscape is amazing, flat as hell for most of the time, but then those mountains start to appear and twenty minutes later you ride past them... and then those deep gorges show up and you can look down into them... it’s like another planet. I stopped to wander around a junkyard that had a bunch of old trucks from the thirties, forties and fifties. Rusting old carcasses from the days when motor travel was in it’s infancy and driving a truck was hard work like breaking rocks is hard work.

The sky was a brilliant blue and the clouds were white and puffy, huge cotton balls just hanging there. And then eventually I saw them (and right where I left them, too!), the Rocky Mountains! Big sons-of-guns, they are, breathtaking.

Crossing into Colorado I was reminded what REAL scenery looks like. Southern Colorado is beautiful. One of the great things about motorcycling is that it gives people like me (people who don’t like sitting around) a chance to look at the scenery for hours and hours (and sometimes hours and hours and hours and hours) without having to sit still. See, I’ll never pull over at a scenic outlook and stay there for twenty minutes admiring the view. After two minutes I’m ready to leave, and half of that time (roughly one minute) is spent staring at the other tourists when they don’t know I’m looking at them or peering into the trashcan looking for anything interesting, like a human limb. I can’t go sit by a lake for hours, taken in by the beauty of the glimmering water in the sunlight, nor can I sit atop a mountain for more than three minutes without wanting to jump off the damn thing. But I can admire those types of views while riding down the road at 70 miles an hour! At least I’m doing something while I’m sightseeing! At least I’m moving, free from gravity, focused on something other than the scenery (such as not crashing into the scenery) but with another part of my brain thoroughly enjoying the views. But get me to pull over and admire my surroundings and more than likely I’ll just start admiring my bike and then want to go for a ride.

Along the road today somewhere I came across a curious sight, the ass-ends of about two hundred cows lined up side by side. Just their butts were facing the road, their heads were down, and I assumed they were lined up at the trough for lunch, or maybe a mid-afternoon snack. Sometime later I came across a similar scene and it was rather amusing, but also curious because they were in such perfect formation. A few miles down the road the scene was repeated, but this time the cows were lined up perpendicular to the road and as I passed them I looked up the line and realized that their heads weren’t bent so they could eat at the trough, their heads were bent because they were being forced into a long fence and it looked like they were being held in place by the fence as the farmer walked the line of cow heads and did whatever he was doing. Checking for cavities? Fitting them for glasses? (Cows have notoriously poor vision.) I have no idea what he was doing (but as long as he walked on THAT side of the fence I imagine the cows probably didn’t care). (If raping a cow is your idea of a good time, you should look into one of these fences.)

I suspected that the cows were being locked in place by their heads and I felt this was a needlessly cruel and hurtful practice and I vowed right then and there to never eat beef again as long as I lived. About an hour later I was staring at a plate that the waitress had brought me that had on it a baked potato and some buttered carrots with a big open space in the middle and I called her back and told her I changed my mind, bring me the steak. Rest assured, though, when the cows finally organize and get a union and start soliciting contributions via telephone, as they eventually must, I’ll will gladly send them a check.

I’m in Alamosa for the night; tomorrow I’ll head up to that High Ass Gorge Bridge.

I didn’t get a chance to watch the news today, but I saw an odd sight: a group of crocodiles was high-fiving each other by the side of the Colorado River. I wonder what that was about.

Just kidding. RIP Croc Hunter Steve Irwin.

Blog Six Tuesday, 9/5/2006

I left Alamosa, Colorado, at seven am local time (the middle of the night, for me) and was immediately pulled over by a local cop for doing 45 in a 25 zone. I was practically still in front of the hotel when he stopped me. But can I help it? Is there any better feeling then that first up-shift of the day? Yes, actually. That would be the second up-shift of the day, or possibly the third, when the power of the bike under you connects with your soul. You can’t help but smile, you can’t help but feel alive, and for the true motorcyclist, you can’t help but feel at home. The cool morning air being sucked into the motor makes the bike feel like a horse chomping at the bit. You just want to go. Leave another town behind and face another day of high mileage, scenic beauty, and adventure. In that moment or two, everything is forgotten including, obviously, the speed limit.

“Well, you’re not from around here, so if your license is clean I’ll let you go,” the cop told me. (I thought about blurting out that the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world but I got the impression he might agree.)

I rode out of town on the Cosmos Highway, a spectacular stretch of road paralleling a mountain range consisting of sharp, pointy peaks (like the teeth on the bottom jaw of an alligator). Again I saw blue skies and white puffy clouds. The town rapidly disappearing in my mirror, I reflected on the joy of riding through states west of the Mississippi. Only in these states can one find those long stretches of road with nothing but scenery. No towns, no people, very little traffic and sometimes none at all. Just mountains and sky and sand and trees, and even while riding at 70 or 80 mph one gets the sense that the road will go on for a long time uninterrupted. And one is usually correct.

Along the road were several signs indicating that some type of extraterrestrial activity had taken place here at one time (commemorative t-shirts were available) but since I know better than to believe that nonsense, I paid little attention to them. A few years back, I rode to Roswell, New Mexico, and foolishly squandered two dollars to gain entrance to the International UFO Museum and Research Center, the official museum documenting the supposed landing back in the nineteen-fifties of aliens in Roswell. I expected that they would present at a plausible version of events that would at least make me wonder what really happened out there in the desert. Instead I found a wealth of ridiculous claims and completely asinine “facts” that conspiracy freaks love to regard as “proof” that the government is hiding something. My favorite “fact” was the local funeral parlor owner telling the newspaper that the day after the crash in the desert the Air Force sent two soldiers to his place of business to purchase from him three body bags, one adult size and two children’s sizes. When he asked what the body bags were for they—are you ready for the fact? –acted “as if they were hiding something”. Well if that’s not proof, I don’t know what is. Clearly the government had masterminded an enormous cover-up of an alien landing—had in fact retained possession of three dead alien bodies—but when it came to getting some body bags in which to store the bodies they simply drove into town and nervously asked for them.

What I find so remarkable about conspiracy theorists is how readily they interrupt the flimsiest of innuendo to be fact. They seem to have a built-in ability to accept shadows as substance and I don’t know why this is. It seems that they reach a conclusion and then interpret the circumstances to support it. This is a very serious flaw in the human intellect, and I suspect it’s the same component that permeates the thinking of religious people. This is a very, very serious indictment of our species. That members of the human race can be so mistaken and fundamentally wrong in their beliefs is an important observation. It’s a real problem for mankind and I wish we could do something about it, but I have no idea what.

Yesterday somebody at the hotel asked me if I’d be stopping at the Great Sand Dunes National Park that I’d be passing as I rode along the Cosmos Highway and I gave a polite “maybe” as an answer. The truth, however, is that I did not stop at the Great Sand Dunes and I’ll tell you why. I don’t like sand. In fact, I hate sand. Sand gets in places where it doesn’t belong and it stays there forever. I still find grains of sand in my pockets and shoes from when my parents took me to the beach when I was eleven. And anyway, what’s the big deal about sand dunes? I don’t care how “great” they are, they’re still sand dunes. Dune is just a fancy word for pile, and why would I want to go visit a pile of sand?

I stopped in a little town on my way to Royal Gorge and had a wonderful breakfast, however I noticed something interesting in the restaurant. I’ve seen this before and I think now might be a good time to address it. Why does a man and a woman, possibly a man and wife, possibly a boyfriend and girlfriend, but in any case it’s always one man and one woman, sit next to each other at a booth when it’s just the two of them dining? They sit next to each other, on the same side of the booth, with no one sitting across from them! This makes no sense to me. You can’t see your companion as you’re conversing with them unless you turn your head (and that gets old quick, I’m sure). What’s the idea behind this? Are they rubbing thighs? Are they holding hands? I think it looks ridiculous and I would sooner break up with a girl before sharing my side of the booth with her.

I got on the famed Highway 50 and headed East towards Royal Gorge. The road was awesome, lots of curves, hills, mountains—all the usual Colorado scenery— and things were going great until I caught a glimpse ahead of me of the absolute worst form of recreational vehicle on the road. All RV’s are a pain in the ass. They go slow as molasses, they rarely, if ever, pull over to let traffic pass (even when there’s a line of vehicles behind it stretching to another state), and they are usually being driven by retirees who have lost all sense of time and direction. (One great thing about the State of Alaska, it’s a law that you must pull over if four or more vehicles are behind you to let them pass.)

But the worst form of RV on the road, even worse than the forty-foot Airstream being towed by a dual-ee pickup truck driven by an 85 year-old-woman (with mirrors that stick out five feet on either side of the cab), even worse than the pop-up camper being pulled by a mini-van, and even worse than the GIANT camper mounted on the bed of a miniature pick-up truck, is the FORMER-SCHOOL-BUS THAT SOME INDUSTRIOUS BASTARD HAS CONVERTED INTO HIS RV!

For one thing, no one ever converts a new school bus into an RV, it’s always a school bus that has done it’s time and was put out to pasture years ago. It’s slow as hell, cumbersome to drive, and usually has some type of apparatus welded onto the roof to hold the family’s kayak, propane barbecue, picnic table, inner tube, lawn chairs, badminton net, archery targets, and once I saw several sections of fencing atop the roof of a converted school bus that the driver told me was for confining the dog when they got to a campsite (I’m sure the dog was grateful). All of this stuff threatens to come loose and kill a motorcyclist at any given moment. There’s a good chance there’s no power steering or power brakes on the bus, no way in hell there’s air conditioning, and the hideous home-made, multi-colored paint job (usually applied with a brush) managed to cover the one thing that was ever safe about the bus in the first place, the bright yellow paint!

Naturally, the bus’s top speed today was forty miles an hour, but at the slightest hint of a curve in the road he would slow to a prudent twenty miles an hour (probably thinking about all that crap he had on the roof sliding off and killing me—although I wouldn’t have minded so long as the hearse didn’t have to follow him to the morgue). I prayed to god that he wasn’t heading to where I was headed (knowing in my heart that he was) or that we would enter a passing zone before I had to apply for social security. But thirty-nine years of atheism came back to bite me in the ass and I followed that rolling monstrosity all the way to Royal Gorge. (There were a few passing zones, but in some highway-engineer’s idea of a practical joke, they were only about twelve feet long, and the image of my eulogy kept popping into my head along with the speaker saying to my tearful friends and family, “Andrew had some good ideas in his day, but passing that bus around that curve wasn’t one of them.”)

Arriving at Royal Gorge was pretty cool. I passed Buckskin Joe’s Western Town (Shootouts and Hangings Daily!) and some great scenery. Royal Gorge is an enormous canyon that has at its bottom the Arkansas River. One thousand and fifty-three feet above that canyon-bottom is the Royal Gorge Bridge, the highest suspension bridge in the world! The bridge crosses the canyon and delivers you to the other side, where the only thing you can do is turn around and come back. It is merely a tourist attraction, not a bridge in actual use, and although cars and bikes can drive across it, most people just park and walk across. I, however, was determined to ride my bike across, despite the obvious danger (that being the bridge collapsing while I’m on it and sending me and my bike one thousand and fifty-three feet to the canyon floor below, crashing into it at terminal velocity. Although I did wonder if that damn converted school bus was to fall along with me if it would fall towards the earth at forty miles an hour.)

See, the thing with bridges is that sometimes they collapse. It has happened in the past, and based on that, I would have to guess that it will happen again. We don’t know where it will happen, and we don’t know why, and that is exactly my point. If you can’t tell me which bridge is going to be the next to collapse, then you can’t tell me with any certainty that I won’t be on it when it does.

Before riding across the bridge that is (did I mention this already?) one thousand and fifty-three feet above the canyon floor, I placed a call to Staples, the office supply store. On Saturday, I’d stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at a Staples and purchased a new laptop computer to replace my old one (which the previous night was seconds away from being thrown through the window of the Super Eight where I was staying. Had that thing rebooted one more time as I was in the middle of sending an email it would have taken flight. And that the window was the type that couldn’t be opened was of no consequence to me.). I had purchased for my new laptop an extended warranty, the type that covers every single thing that can possibly happen, including “accidental damage” caused by the owner (me), and I just wanted to check with them and make sure that the laptop being smashed to smithereens because it plummeted one thousand and fifty-three feet from the Royal Gorge bridge was under the scope of “accidental damage”. There was no way I was paying that extra money for the warranty and then leaving my heirs to get it fixed on their dime because I didn’t read the fine print. (My heirs being my sister or my parents, and my sister already has a computer, so that means that after Staples fixed my new laptop, and after a respectable period of grieving by my parents, they would inherit the repaired laptop and attempt to use it. That I would not be around to witness this momentous event is a great relief to me, since the day my parents get a computer will be the day I finally have to change my phone number and move to Siberia. That would be the only way to avoid the ten-thousand phone calls that my parents would place to me asking such things as “Where’s the ANY key?” and “How do you spell WWW?”, not to mention my father swearing he DIDN’T TOUCH ANYTHING! THE COMPUTER JUST STARTED DOWNLOADING STUFF ON ITS OWN!)

I also removed the battery from my cell phone because if that bridge did collapse and me and my bike plunged one thousand and fifty-three feet to the bottom, I didn’t want the impact to cause my cell phone to speed-dial my voice mail and stay connected until the Park Service helicopter-ed my remains out of the canyon, which would have used up all of my minutes. Fuck Comcast.

So despite my mild fear of heights and of bridges and despite that the bridge looked seconds away from collapse, me and my bike left terra firma behind and rolled onto the wooden deck (ah, a wooden deck, that’s reassuring). The crowds walking across the bridge parted, allowing me to ride across at a considerate ten miles an hour and as I reached the center of the bridge I glanced down through the wooden slats at the incredible view and thought, If this bridge does collapse right now, what will happen to all the Trip Reward points I’ve accumulated by staying at only Super Eights? and I made a mental note, assuming I make it to the other side, to contact my attorney and have my Will amended. Laptop to my folks, four-thousand Trip Rewards points to my kid sister. Enjoy, kiddo.

On the other side of the canyon and back on safe ground I parked the bike and visited the gift shop. I tried but couldn’t find a shirt that read, I RODE MY BIKE ACROSS THE ROYAL GORGE BRIDGE AND DIDN’T PLUMMET THROUGH THE WOODEN DECK ONE THOUSAND AND FIFTY THREE FEET TO THE CANYON FLOOR BELOW. So instead I had some ice cream and then rode my bike back across the wooden deck of the Royal Gorge Bridge and out of the park.


I had planned on taking US 50 in the direction from which I’d just come, but I needed gas and realized that I’d made a classic rookie oversight. I’d forgotten how far back the last gas station was. Long-distance motorcycle riders are perpetually in the habit of noting the distance of every gas station ahead or behind them, but thanks to that damn bus I’d forgotten how long it’d been since I’d passed a gas station, and heading back west-bound without that information was risky. So instead I rode eight miles east to the next town, Canon City, and gassed up. While in Canon City I rode around a bit and found it to be delightful. Wait a minute. Why is it called Canon City and not Canyon City? I mean, a gorge is kind of like a canyon. What the hell is a canon? Anyway, if you’re going to Royal Gorge, try and stay in Canon City. There’s a prison museum, a really cool diesel train that you can ride down into the Royal Gorge, and bunch of restaurants and shops along the classic Main Street. As it turned out, I probably would have made it to the next gas station West-bound, but it would have been cutting it close.

Leaving Canon City on US 50 (which cross-county enthusiasts should recognize as one of the very first coast-to-coast highways, a rival to Rt. 66, and the only road still in use from the early days) I headed west, planning to cross the Rockies, stop at Telluride for a visit, and then ride to my hotel for the night in Cortez, Colorado. My route was not direct, but circular, and since the maps listed all the roads I’d be taking as scenic (is there any other type of road in Colorado?), I figured it would be a good ride.

Boy, was it! Us 50 from Canon City to Montrose, Co, is two-hundred miles of awesome road! Rivers, rapids, rock faces, forests, hills, curves, plenty of passing lanes, majestic views, and forgive me for stating the obvious, but the Rocky Mountains are beautiful! US 50 at one point climbs to over ten thousand feet and must I say it? The view is incredible! Then it descends rapidly down the Rockies with lots and lots of curves, a motorcyclist’s dream! (Although it was almost this motorcyclist’s nightmare as I came down a steep hill, slowing for a very sharp curve at the bottom, and a car coming the opposite direction pulled directly into my lane to pass the car in front of her as they were going UP the hill. No turn signal, no headlights on, and she had a DOUBLE YELLOW LINE. When she saw me, she slammed on the brakes and pulled back in behind the car she’d been trying to pass. It wasn’t super-close, but it was close, and my guess is that she will eventually kill somebody someday and I hope it’s only herself she kills (or this guy Bob who’s been harassing this girl I know who’s a really nice girl but she lets guys walk all over her and now this guy Bob has gone too far and messed up her car and has been calling her at work and I can tell you he wouldn’t be doing that shit to me if I had been the one to break up with him cause he smokes too much pot but he’ll do it to her because she doesn’t stand up for herself).

Leaving US 50 behind in Montrose, I headed down to Telluride. My friend Arona insisted that I stop there, saying the ride to Telluride as well as Telluride itself is beautiful. Arona, I owe you dinner! What a spectacular ride! (Readers will by now note that I pretty much describe everything as a spectacular ride, but this time I really mean it.) The scenery on the way to Telluride is fantastic. The mountains, the valleys, the rivers, the blonde with the short-shorts in that little town. What a great day.

I intended to have dinner in Telluride and then ride the last seventy-five miles to my hotel just as the sun was going down. Telluride is surrounded on three sides by mountains, and it’s as picturesque a setting as you’ll find, but the town itself is . . . well, how can I say it? RICH PEOPLE ARE DICKS. Yep, that pretty much sums it up. Riding into town I could smell the money here. As I caught sight of the pedestrians clogging the sidewalk I thought perhaps there was a convention of L.L. Bean models in town (Hey, page 43, That windbreaker really is form-fitting and comfortable, isn’t it?), but then I spotted all the Hummers and Range Rovers parked along Main Street and realized that it was just a bunch of dicks who buy their clothes from catalogs. (I, of course, buy my clothes from catalogs, including L.L. Bean, but that’s only because I hate going to the mall even more than I hate rich people.)

One guy I see is wearing a cowboy hat, jeans, a Western-wear shirt, cowboys boots, and, I swear to God, he has an IZOD SWEATER TIED AROUND HIS NECK! He’s standing outside some upscale eatery yapping on his cell phone (yes, mummy, may I borrow the Beemer tonight to take Muffy to the theater, please?) Now maybe I’m crazy, but when I see a guy dressed like a cowboy but wearing a sweater tied around his neck I want to smack him. I want to yell at him HEY! PICK A LOOK, WILL YA? THIS ISN’T BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN! IF YOU’RE GONNA WEAR A COWBOY HAT, GET RID OF THAT RIDICULOUS-LOOKING SWEATER TIED AROUND YOUR NECK! It’s like seeing a Hells Angel wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals and riding a moped! IT DOESN’T LOOK RIGHT!

So I made a quick U-turn out of town and said to hell with Telluride, to hell I ride! I meandered my way down to Cortez, enjoying the last seventy-five miles of the day’s ride while thinking about what I’d like to do to the guy who came up with the Head-On commercials that run every ten minutes on CNN and The Weather Channel: MY FOOT! APPLIED DIRECTLY TO HIS FOREHEAD. MY FOOT! APPLIED DIRECTLY TO HIS FOREHEAD. MY FOOT! APPLIED DIRECTLY TO HIS FOREHEAD.

Tomorrow, Utah, baby!


Blog Seven Wednesday 9/6/2006

Well, I woke up today and realized it’s day seven without a Piper Burger and I began to sweat. I looked in the phone book for a support group, but the phone book was six pages long (and used only first names) and I found nothing. I read on the internet that the molecular remnants of food can remain in your body for up to seven days, finally expunged through your urine, and so I briefly considered drinking my urine but realized that that’s not the type of thing that goes over well in conversation, especially when one is trying to get a date. It’s probably just as well that it’s been seven days, three hours, and fourteen minutes without a Piper burger because yesterday, while hitting a large bump in the road, I think felt a piece of cholesterol dislodge from one of my arteries.

I left Cortez, Colorado, and headed into my beloved Utah. Colorado is beautiful, no doubt. The Rocky Mountains are amazing, but I’ve never had the type of connection with Colorado that I have with other states, such as Utah. I’ve motorcycled through Colorado before without getting attached, and this time I was hoping I would feel different. I was hoping I would get the feel of the state, hoping I would spot it’s endearing qualities. Every state has great scenery, but every state has it’s own personality, too, and it’s this personality that makes one fall in love with it. But it didn’t happen. Once again I escaped the embrace of Colorado without falling in love and I’m not sure why, but I’ll take a guess. It seems to me that Colorado is missing two things: hardcore natives (the folks born and raised in Colorado---the REAL Coloradoans) and a middle class. There is no middle class in Colorado. And if there are natives here, people who define Colorado, I can’t distinguish them from the unshaved, flannel-shirt-wearing, somewhat grungy, free-loaders who blow in from everywhere else in the country and live out of their vans. It seems that everyone in Colorado has come here from someplace else, and they’re either living in trailer parks or they’re at the exact opposite end of the spectrum---they’re filthy rich and living on multi-million-dollar ranches. You can see these two groups clearly defined on the roads of Colorado (Charles Dickens said that if you want to know about a place, look at it’s prisoners. I say look at it’s drivers.).

The roads of Colorado consist of two types of driver/vehicle. The first is the hippie, tree-hugging, sandal-wearing, minimum-wager who believes in saving the environment but has somehow overlooked the stream of blue smoke coming from the tailpipe of his twenty-year-old Saab. (My issue with the sandals is this. Sorry, but I don’t want to have a clear view of your nasty, black-with-dirt, poorly maintained feet propelling you around the restaurant after you’ve been one with nature all day and I’m trying to eat my Salisbury Steak. Put on some socks if you’re not going to wash your feet by the end of the day and you want to enter a place where people are eating.) There are also the rock-climbers, white-water-rafters, artists, and ski-bums, and all have moved here from another state because they evidently get the allure of Colorado that I’m missing. I lump all these folks into one group. (Most of them are really nice people, mind you, even if their commitment to personal hygiene differs from mine.)

The other type of driver/vehicle that I see in Colorado is the filthy rich (or somewhat rich, but like to think they’re filthy rich) SUV or sports car-driving yuppie who can be spotted from a mile away. For one thing, they’re always in the left lane (even when going slow so they can window shop as they drive), they never use turn signals, they tailgate, and they are always on the cell phone. Always. They drive like they own the road, and this sense of entitlement is the same sense of entitlement that caused them to relocate to Colorado in the first place. About fifteen minutes after they move to Colorado they begin to complain about the “outsiders” who clog Colorado’s roads and parks.

Sprinkled amongst the two groups is the tourists who flock to Colorado in droves, of which I was one. Tourists, as everyone knows, are a total pain in the ass at all times, especially the goofy motorcyclists who wander around asking dumb questions so they can write about it later in their blog. “Excuse me, I saw some cows in Texas yesterday with their heads locked in a fence. Any idea what’s going on there?”

So this morning, as I crossed into Utah, I immediately got excited. Now why I love being in Utah and merely like being in Colorado is probably because I clearly recognize the personality of Utah, namely Mormons, or crazy people, as I think of them. I know it’s not nice to describe an entire religion as being filled with crazy people, but they believe that Joseph Smith Jr. was sent here by god in the 1830’s to lead them, and although most of them reject polygamy now-a-days, they still believe that Joseph Smith Jr. was sent here by god, and in my book that qualifies you as crazy. (There are plenty of Mormons in Utah, however, who do not reject polygamy, and for a guy who’s avoided taking one wife for the last twenty years, the idea of talking more than one wife is most definitely insane.)

Also, Gary Gilmore lived in Utah and he was the main character in one of the greatest books about true crime ever written, The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer, and so I’ve been thinking about Utah ever since I was a teen and was captivated by that book.

Riding into Utah through flat desert was nothing too exciting. I stopped at the Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, which was awesome, although I was a little disappointed they didn’t have any live dinosaurs. I paid two bucks and everything I saw was either dead or fossilized, or both. They did, however, let me touch a nearly five-billion-year-old meteorite which was about twice the size of a basketball but weighed a stunning 360 pounds. And five billion years old! I don’t know what those meteorites do to take care of themselves, but this one didn’t look a day over three billion.

Leaving Blanding through more desert under beautiful blue skies, I could see way ahead of me some giant rocks, or mountains, or whatever they are and I figured it would start getting scenic soon (not that I was unhappy---I was hauling ass through the Utah desert with perfect weather, zero traffic, no buildings, and the bike was running great). Quickly, though, the terrain started to change. Red rocks started appearing, like the type one sees in Sedona, Arizona. And then some crevasses, and then some deep canyons, and then some deeper canyons, and then some massive canyons and red earth and thrusting rocks and weird shaped terrain and sandstone and rock faces with intricate designs weathered into them! Holy cow! I’m on Mars. Then the road started to climb and now it’s cut into the giant red rocks and so you’re riding between them. Huge walls of rock on either side of the road, the layers indicating the billions of years it took to form them.

Now the road is curling up the mountain and as it does I can look out at these amazing rock formations. I’m riding through the Natural Bridges National Monument and there’s no guard shack, no park “entrance”, no 15 MPH speed limit---the road IS the park, and I’m running seventy miles an hour as these outlandish shapes and designs fly by! The rocks that are all around me look as if they were once giant drops of melting plastic that have cooled and hardened. Between them is deep ruts and canyons. Wild!

The road twists and turns through these amazing natural sights and then enters the Capital Reef National Park where to my amazement the terrain becomes even more outrageous! Now I’m at ten thousand feet looking down on the Mars-like terrain that I’d just ridden through. I can see all of Utah, part of Nevada, and is that Atlantic City? The view is amazing. If I look hard enough I can see some polygamists warping the minds of their young children!

Then curving down the mountain, through the Dixie National Forest, more crazy rocks the size of office buildings, but also trees and dry riverbeds (not much water around here lately) and the road lined with signs proclaiming cattle on the road--FREE RANGE--and then, the cattle! They line the side of the road, just grazing and ignoring me, not even caring that I just washed the bike yesterday in Colorado and it looks good (or pretending not to care---cows are masters of underplay).

Then back up a mountain. Then back down. Then, eventually, just when I think this can’t go on forever, the road rises up the mountain into Bryce Canyon National Park. More amazing terrain---what color is it out here? Red? Brown? Orange? Reddish-brown-orangy? It’s exactly the color one would imagine Mars would be. More cattle grazing three inches from the white line, and then, at the top of the mountain---some clever highway engineer earned his bonus on this one---the road runs between two canyons... no shoulder at all, just a clear drop off on either side. It’s only for a few moments, and then a rock face appears on one side of the road. But for those few moments all you see is the two lanes you’re riding on and clear air on either side of you! No shoulder, no earth, no guardrail---just a clear view for a million miles! It truly feels like the road is suspended in midair and you are on top of the world! If you go off the road here you’re a goner, there’s no way around that.

I climb a little higher and the road curves. Now I pull over and look back at everything I’ve just ridden through! The view is so magnificent it puts me in a romantic mood. Suddenly I feel like finding a wife or three.

But it’s not over yet. Now I come down the mountain, dozens of curves, amazing vistas (what the hell IS a vista?), trees, rivers, more cattle, I’m in Dixie National Forest again and the terrain is spectacular. Colorado who?

After four hundred miles of this stuff, having ridden clear across Southern Utah, I stop at Milt’s Stage Stop on Highway 14 just outside Cedar City, Utah (my town for the night), and have my first truly good (and expensive) dinner of the trip. A great restaurant, excellent service (but let’s just say I don’t expect to see Rachel Ray here on her forty-bucks-a-day trip, unless she plans on eating one appetizer for the entire day).

Tomorrow will be an easy day, a few hundred miles. I want to ride through Colorado City, Arizona, the town where all the crazy polygamists live, and then back into Utah for some more scenic riding through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and then back into Page, Arizona, where I just booked a room for the night. Needless to say, I’m reluctant to include anything on my journey that involves the word “staircase”, but I hear it’s beautiful there.

Blog Eight Zion 9/7/2007

I left Cedar City, Utah, this morning intending to head to Colorado City, Arizona, which has been in the news lately as the hometown of one of the FBI’s Most Wanted, a strange character named Warren Jeffs who was recently apprehended for marrying off fourteen-year-old girls to middle-aged sickos in his church, claiming that God said it’s okay. (Yea, wait till he meets Bubba in cell-block A. Bubba talks to God, too. Oh, and it doesn’t matter which Federal Pen they send him to, every Federal Pen has a Bubba in cell-block A.) The whole town is filled with these polygamist nuts and even the police officers are members of this strange church, so I thought it would be an interesting place to visit. But then Zion National Park entered my life.

On the way to Zion, however, I stopped in Hurricane, Utah. Entering Hurricane is neat. You ride into town over a bridge that spans a huge canyon (I know “huge” is relative, tomorrow I go to another canyon that will make Hurricane’s look puny). I stopped and had an excellent breakfast at the Main Street Café, where a Stevie Wonder CD was playing---the first time I heard something other than country music in a public place since I crossed the Ohio River a week ago---Boogie On Reggae Woman! At the café I spotted a big, friendly dog without a leash laying at the feet of two women seated at an outdoor table. I asked if I could pet their dog and they told me it’s not their dog, the dog belongs to an elderly woman who used to come to the café everyday for lunch. The woman has gotten too old to come to the café anymore, so the dog, Max, comes each day on his own. He sits for a while and then heads home. What a wonderful story. A nostalgic dog.

Before I left on my trip someone, I forget who, told me to go see Zion National Park while I was out here and so I did. Whoever that was, thank you very much. First let me say that I’m not generally a fan of national parks. I know some of you may have just spit your coffee out of your mouth when you read that someone in America doesn’t love our national parks, but let me be blunt. Generally speaking, national parks BLOW!

Yes, the scenery is usually nice, I admit, but it’s not usually any nicer than the surrounding areas. And if you stick to two-lane roads around the national park, rather than the tiny roads inside the park that are forever clogged with RV’s, you can see the scenery, meet some locals, and average speeds above twelve miles an hour. Inside the National Park, forget it! The speed limits are either 15 miles per hour or occasionally 25 miles per hour, but that’s as fast as it gets in our National Parks, and for those of you who don’t know this, riding a motorcycle at 15 miles an hour is more difficult than riding it at 45 miles an hour, and the truth is, if I have to ride the bike at 15 miles an hour I’d just as soon push it. There’s really no difference.

Additionally, there’s something artificial-feeling about our national parks. It’s as if we fenced off an area and posted some signs telling us that inside the fence is beautiful scenery, WHEN WITHIN THE FENCE, PLEASE BE ENAMORED BY THE NATURAL BEAUTY. But what about all that beautiful scenery that you passed on the way to the park? Didn’t you notice any of that? Oh, I see, you took the interstate to the park where someone has kindly fenced off some beauty for you. Next, you will get back on the interstate and head to the next park to see some more fenced-in beauty, but you will miss all the real America that’s between our parks. It’s the same beautiful scenery outside of our parks, but it’s land that’s lived on, land that’s put to work. It’s scenery that if you look closely, if you pay attention, will reveal itself to be far more imperfect---and hence interesting---than the Disneyland-feel of many of our national parks. But this requires imagination and a sense of romance, things not often in found in Americans, especially Americans on vacation.

Also, when I ride through a national park I’m usually in the middle of a long line of cars, RV’s, and Goldwings pulling trailers, all of us moving at the snail-like pace of the RV at the very front of the line, an RV driven by someone who hasn’t looked in his mirrors since he left home three years ago and who would never in a million years consider pulling over and letting the cars and bikes get ahead of him. I don’t know about you, but riding in a slow-moving line of traffic doesn’t make me feel like I’m one with nature.

Pulled over along the park roads we see mini-vans with families picnicking, diapering the baby, walking the dog, or taking pictures of the scenery. At the slightest hint of any wild-life, we all frantically stop in the middle of the road and damn near kill ourselves to snap pictures of the hapless animal. Heaven forbid we should quietly observe an animal for a few moments and commit it to memory. That would never do.

It all feels fake to me, jostling with each other to get the best view, being surrounded by vehicles and people. What’s natural about that? It’s sterile and predictable, and crowded to the extreme.

And, today, while entering Zion National Park, I saw a sign for the Zion Movie Theater that read SEE THE PARK ON THE BIG SCREEN! Are you frickin’ kidding me? Are there people so unimaginative that they would go sit in a theater to look at a national park even when they’re AT the national park? Why not just send away for the tape and stay home? You can save on gas and you won’t even have to put on shoes!

Obviously though, there are some exceptions to my contempt for national parks, and Rt. 9 in Utah, which runs through Zion National Park, is one of them. No way can I even attempt to explain the incredible scenery in Zion National Park. If I did, Zion National Park would eventually track me down and kick my ass for doing such a terrible job. That it’s spectacular and other-worldly is all I can say, with massive red-rock formations, twisty roads past rivers and crevasses, and sharp curves through mind-blowing natural sand sculptures. I was so delighted by Zion National Park that I decided to skip seeing those wack-jobs in Colorado City and instead stayed around Zion for a while (plus I was out of polygamy jokes).

I beg you, ride through Zion National Park before you die! Please!

Eventually I left the park and stopped for gas at the next town, where it had obviously rained in the last hour or so. Three Harley riders were sitting by their parked bikes drying out their expensive leather chaps and designer leather jackets by hanging them over a fence. Their leathers could not have been more wet had they been thrown in the ocean, and it occurred to me that George W. Bush might read the Iliad before those leathers dry out. These were three newer riders, I would guess, and I would normally make fun of them for getting caught in the rain wearing useless leathers, but I must admit that over the last three days I have seen a lot of Harleys on the road, almost all of them dressers, packed and loaded for some serious riding. Good! Maybe some of the newer Harley riders actually fell in love with riding and will stop acting like jack-asses and actually ride! (I was also thinking about my first long ride on my Harley. I was nineteen and I rode from Philly to Boston for the purpose of, well, why does any nineteen-year-old male do anything? To see a girl, of course. Back in those days yuppies hated bikers. Somewhere along the way they began to emulate us. Who would have thunk it?) The point is, in honor of all the Harleys I’ve seen on the road I’ve decided to not make any disparaging remarks about Harley riders for the entire day! (Plus, I’m considering a buying a Harley for my next bike.)

Next stop was Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. As a rule, I studiously avoid all types of physical exertion, so anything with the word “staircase” in it would normally be enough to scare me away. Not this time. I’m glad I went. Wow! The terrain in this part of the country is amazing! Those dried river beds are spectacular.
As I got near the Arizona border, the landscape got even bigger. I rode for sixty miles next to these amazing formations. And it’s so different from the terrain I saw yesterday in southern Utah and different from the terrain I saw this morning in Zion National Park. Not only is the landscape in our country amazing, it’s vastly different from place to place.

Arriving in the town of Page, Arizona, my stop for the night, I visited the Glen Canyon Dam, which is about one block out of town, and is absolutely, positively spectacular. At the scenic pull-off just beyond the dam I pulled over and was flabbergasted! Again, the only way I can think to describe it is to say that it’s like being on Mars! (Well, what I imagine being on Mars would be like, provided Mars raised its temperature, added some oxygen, and got a Starbucks, Mars being, as I understand it, the only place in the universe that doesn’t yet have a Starbucks.) These outlandish rock formations, reddish and brown in color, surround the dam, (they’re actually sandstone, I think) and you can walk down a path among the rocks all the way to the edge, where you can then peer straight down six hundred feet or so to the river! No guardrail, no guard, just a sign reading STRAGHT DROP OFF, DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE.

Walking among these natural sandstone sculptures is again beyond description. As you descend the path bringing you closer to the edge of the canyon, the sandstone rises around you until all you can see are these crazy designs surrounding you and the blue sky above! You can see no buildings, no highway, just huge, swirling layers of sandstone. It’s easy to imagine you are being swallowed up in a giant cup of butterscotch pudding (and not that instant crap, either).

I had dinner on the deck of a restaurant high up on a hill where I could see the dam, the sandstone, and an unobstructed view of the desert for about, oh, one hundred miles (it seemed, anyway.)

Tomorrow, The Grand Canyon. (I know I wrote that at the end of yesterday’s blog, but I was a little confused.) Tomorrow, The Grand Canyon, I mean it.

Blog Nine 9/09/2007

Yet another beautiful day. First thing I did this morning before leaving Plane, Arizona, was to ship home some extra clothes at the UPS Store. As usual, I brought a few extra things, and as usual, I had to send them back. When will I learn to leave the fur stole at home and the tennis ensemble, including cashmere pullover and knee-high socks? I don’t even play tennis!

I paid another visit to the Glen Canyon Dam before leaving town as well. That whole area is amazing! The canyon walls that rise seven hundred feet above the Colorado River are truly spectacular. Razor straight, deep red, and stained and etched with the evidence of past water-flow. The sandstone that surrounds the dam and the canyon walls are mind-boggling. The outlandish shapes and designs are as if the result of a bad acid trip, and the whole area has the feel of another planet.

From there I rolled down Highway 89 headed toward the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Once again, the terrain was spectacular. What are those large rock formations that stretch for miles through the desert? I know that I’ve heard many a park ranger begin to explain what those mountains are actually made of, but to be honest, about three seconds after those guys start talking my eyes start to glaze over... “ ...and in the crustacean period, the erosive tactile strata began to form under great fissure pressure---” Uh, that’s interesting. Where’s the gift shop?

The road through the desert along side those great red rocks was about one hundred miles long. Running 80 MPH the whole time, I was in heaven. Last time I rode through here it was 100 degrees out, today it was 80. And then I started to climb the mountain, and there were trees now, and it dropped it to 60 degrees (which felt like 30 degrees after that desert heat!). Turning onto the road that runs directly to the park (Grand Canyon 45 MILES, the sign said) I continued to climb to 8000 feet. (I noticed that I was a little short of breath at times and figured that I really need to lose some weight. When I realized it was the high altitude that was to blame, I celebrated by having a pizza for lunch.)

The ground as well as the trees along a long stretch of this road was solid black, no green anywhere, and there was a strong odor of smoke. Putting two and two together, I deduced that there had been a forest fire here recently. The ranger later confirmed that for me, and I wondered once again if I might have a future in forensic science (momentarily forgetting that I faint at the sight of blood and occasionally at the sound of the word blood).

Ahead of me I spotted a car haphazardly pulled onto the shoulder, partially blocking the road. An accident? A breakdown? A carjacking in progress? Someone in need of medical assistance? Of course not! The experienced traveler knows that such a scene can only mean one thing. Some idiot spotted or thinks he spotted some wildlife and has slammed on the brakes in order to take a picture.

Sure enough, some guy was hanging out the window of his car snapping a picture of... well, I guess I can’t blame him. There it was, feet from his car, and in broad daylight, no less. The rare, the reclusive, the much-desired prize of the animal kingdom... the cow. Yes, some knucklehead was pulled over taking a picture of a cow. Even the cow turned around to look behind himself and see what the guy was photographing, never thinking for a second that he might be the subject of the photo. What? Me? You’re taking a picture of me? I’m a cow! You almost gave me a heart attack, for Christ-sakes! I thought there was a bear behind me!

A few minutes later I rounded a curve doing, oh, sixty in a forty-five, and the park ranger who was parked on the shoulder looking directly at the oncoming traffic (me) hit his overhead lights. I slowed and gave him a big smile, the kind of smile that said, You’re a park ranger. You can’t write tickets. You’re one step up from a mall cop. Later, I watched him pull somebody over who was speeding and I wondered if park rangers can in fact write speeding tickets.

I stopped to help two girls from Connecticut whose car has been overheating every day or so since they left. They would just pull over and add water to the radiator, and by now they had had so much advice from so many people about how to handle the situation and what might be causing it that they were thinking of writing a shop manual. I told them I’d purchase one when it came out.

Leaving them behind I took off, and getting close to the canyon, I twisted the throttle in anticipation of arriving at the big one. I came around a curve and far ahead of me I saw a slow-moving, white Grand Marquis and I immediately think that it’s an unmarked patrol car and he’s got rear-looking radar and I’m busted. But then he slams on the brakes as he passes a road sign and I think to myself, I’ll bet a hundred bucks he’s got Florida tags. Sure enough, Mr. and Mrs. Irving Schindlebaum have navigated their way from Boca Raton to Arizona and are seconds away from seeing the Grand Canyon. (Actually, I’m seconds away from seeing the Grand Canyon. Irv and Mitzhi will need another forty-five minutes to argue about where to park, and then another forty-five minutes to walk the five hundred feet from the parking lot to where they can see the Grand Canyon, assuming Irv remembered to bring his glasses from the car. Based on the way he drives, I would say even the Grand Canyon might be hard for him to spot without his peepers.)

Finally! There it is. Wow! What a canyon. It’s truly grand, it’s amazing. It’s a big frigging canyon. And deep! Holy Moses! If I fall in I’d bet that I’ll have time to get out my cell phone and call my loved ones to say goodbye before being vaporized on the canyon floor. (Well, each of my loved ones except my parents. Even a fall into the Grand Canyon would not last long enough for me to listen through my parent’s outgoing message on their answering machine should they not be home when I called. My mother still feels the need to instruct callers on what to do after the beep. “After the sound of the beep, please leave your name... your number... the time of your call... and a brief message. We will arrive home, hear your message, and then return your phone call. This device is known as an answering machine. Wait for the beep before recording your message. Thank you.” Although she’s not as bad as my elderly customers who don’t realize that only other elderly people still have answering machines. Everyone else, including me, has voicemail. I get messages on my plumbing business line like this, “Andrew, are you there? Pick up. My sink is clogged. If you’re there pick-up.”

PICK UP WHAT? IT’S VOICEMAIL!

I hung out at the North Rim for a while, admitting that this was one scenic view I wasn’t ready to vacate after two minutes. The Grand Canyon doesn’t start to get boring for at least fifteen minutes. After a while I was ready to leave the North Rim ride around the canyon to the South Rim, two hundred miles away.

I had to ride back the same way I came in, including going back across 89A through the desert. To a motorcyclist, taking the same road twice is something we avoid as strenuously as getting speeding tickets , but 89A, through the desert, through those big red rocks, is a road I can take ten times.

Heading south to get around the Grand Canyon, I saw dark storm clouds up ahead and some lightening. It was bright and sunny where I was, but it looked like I was heading into a storm. As those who travel the mid-west and west well-know, you can usually see the storm long before you enter it, and because of this you can often go around it. (I once rode around a bad storm in North Dakota that made me feel like a genius for days. I saw the storm way ahead of me and I made a right onto, oh, some road. Ten miles later I found some other road and turned left. I was able to watch the lighting and heavy rain hit the ground ten miles to my left as I paralleled the storm, warm and dry, on a side road, and when I’d passed the storm, I turned left and then eventually right, continuing on my having ridden right around the storm. I know, I know, those back at home have heard that story a hundred times, but hey, now you get to read it.)

When I arrived at Rt 64, the road that heads west to the southern rim of The Grand Canyon, I realized that I would again be running parallel to a storm and I just might stay dry. Sure enough, the storm was moving away from the Grand Canyon. I’d lucked out. I heard later that it had delivered heavy rain and hail along the route I’d be riding shortly before I arrived. See, stopping to help those girls with the over-heating car was a good deed and I was rewarded. (Makes me want to let the air out of someone’s tire just so I can help ‘em fix it.)

Arriving at the Southern Rim, east side, I discovered the view was even more impressive than the Northern Rim. My heavens! What did our ancestors think when they were making that first trip across the continent and they came to this?

I then rode 25 miles to the west view of the Southern Rim, which is also amazing. Next time I visit the Grand Canyon I will book a room right at the park. It’s hard to just sit there and enjoy the Canyon when I know I have 200 miles more to ride to my hotel for the night, and I’ve already ridden three hundred miles to get where I was. It was poor planning on my part. I didn’t realize the room I’d booked was so far from the Grand Canyon, and I didn’t even think to stay right at the Grand Canyon. I think the wise thing is to arrive at the Grand Canyon early in the day and get a room. Eat at one of the look-outs, take a hike, look up the skirts of the women climbing the steep steps of the viewing tower, wander around, and just have a relaxing time for a few hours with only a short ride or even a walk to your hotel when your day is done.

I left the Grand Canyon around six o’clock and headed down to I-40. Before I got to the interstate I stopped at the Flintstones Theme Park. First, I can tell you that I hardly believed my eyes when I saw this place from the road. This was truly the theme-park that time forgot. Behind the gaudy, outdated, run-down building I could see enormous faded Flintstone plaster-of-Paris characters. As I pulled into the gravel parking lot, the last of the day’s sunlight revealed most of the giant statues were in need of repair. Some had holes in them, some were simply worn out by the generations of children whose parents were clearly less-then-discriminating about where there children vacationed. This place was scary.

Standing by the front door was a woman smoking a cigarette and wearing a permanent scowl. I pulled up and shut off the bike. Pointing to the giant hand-painted sign that read FRED’S DINER I said, “Is there really a diner here?” Which by that I meant, do people really consume food in this building that looks like it should be condemned?

“Yea,” she said, her enthusiasm on par with that of dead people.

“Is the food any good?” I asked, more out of reflex than of any desire to dine there.

“Yea,” she said while coughing.

“Well, I’m sold,” I replied.

I parked the bike and navigated the enormous puddle of water that was blocking the front door and walked into 1972. Sweet Mother of God! The Grand Canyon was great, but this place is really why I travel. Dark, dingy, dirty, smelling like a damp sock, but somehow loaded with clean new merchandise for sale. I walked the aisles, carefully avoiding the buckets on the floor that were catching the dripping water coming in from the holes in the roof. This was place was dingy, it stunk, but yet the stacks of tee-shirts were neat and straight and I realized that someone here is still hanging on to a dream.

Turns out Miss Congeniality is the cook, and it’s only me and she in the place. She whips me up a Brontosaurus Burger (which is on the menu for $2.95) and makes a pot of decaf. I wander around the joint wondering if the cash I have in my pocket would be enough to buy out the entire inventory. It would be close.

She tells me that the place was built 34 years ago, not mentioning that there’ve been no improvements since. That I already knew. I sit at a table in a section that’s lit by Christmas lights which are hanging from the ceiling. The darkness obscures the age of the place, but it doesn’t hide it. Wow. This place is weird.

“Business slow?” I ask as I eat my Brontosaurus Burger, not mentioning that the name of this burger is slightly misleading. I finished it in two bites.

“Well, let’s put it this way,” she said. “Last year I made $150 a week in tips, this year I’m lucky if I make $50.”

Fighting back the impulse to ask how she lives on that amount, I instead ask her why she thinks business has dropped off. Expecting her to simply point to the surroundings and say, uh, what the hell do you think?, she instead says, “Gas prices,” and by that she means people can’t afford the gas required to drive here.

Yea, well then the little kids around here better pray that gas prices keep rising!

She seems to think that if gas prices come down more people will take their kids to outdated, dirty, dingy, scary theme parks based on television shows that went off the air twenty-five years ago. I’m a grown man, and those grotesque Plaster-of-Paris characters that are twenty-five feet high are scaring the hell out of me! I can’t imagine little kids coming here. Do kids today even know who Fred Flintstone is?

She’s tells me I missed the heavy rain and hail, and I’m glad for that, but I’m really glad I didn’t miss the Flintstone’s Theme Park. She walked me out to the bike and wished me a good ride. I thanked her for the burger and made sure I got her close to the fifty-dollar tip mark for the week.

I hauled ass down I-40 and got to my room on Historic Route 66. I’ve been here before, on my Route 66 ride a few years back, where I rode on Route 66 in each state except for California. (I’ve never had any interest what-so-ever in visiting California.) During that trip I stopped on Route 66 in Winslow, Arizona, and I called home to some friends and family, one of whom upon answering the phone heard me yell, “Guess where I’m at? I’m standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona!” and my friend, obviously not an Eagles fan, replied, “You’re drunk,” and hung up on me.

Tomorrow I’m off to the Hoover Dam, and then... well, I really, really want to ride I-15 from Las Vegas to Barstow. I know it’s crazy to want to ride a long stretch of interstate when I’m out in this beautiful country, but it’s such a famous stretch of interstate and so many millions of people have taken it from L.A. to Vegas and back again. I just want to ride a road that I know for sure everyone from Elvis Presley to Frank Sinatra to Robert De Niro have taken. But I don’t really want to stop in Vegas. Actually, I wouldn’t mind stopping in Vegas, I just want to avoid gambling away all of my vacation money and the only way to do that is to carefully avoid stopping in Vegas.

So I’ve made a deal with myself. If I happen to see any, let’s just pick a color, white cars on the way to Hoover Dam tomorrow, then it will be okay if I stop in Vegas for the night and spend a few dollars at a casino. If I don’t see any white cars, then I’ll keep riding to Barstow. I’ll let fate decide whether or not I stay in Vegas. (Although I’ve taken the precaution of booking a room a block off of the strip just in case.)


Blog Ten 9/9/2006

Leaving Kingman, AZ, under sunny skies and ninety-degree heat I headed out to the Hoover Dam, a mere ninety miles away. Along the way I marveled at the western Arizona terrain. Dark brown, hilly, and big! By now, I’d imagine that some readers may want to mail me a bag of anthrax if I describe the terrain as Mars-like one more time. So to save you the thirty-nine cents, I’ve decided to come up with a new analogy. I would say that the terrain out here reminds me of Jupiter. Or Uranus. Or even Your Anus.

Along the way I stopped at a junkyard in the middle of the desert. Junkyards are wonderlands to me, but not junkyards with newer cars and trucks, only junkyards with very old cars and trucks. As I wander around I am aware that each wreck, each rusting hulk is a story. Maybe a good story, maybe a boring story, maybe a sad story, but surely a story. Who owned this 1949 Chevrolet? Did someone buy it new after saving for three years and finally getting that promotion? What about this pickup truck? Did a farmer own it and did he have to sell it when the bank foreclosed on his farm? Did this truck get driven coast to coast more times then I can count or did it never leave the county?

What about all of these cars and trucks that have been in accidents? Surely someone was hurt or maybe even killed in some of these wrecks. Were they drunk? Were they fighting with the wife and lost control going around a curve? Did a husband lose a wife in this accident? Was it even an accident? Here’s a car with the engine pushed into the driver’s seat. What did he hit? Did someone pull out in front of that car and kill the driver, only to live the rest of his life with the guilt? Was it in all the newspapers when it happened? Did a parent lose a child in this car? Did a child lose a parent?

Vehicles of all types are such an integral part of our country and its history, and even our individual lives. If only these wrecks could tell their stories.

Leaving the junkyard I hauled ass out to Hoover Dam, passing through a permanent police check-point on the way. The cop waved me through with a bored look, which was a little disappointing. What? Can’t chubby, white, Jewish-looking guys on motorcycles be terrorists?

Arriving at the scenic pull-off before the dam I observed a group of Harley riders heavily clad in leather, including chaps, gloves, bandanas, and god-help-me a few pairs of leather pants. Even the fat-ass, middle-aged wives had chaps on. (Well, if you pay four hundred bucks for leather chaps, I guess you really want to show them off, who cares if it’s ninety-five degrees and you’re in the desert of Arizona?) They had parked their rental Harleys haphazardly in a bunch of parking spaces and had their leather jackets draped all over the bikes and the stone retaining wall of the parking lot. It was an embarrassing scene of amateurs on rentals bikes. They were dentists and lawyers and accountants, and I fought back the impulse to go over and toss their jackets off of the stone retaining wall while shouting, “It’s a hundred degrees out here? Are you fucking retarded?” (I was a little worried though that the wives might kick my ass. The husbands, however, I could surround by myself.)

(In a future blog I’ll explain my dislike for today’s Harley riders. Many of them are cool, many of them ride, and even if they’re weekend riders, they’re still decent guys or gals and I have no beef with them whatsoever. But many of them, like the group I saw today, are clueless yuppies who don’t even enjoy riding and are continuously getting themselves killed and maimed and driving up the statistics on motorcycle accidents. To them it’s a fashion show, a contest to see who has the most chrome and spent the most money. I know a lot of folks might think I’m really hard on today’s Harley riders, but Harley Davidson used to be a brand that I lived and died for. What other brand names do people get tattooed on their body? I never see anyone with a Pepsi tattoo, or for that matter a Kawasaki tattoo? And the bottom line is that nobody likes yuppies.)

Hoover Dam itself is very cool, but I must say, no where near as cool as Glen Canyon Dam, in Plane, AZ.

Leaving Hoover Dam I stopped in Boulder City at the famed Boulder City Hotel, built at the same time the Hoover dam was built back in the 1930s, and the place where Howard Hughes stayed after his plane crash. In the lobby of the hotel is a huge, black grand piano, one hundred years old I was told. When I first walked in the lady at the desk looked at me as if I were a hobo, and I think she wanted to say, “Just so you know, the food is very, very expensive. Maybe you should try the diner down the street.” But when I started playing that beautiful piano she offered me a job. Oh, man was that piano nice!

Pianos are like women. Each one is different. They feel different, they sound different, and they react differently when touched. Some are a dream to play, the piano loves everything you do. And some, no matter how gentle and persuasive you are just don’t respond. I call those pianos Jewish Women.

This was one of those pianos where my fingers just glided over the keys. I could play faster, cleaner, and with more feeling because the piano, like a woman, inspired me to. When the lady behind the desk raised the top of the grand piano to let the sound out, it sounded like a million bucks. As often happens when I play the piano in public, some guy came running over to ask me to play a song so he could sing along. And as so often happens, I didn’t know how to play any of the songs for which he asked (and I wouldn’t have admitted it anyway). I told him I only play the blues, and he looked at me as if he was Emril Lagasse and I had just told him that his restaurant is nice, but it’s no Applebee’s.

He was undeterred and began to sing a Tom Jones song to a blues progression I was paying in the key of A. He was in tune, but I still suspect that had Tom Jones walked in at that moment he would have beaten both of us to death. I would have begged Tom to kill me first.

This was the latest in a series of famous pianos I’ve played, including the piano in the girlhood home of Amelia Earhart, and once, deep in the Louisiana Bayou, I stopped in a little run-down bar and played the piano for a bit, after which the bartender told me the last guy to play that piano was a Mr. Bruce Springsteen, who had been filming a video down that way.

For lunch I had chicken quesadillas and for the third time in my life---thanks to Lou at the Brick for getting me addicted to these things---I had steamers in a garlic broth. I forget if steamers are clams or oysters, but while they still seem a little like snot to me, they are very good. This order came with so much garlic (I ate it in huge chunks) that I was glad I was headed to Las Vegas where prostitution is legal, because with all this garlic I was consuming, a hooker be the only way I’d be getting lucky tonight. And she would probably charge me extra.

Upstairs of the hotel was the Hoover Dam museum, which I really liked. The little old lady behind the counter assured me repeatedly that I should stay and watch the twenty-minute film about the making of the dam, insisting that the film was that good. I didn’t have the heart to turn her down, so I watched the film. It was really good. Let me recap. Some guys blew up some rocks and then filled the hole in with concrete. They used twelve gazillion tons of concrete. They named it after Hoover (I’m guessing they mean the president, not the vacuum).

I told her that since I watched her film she had to watch mine. (She acted like it was the first time she ever saw two women do that before. Yea right!)

Arriving in Vegas I had to ask myself, am I an idiot? Why would I stop for the night in this place? Vegas is a urinal cake. A crowded, obnoxious city filled with low-lifes and degenerates. The last stop on a long train ride to hell. At this moment I’m at the Travelodge, looking out my window at gang-bangers and hoodlums having a tailgate party in the parking lot. When booking a room I somehow thought that a hotel one block off of the strip would probably mean it would be a nice place. I was wrong. Although I suppose anyone dumb enough to think that an 89 dollar-a-night Travelodge would be a nice place anywhere deserves what he gets.

I think I’ll tie a bandana around my forehead and button my shirt up to the neck and go out there and try to mingle. Wassup, Homes? How’s it hangin’?, Bro? I should fit right in.

After that I’m go head over to the casino---I think I saw a sign for casino or two on my way into town---where I fully expect to win big.

Either that or I’ll barricade me and my bike in the room and watch women’s tennis with the sound off. I’ll let ya know.


Blog Eleven Vegas 9/10/06

Last night, in Vegas, I sat in my motel room for several hours peering out the window hoping in vain to witness my first drive-by shooting. It was a slow night for the gang-bangers, I guess. Eventually I stuffed everything that I’ve brought with me, including my dirty laundry, into the hotel safe and headed out to hit The Strip. Setting out on foot (it’s only two blocks to The Strip, even I can walk that far) I encountered a young lady who inquired if I would like a date.

“Most impressive,” I told her. “And how refreshing! In this day and age, a young woman assertive and independent enough to ask a man out on a date rather than waiting for him to make the first move. Women’s lib is alive and well!”

“How much do you have to spend?” she asked.

“And thoughtful, too.” I remarked, impressed that she was considerate enough to inquire as to my financial status so as not to suggest a venue beyond my financial means. “What did you have in mind?” I asked. “A show, a movie? Dinner for two at Dean Martin’s old joint?”

“I’ll blow you for fifty bucks,” she said.

Oh. I had obviously misunderstood. “Well, that’s certainly a reasonable price,” I said. “But my cash is tied up in futures. Do you take credit cards? I’m using my Lukoil Mastercard on this trip because I get a one-percent rebate on purchases.”

She said something to the effect that her business does not at present conduct credit card transactions, but if enough of her customer base were to express an interest in it she would initiate the necessary steps. “FYI,” she said, as she turned to leave. “You’d be wise to take a cash advance on that Mastercard and invest it in either a 30 day CD or an ING savings account. As long as you make the minimum payment each month, you could yield as much as three-and-a-half to four percent interest, adjusted for maintenance fees and taxes, of course.”

“Of course,” I replied, and headed off in search of an ATM machine and a condom large enough to cover my entire body.

Three minutes later, while cutting across a dark parking lot, I encountered another Lady Of The Night, this one proudly displaying her collection of sexually transmitted diseases and open sores. I declined her offer of “some company”, imploring her not to take it personally, it was just that I’d made previous arrangements with one of her colleagues, although I did suggest we become pen-pals when she gets clean. I bid her a dui’ and waked seventeen miles to The Strip. (Seventeen feels-like miles, that is, two actual miles).

Arriving on The Strip I was surrounded by a sea of humanity. Every type of person could be observed crowding the brightly lit sidewalks. Punk rockers, cowboys, rednecks, rich people, jocks, Orthodox Jews (really), bikers, Wasps (the insect, not the human), whites, blacks, halfs and halfs, Chinese, Japanese, Thai---you get the idea. (Although I didn’t see any Tunisians, which was surprising.)

I dined at Smith & Wolensky where I was treated like royalty. (Probably because I’d told the maitre d’ that I was the Prince of Zaire.)

After dinner, I walked another 37 miles (37 feels-like miles, one actual) to The Bellagio, where I observed the famed water-fountain-show. Most impressive! (Note to small-business owners. If you really want to pick up some business, invest in a multi-million dollar water-fountain-show, it really packs-in the crowds.)

I’d heard that the casinos donate a portion of their profits to local Las Vegas charities (roughly ten dollars for every 350 million dollars they make), and being somewhat of an amateur philanthropist myself I decided to support such a worthy endeavor.

Perhaps I could find a casino employee and give him or her some cash to give to the poor. This seemed like a great idea and I was very much enamored with my own compassion. Entering the casino, I could not find an employee who looked like he might know the proper channels for accepting my contribution, so instead I just stuffed the cash into the nearest slot machine and trusted it would end up in the hands of the needy. A waitress wearing a skirt the size of a postage stamp served me free vodka and orange juice, and thinking only of the poor, I placed a little more money into the slot machine.

When I felt the poor had been given enough via the slot machine (don’t want to spoil them) and when I had given more than I swore to god I would, I walked four miles back to the sidewalk and hailed a cab. To my delight and surprise, the cab driver who picked me up spoke perfect English, kept his cab in immaculate condition, and was a courteous and safe driver. (Yea, right. And I also slayed a dragon and sprinkled some fairy dust on it where it then turned into a beautiful princess who blew me for fifty bucks.)

Falling asleep in my motel room to the soothing, gentle rhythms of Tupac Shakur being played through a 40,000 watt stereo system worth 800 bucks (mounted in a van worth 200 bucks), I slept fitfully and comfortably and awoke at seven AM local time ready and anxious (desperate) to get the hell out of Las Vegas. Praying that my bike was still six inches from the hotel lobby door where I’d parked it, I ran across the large parking lot, zigzagging like a soldier to throw off the snipers, and got on my bike and got to gettin’!

Generally I avoid interstates like I avoid prostitutes with open sores, but I was in Vegas for the sole purpose of riding the interstate from Vegas to Barstow, a very famous stretch of road. I figured at eight AM local time on a Sunday the road out of Vegas wouldn’t be that crowded. Once again, I was wrong.

That road was packed. All the way to L.A., no doubt. Cars hurtling down the highway at a minimum of 85 miles per hour, racing through the desert, no-doubt thinking (like I was) about the money they lost last night, and wondering if they should stop at those last-chance casinos that line the road as you near the border. (These are not exactly five-star casinos, as evidenced by the tractor-trailer-and-motor-home-parking out front, and the prestigious Burger King and McDonalds restaurants advertised on billboards as being located “right inside the casino”. Hmmm, I missed them in Zagats.)

This hundred mile or so stretch of I-15 from Vegas to Barstow is a mad house. Each driver jockeying to get ahead of the next. There is a split speed limit here, one speed for trucks and another for all other vehicles. And trucks have been sentenced by the state to the right lane only, kept at 55 miles an hour, but the left lane is open for cars and bikes to do 70, which means, of course, that they do at least 80 and often 90. It is completely insane. And don’t forget the tailgaters, the drivers who don’t know what or where the turn signals are, and the drivers who are probably sleep-deprived and possibly still drunk from the night before. I couldn’t wait to get to Barstow so I could hit the back roads and escape the insanity of I-15.

A few miles outside of Barstow, I see a sign for Peggy Sue’s Fifties Diner and decide to stop there for lunch. Just before the exit, though, traffic is at a dead stop. Realizing that it’s legal for motorcycles to ride the dotted white lines between lanes in California, I can’t help but wonder if riding the shoulder is legal here, too. It’s only about a mile to the off-ramp, and I figure that now is as good a time as any to find out if I’m allowed to ride the shoulder (something I never, ever do when stuck in traffic). So I zip down the shoulder and as I get to the off-ramp I spot a California Highway Patrolman and he spots me. I discover that the road is closed all traffic is being diverted off at this exit, and as I duck in behind a truck to sneak past CHP officer, I see that he’s not even looking at me and so I figure maybe it is legal to ride the shoulder in California.

Traffic is exiting here, but then getting back on the highway at the on-ramp right across the road. As I descend the off-ramp, I can see the highway and I can see that it’s closed because a car is sitting there on the shoulder facing the wrong way. It’s banged up, and I think I see a light pole knocked down.

And then I see a what was very recently a shiny new Honda Goldwing that looks like it’s been dropped from a ten story building and I get sick to my stomach. No frickin’ way that rider survived. The cops are there and a fire truck, but no ambulance yet. Some firemen are pulling someone out of the car, and another cop and a fireman are working on someone laying on the ground near the bike. I hope it’s the rider and I hope he/she has a chance, but I don’t think so. That bike is destroyed.

I make a quick left off the ramp as the rest of the traffic gets back on the highway, and right there is Peggy Sue’s Diner. Pulling into the lot, I parked next to a Goldwing with a sidecar and the words On the road again… from sea to shining sea painted on the back. I’m not really in the mood to eat, but I go in. I’ve passed bike wrecks before, and once I rode past another Goldwing fatality on I-80. The thoughts and images stay with you all day.

I meet the Goldwing-with-the-sidecar owner and his wife in Peggy Sue’s Diner. They’re retired (I assume), and they ride about 40,000 miles a year on their Wing, just seeing the country. He tells me that shortly before the accident, the Goldwing that was in the crash had passed him and his wife on the highway and was going pretty fast, but not insanely fast. He said there was a male riding and a female passenger, and they both gave the thumbs-up as they went by. He said they were both wearing shiny new helmets and shiny new pants and jackets and gloves. This may or may not mean anything, but it may mean that they were new riders. I asked if he thought the guy knew how to ride. I think experienced riders can often tell from a mile away when someone is either careless or not terribly comfortable on their machine. He said that he did look a little shaky as he gave the thumbs-up. Again, it may or may not mean anything. It’s just a feeling that experienced riders get when observing other riders.

A short while later he and his wife reached the accident scene and realized it was the Goldwing that had passed them earlier. The cops were there and they had covered up the body of the rider, he was dead, but they were working on the passenger. Some lady who’d pulled over told them that a car (the one I’d seen that was facing the wrong way) came across the median doing circles and spun right into oncoming traffic. She didn’t know exactly why the bike crashed, maybe the car clipped it, but she said she had to floor it to miss the spinning car. When she pulled over the bike was already down.

We swapped some stories and tips, talking about great roads and great states and which rain gear we liked. The Goldwing-with-a-sidecar rider and his wife had ridden in every state except Maine and Hawaii, and they had no intention of riding in Maine. No reason, really, just didn’t care if they did or not. Funny, I told them I had always felt the same way about California. This very day was my first time in the state and so far I could take it or leave it.

Me and the Goldwing-with-a-sidecar husband and wife parted ways and agreed that we’d be thinking about that dead biker for the rest of the day. Did the spinning car hit the bike and take it down? Or did the rider swerve or brake to avoid the spinning car and lose control? Did another panicked driver hit the bike? And the biggest question of all, what would I do if I saw a car spinning across the median and right into my path?

Interesting footnote. When I arrived at Peggy Sue’s Diner there was also a BMW motorcycle parked out front. One of those fancy touring bikes with a GPS unit on the handlebars and all sorts of gadgets. The rider was inside at a table keeping to himself, but with an air of smugness about him. On an empty seat sat his fancy riding suit and his fancy full face helmet and I saw he was wearing expensive riding boots and expensive riding pants. I call this type of rider one of the “Aerostich” crew. Aerostich is a company that makes awesome motorcycle gear and I have been a loyal customer for a long time. I even visited them in Duluth, Minnesota, on a previous trip to Alaska.

When I speak of the Aerostich crew, I am referring to riders who often log more miles on a bike each year then everyone I know put together, including me. These are the guys who ride the BMW-style bikes and wear one-piece riding suits, motorcycle touring boots, and full-face helmets when they ride, no matter how hot it is. They have fancy GPS units, hydration systems, and all sorts of gadgets. Many of them are Iron-Butt riders, that group of hard-core endurance riders who like to, oh, ride ten consecutive days of 1000 miles each day. That’s hardcore. But many of them are folks who just like gadgets and gear. They have to have the latest and newest and the best of every item available for motorcycle touring and though you wouldn’t know it to look at them, they don’t actually ride that much. Sort of like the BMW version of the Harley yuppie, and the guy that was inside Peggy Sue’s Diner with the BMW parked outside looked like one of those guys.

The Goldwing-with-the-sidecar rider told me that the BMW guy had gotten off of the highway at the same time as he and his wife, had seen the wreck on the road, had pulled into the same diner parking lot, and yet didn’t say a word to either of them. The Goldwing-with-a-sidecar rider and I were both a little shaken at seeing that Honda smashed out on the highway with a dead rider next to it, and we were glad to share a few moments with each other. Maybe the BMW rider had other things on his mind, maybe he was processing it in his own way, but me and the Goldwing-with-a-sidecar rider agreed that the BMW guy was probably just a poser. But we could be wrong.

I left Peggy Sue’s Diner glad to be on back roads. I saw a billboard advertising a “ghost town” ahead and a few moments later I pulled over to study the dilapidated buildings, the deserted shops, the broken-down cars. And then some woman came out to yell at me. “This ain’t the ghost town, you idiot. The ghost town is down the road five miles. We’ve been like this since Bush got elected and ruined the damn economy!”

“Hillary will fix it in ’08,” I shouted and hopped on my bike.

Hitting the back roads down to Barstow, I rode on Historic Route 66 in the State of California for the first time (the only state where I hadn’t ridden on the original Route 66). This was in fact my first time riding a motorcycle in California, my 48th state. Oregon will be 49. I’ve always avoided riding in California, even when I was once riding around Arizona and only ten minutes from the border. I’m not sure why I never had any interest in visiting California, especially when one considers how passionate I am about visiting almost every other state in the union. But I think it’s for several reasons. For one, I can’t think of any real history that California is famous for. There is plenty, I’m sure, but none of it comes to mind when I think of California. The only things that comes to mind when I think of California is Hollywood. Fake, gaudy, self-absorbed, obnoxious. I know it’s ridiculous to associate the entire state of California with the worst of Los Angeles, but that’s what I’ve always done.

Barstow was a much bigger town than what I was expecting, but other than that, nothing to write home about. I left Barstow, headed to San Diego via California back roads.

I rode clear through Joshua Tree National Park (I would have preferred to ride through Achtung Baby National Park---a much better album---but I couldn’t find it on the map). I still have no clue what the hell a Joshua Tree is, but the park was amazing. What a fantastic place through which to ride. Rolling brown hills, strange vegetation, and these enormous rocks (five times the size of your house---eight times the size of my apartment) that look as if someone smashed them with a giant sledge hammer and then glued the pieces back in place. Cracks and splits and crevices, really, really cool.

As I have several times on this trip, I saw people climbing the rocks and the mountains as I rode past and I was grateful that someone else had come up with the idea of rock or mountain climbing because I can assure you that I never would have invented it. Not once have I ever looked at a mountain or a rock and thought, I really want to climb that thing just to get to the top. I have, though, occasionally thought that about a really tall woman.

After riding sixty miles through Joshua Tree National Park (temps of 104 on my digital thermometer as I rode), I hopped on I-10 for a few miles just to get to another back road that I had mapped out. At the exit for that particular back road there was also a gas station, and so I stopped for gas. After filling up I forgot that I was supposed to take the road at that exit and instead I got back on the interstate. Duh! After about ten miles of looking for RT 86, swearing that it should be right around here, I realized what I’d done. The hell with it, I thought. I’m not going back. (Motorcyclists would rather ride ten thousand miles out of their way and into a hurricane before making a U-turn.)

As I booked down I-10 in the middle of the desert I was the slowest guy on the road, at a mere 85 miles an hour. What is it with these California highways? These people drive like maniacs in this state. Everyone except me seemed to be cruising comfortably around 90 mile per hour. Unbelievable.

I spotted a road off to the left of the highway that wound it’s way up a huge mountain and looked cool as hell. Like a motorcyclist in heat I thought, I have to take that road. And it’s headed south, it will probably get me towards San Diego. The exit sign said it was the Gene Autry Trail and I thought, Yippee, this looks promising.

About six minutes later I wasn’t on a road climbing a mountain, I wasn’t on a curvy, twisty, really cool two-lane, I wasn’t even on a back road. Son-of-a-bitch! I was smack in the middle of Palm Springs or Palm Desert or Palm something. Traffic lights every six feet, shopping centers, rows and rows of houses, and senior citizens as far as the eye could see. (Well, as far as MY eye could see. Old people aren’t known for their exceptional vision.) I was the youngest person in view by, oh, forty years!

But, as usual, too stubborn to make a U-turn, I stayed on this boulevard for traffic light after traffic light. It was around 100 degrees, and I rode for miles getting deeper and deeper into the suburban sprawl that all motorcyclists hate. Naturally, I caught every single red light (did I mention it was around 100 degrees?) and once I was almost clipped as some bone head tried to cut in front of me before the lane he was in came to an end. (RIGHT LANE ENDS... RIGHT LANE ENDS... RIGHT LANES ENDS... well, I’ll admit it is a little hard to figure out what those signs mean.) At the next light I seriously considered removing his teeth, but when I saw he was 92 years old I figured there’s no joy in removing someone’s teeth in the afternoon who will be removing them later that night anyway.

There were no signs indicating that I was headed toward the interstate or any other type of road that might actually go somewhere. I was stuck in suburban hell. I had the sickening feeling that all this riding was taking me back in the wrong direction, and that I might have no choice but to make a U-turn and hit every one of these four thousand traffic lights again if this road eventually dead-ends out in the desert. I was no longer keeping a wary eye out for careless motorists who might kill me, but was instead praying for a careless motorist to kill me. Anything to get me out of this traffic and away from these pastel-painted buildings and day-glo signs offering early-bird specials.

Suddenly, I spotted a sign for California Route 74 and I said, I’m taking that road, I don’t care where it goes, but I’m getting on it.

A few minutes later, to my extreme delight, I was climbing a curvy two-lane road up the side of a mountain, the very saw one I’d spotted from the interstate. Spotting a sign that reads, SHARP CURVES AND STEEP INCLINES NEXT 38 MILES, I immediately congratulated myself on my brilliant sense of direction and adventure, forgetting that just moments ago I was thoroughly lost, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic in 100 degree heat, and surrounded by geriatrics, only seconds away from crying out that I want my mommy.

I rode those two-lanes for another 150 or so miles making my way to San Diego and my hotel for the night. What a great road. Great scenery, great curves, and perfect weather. I was starting to like California a little bit.

Arriving in San Diego I started to feel that woozy feeling one gets when possibly falling in love. In keeping with a tradition I developed some years ago, I did not look at the directions I’d written down and had in my saddlebag that would get me to the hotel I’d booked for the night. Instead I rode around San Diego aimlessly, eventually following the signs to the San Diego waterfront, arriving just as the sun was going down over the water. What a beautiful spot. Great view, great restaurants, and I enjoyed a large orange juice I bought for four dollars and eighty-five cents at a store that only sells juice. Can you imagine? They only sell juice!

I got on the highway after leaving the waterfront district and headed to my hotel, accidentally riding seventeen miles in the wrong direction. It was fun, though. California’s highways are enormous and the people fly down these roads. I was doing 75 miles an hour and was getting passed like I was standing still, by grandmothers, teenage girls, kids on skateboards. One car passed me doing 90 miles an hour and when I looked inside I saw a blind man sitting in the passenger seat, his seeing-eye-dog was doing the driving! I must admit, though, that the drivers here seem quite capable, except for the speeding part, but heck, I speed. They don’t hog the left lane, they don’t ride the brakes. Somehow, they keep everything moving. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a major city before.

Finally finding my Super Eight for the night I again encounter a motel office reeking of curry, a dirty motel room, and spotty wireless internet service. I had to leave the door to my room propped open to get a wireless signal.

Some readers of my blog have emailed me to suggest that if I switch hotel brands I will perhaps find better as well as curry-free accommodations. Why didn’t I think of that? I think I’ll switch to Best Westerns. (I’m putting it politely when I say they “suggested” I switch to a new brand of hotel. It was more along the line of, Hey, you moron! What do you expect to find when you book a hotel for 49 dollars? A concierge wearing a tux and offering complimentary champagne? Well, no, I didn’t expect that, but mainly because I can’t spell concierge.)

Interesting back-story. Even when I’m not on a road trip I ride my bike just about every day. I take a lot of weekend trips, and I stay out till late at night many nights riding around my hometown of Bucks County, PA. So when I have to put my bike in the shop for service it is a traumatic experience for me. I hate to be without it. The Kawasaki dealer closest to my house is completely worthless. They have so much business that they have zero interest in treating their customers right. On several occasions I dropped my bike off for service and was promised it would be finished in three days and a week later it still wasn’t done. Or it was done, but they forgot to do everything I asked, and so really it wasn’t done. Once, they advertised free pick-up and delivery for service and so I had them come get the bike and put on tires, brake, etc. The bike was done two weeks later, but for the next two weeks they didn’t deliver it to me because their driver had quit. It was the dead of winter and I guess they didn’t think it was a big deal for me not to get my bike back, but I ride all winter and it was a very big deal. I ended up taking a taxi cab to their dealership to retrieve my bike.

So the next time I decided to put my bike in the shop for a complete service, tires, brakes, etc., as well as having as oil leak from the engine fixed, I knew I wouldn’t be taking my bike to that dealer. I called Trenton Kawasaki and spoke to the service manager. I was very friendly and polite. I said, “Fella, I don’t live all that close to you, but I will have the bike delivered to your shop and left there for tires, brakes, etc., as well as the oil leak repair. I know that to repair the oil leak from the engine, the engine will have to come out of the bike and this will take some time. Since I ride the bike every single day, my question to you is this. How long will it take and when do you want me to bring the bike in? I don’t wan to rush you, and I don’t need any special favors. If you’re busy now, I can bring it in next week. If that’s no good, I’ll bring it in the week after. There’s no real hurry, I just want to plan this out so I get the bike back as quickly as possible. It is very important to me that I know how long I’ll be without my bike. And hey, if you can’t do it quickly, if you can’t commit to a return date, I understand that. I just want to know ahead of time.”

He said to have the bike delivered to him the following week, and that it would be no problem to do all the work I requested, and that it would be no problem to have the bike back to me in two weeks. I thanked him and then had the bike delivered exactly when he’d asked me to.

After he’d had my bike for two weeks and I hadn’t heard from him, I called. To my astonishment, he told me that he was waiting for the tires to come in then he’d start the bike. He’d start the bike? He’d start the fucking bike? So the oil leak isn’t fixed? The brakes aren’t done? And wait a minute, he doesn’t have tires in stock? And even if he doesn’t have tires in stock, you mean to tell me two weeks isn’t enough time for him to get some new tires? A Kawasaki dealer?

I said none of that, of course. Instead I politely asked him when he thought he’d have it done. “Probably next week,” he told me.

Oh yea, some readers might recall the Kawasaki Dealer who KEPT MY BIKE FOR A FREAKIN’ MONTH when they said they’d have it back to me in two or three weeks and DIDN’T DO THE WORK THEY SAID THEY WOULD DO EVEN AFTER KEEPING IT FOR A MONTH! Well, yesterday someone from that dealership left a message on my voicemail saying they just wanted to know if I was happy with their service. Well, if speed dialing ever gets into the Olympics I want to compete. I dialed that number so fast after hearing that message that even the operator cut in to say she was impressed! I gave the manager an earful and he said he’d look into it and call me back. We’ll see what happens.

Tomorrow, Tijuana (maybe) but at the very least, the start of my ride up the entire California Coast!


Blog Twelve Pacific Coast Highway 9/11/06

First let me say that every single thing I write in my blogs is the absolute truth. The only exception is the places where I’ve lied to make it funnier and where I’ve changed the names to protect the idiots.

Also, I know that some people may read my blogs and conclude that I’m one of those cantankerous know-it-alls who find fault with everyone but themselves and want everything in life to be perfect and will criticize anyone who doesn’t meet their absurdly high standards. This is true.

Leaving San Diego this morning, I headed south down I-5 to Mexico. It was nine AM local time when I arrived at the border, and there were maybe 40 or 50 cars waiting to cross. I pulled into the U-turn lane and immediately a border guard came out to meet me. I considered making a joke about my crossing the border in search of a landscaping job, but I figured by 9 AM he’d probably heard that joke twenty-eight times already. He was quite friendly, and when I asked him whether or not it would be a good idea to ride into Mexico, he gave my bike a good long look and said, “I wouldn’t.” Next I asked if he thought it was worth it to park on the U.S. side and walk across the border and he said, “probably not”. I believed him, and hit the gas and got out of there. So now I’ve been in 48 states on a motorcycle, almost all of the Canadian Provinces, crossed the Arctic Circle, and was within eight feet of Mexico. (I happen to think the Mexicans are a beautiful people and I’m most fond of them, but for now I’m content to admire them from afar, not counting the thirty or forty million of them who are already here.)

Headed back northbound on I-5, I rode through San Diego and
exited the interstate at the very beginning of the Pacific Coast Highway going north. Yee haw! Let the trip begin. Time to ride the coast. The famed PCH. I’ve heard about it, read about it,(never actually dreamt about it, though) and was assured by everyone who’s ever ridden it that I’d be in heaven. Three minutes later I was back on I-5. What the f...? Evidently the PCH runs for about two blocks before rejoining the interstate.

Fifteen minutes later, I again exited the highway and got on the famed PCH. This time I rode through an industrial area and stopped at six traffic lights. Along the way I passed a California Highway Patrol station and stopped in to say hello. I informed the kind officer at the desk that I was from out of state and would like to familiarize myself with the vehicle laws as they pertained to motorcycles. He explained that lane-splitting was permitted if traffic was slowed or stopped, but that I might be responsible for any damage if someone opened their door as I was flying past and I struck it. (I didn’t ask if by damage he meant the damage I would cause to that “someone’s” face when I got out of the hospital.) Riding on the shoulder is never permitted, he told me emphatically, and I realized I’d caught a break the other day in Barstow when that CHP officer saw me doing just that. As I rode away from the CHP station (staying well clear of the shoulder), I congratulated myself for not making any Eric Estrada jokes.

Back on the interstate, I saw a sign for tourist information and I exited and found the tourist office located in a charming little park right by San Diego Bay.
The lady at the information booth, with the help of a map and some tourist brochures, gave me the straight scoop on the Pacific Coast Highway. Eventually, the PCH separates from I-5 and follows the coast line. Beach and ocean on one side of the road, mountains on the other. However, the communities through which the PCH runs are so close together that you end up more or less riding through towns all day with brief glimpses of sand and ocean. Most of the towns are super-rich types of places, with really nice stores and shops, as well as restaurants serving types of food that didn’t sound particularly appetizing. Many of the towns had San or Del in the name, and some of them I’d heard of (like Huntingdon Beach) and some I’d never heard of.

I left the tourist booth and rode down by the water of San Diego Bay where I saw what seemed like a very California type of thing: a bunch of very fine-looking mommies doing aerobics by the water, their baby strollers in hand. They were bending this way and that, and some of them were wearing what looked like very expensive and very tight and revealing workout gear. I suspected they’d either adopted or were the nannies for the babies they had with them, because there was no way that some of those women had recently given birth. Even Ethiopian women retain more fat than these ladies. I rode past very, very slowly (so as not to frighten the children).


Finally riding on the Pacific Coast Highway, I detoured at the first little beach town I encountered and did some exploring. I was amazed at the obvious wealth as well as the beauty of the people on the streets. Even the mannequins outside the clothing shops were better looking than I am (and certainly better-dressed). It was not my kind of town, but I found a restaurant and decided to have breakfast. I couldn’t decide between the Thai Poached Eggs With Soy Chutney or the Enoki Miso Soup with a Hint of Mint and Kaffir Lime Omelet, so I just asked for some fucking eggs and coffee. No I don’t want no damn sesame toast, no I don’t want no damn soy chai milk, and what the hell is tarragon dill butter?

Back on the PCH after my high-end breakfast, I finally got to a few stretches of road where there were no traffic lights, no traffic, and no towns, just ocean on one side, mountain on the other. I would pass through the occasional beach town, but they all started to look alike and none of them were places where I had any interest in stopping and hanging out, I’m not sure why. They seemed like typical rich-dick beach towns and I preferred to just keep moving. I also wasn’t very impressed with the scenery. The ocean looked nice, but not exactly amazing. The beaches, when I could see them, were not very wide and the sand didn’t look particularly impressive. They certainly weren’t beautiful swatches of golden sand, smooth and inviting. The beaches often looked cramped. The terrain on the side of the road opposite the ocean wasn’t that great either. Not a lot of green trees or vegetation, really. Just large brown mounds of earth covered with brown shrubs or something. From what I’d seen so far, the Pacific coast is not even half as nice as the coast of Maine or the Carolinas or the coast of Nova Scotia. But I still had a long way to go.

And then, eventually, I got to Los Angeles.

Mamma Mia. Traffic. Traffic lights. Millions of people. Hey look! The famous Los Angeles crazy street people! Wow, there are plenty of them. Most of them had heavy beards and were wearing jackets, sweaters, scarves, and hats despite the 90 degree heat. (And that was just the women.)

One would suppose that I hated it, but I didn’t. Actually, I kind of dug it. I turned off the Pacific Coast Highway and took a little ride around L.A. Not enough to really see the city, of course, just enough to catch a glimpse of that part of L.A. (right near the Port of L.A. and LAX). There was something interesting about this part of the city that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And then I figured it out. It was diverse. Unlike Chicago or Atlanta or New York or Philly, where the neighborhoods are separate and distinct---rich people here, poor people six blocks over---this part of Los Angeles was thoroughly integrated, with high-end shops next to low-end stores, fancy-looking restaurants next to cheap burrito joints, and expensive luxury cars parallel-parked behind and in front of jalopies. A seriously fancy-looking spa and salon might be next to a dilapidated used clothing store. The traffic was just as diverse. BMWs and Lexus’s, as well as low-riders and rent-a-wrecks.

Usually, one can ride down a street and get a sense of what type of neighborhood you’re in just by looking at the automobiles and the types of stores. Not in L.A. It was a mixed up conglomeration of races and cultures and incomes. It was fascinating, and I could see how L.A. could be addicting.

Back on the PCH, I entered Santa Monica and stopped at the big Kawasaki dealer in the middle of town. Giving the service manager a big, friendly smile, I said, “Hello! I’m passing through on a ride from Philadelphia. Do you think you have time this afternoon to do an oil and filter change while I wait? Doesn’t have to be right this minute.”

“No,” he said, and I knew instantly that I’d be buying a Harley Davidson as my next bike when I return from this trip. I may have to put up with the yuppie Harley riders, but at least a Harley dealer will change your oil when you ride one of their machines five thousand miles in a week and a half.

This to me, that simple word “no” from a service manager, is un-fucking-believable. In twenty years of riding I’ve never, ever had a service manager not do a quick oil change for a guy on the road. Never.

I switched from Harleys to Japanese bikes at the height of the yuppie Harley craze in the mid-nineties, when Harley dealers had year-long waiting lists for bikes that you had to buy loaded with bullshit accessories. The Harley dealers had customers lined up around the block, and when they started building boutiques in their shiny new dealerships and catering to the Harley fashion show, old-school riders like myself felt betrayed. I wanted to buy a new Harley. But I didn’t want to wait a year and I wanted it bone-stock, not loaded with ridiculous accessories.

Japanese dealers were also enjoying an explosion in sales at this time, but they were lagging slightly behind the Harley boom, and were still a fairly tight-knit community who treated their customers well. In fact, I recall telling all my Harley buddies that the Japanese dealers are just like the Harley dealers used to be.

But not anymore. Jap dealers do not care about their customers because they don’t have to care about their customers. They are currently riding a wave of excessive demand. Now they have customers lined up around the block. The Japanese dealers think that the boom will never end, but as Harley is now learning, every boom ends. I stop at Jap dealers all over the country and not-a-one has to earn their customers anymore. You can sense it the minute you walk in the door---the arrogance, the indifference. The manufacturers limit the number of dealers in an area, and so the dealers do not have to compete. The Japanese make a superior motorcycle, no doubt, but bad service can diminish any advantage a company has, especially if the bad service is consistent.

So now the situation has reversed itself. The Harley boom has slowed down and new Harleys are readily available. The Harley dealers not only have time to catch their breath, but they are well aware that as the yuppies sell their Harleys and move on to the next fad, the way to get old-school riders like myself back is to keep up their reputation of offering great service, especially to guys on cross-country trips.

Oh, well. I liked the two Jap bikes I’ve owned, but it’s back to Harleys for me. (Although maybe I shouldn’t blame the service manager for not doing my oil and filter change, after all, by the time I walked in it they had only six hours left before closing.)

I got back on the PCH and a little while later stopped in Malibu at a seafood stand and met my first real-life California surfers! They were blonde, tan, goofy, full of energy, and I liked them. For about fifteen minutes.

As I ate my shrimp from the safety of the road I watched some surfers out on the ocean, preferring to risk getting flattened on the highway by a tractor trailer rather than risk getting some sand in my boots.

I passed through another ten thousand towns and stopped at another fifteen thousand lights before I got to Ventura. I kept seeing signs that said SPEED CHECKED BY RADAR and so all day I was wondering if Gary Burghoff had joined the California Highway Patrol. (Hey, I’ve heard worse.)

Today was a day of hard riding. Lots of stop and go, lots of traffic. I had intended to do some exploring in Ventura, but it had taken me all day to go a mere 225 miles, and so I said forget Ventura, I’m headed to my Ramada Inn in Santa Barbara. (I discovered that in addition to the Super Eight Motels that I’ve sworn off, Ramada was one of the brands in my Trip Rewards program, so I’m going to try Ramada for a while. No way I’m switching brands before I get to my target of eight thousand Trip Reward points. I WANT that insulated beer can holder, goddammit!)

Along the way to Santa Barbara, I rode through the most amazing cloud cover I’ve ever seen. At first I thought it was smoke from a forest fire, but it didn’t smell like smoke so I wasn’t sure. I’ve ridden through the smoke from two major forest fires, once in Virginia and once in The Ozarks, and this cloud cover was almost identical. Thick haze blotting out even the sun, which left an eerie haze over everything---soft lighting at it’s softest. I couldn’t see the ocean fifty feet away, and I couldn’t see the mountain. Just white everywhere, except for on the road. The road itself was clear. The clouds seemed to stay just above the road surface somehow, and you could actually see them up close at times, detecting the very edge of the clouds as you rode past them. Very, very cool.

I arrived at my quite comfortable and clean Ramada in Santa Barbara and after dropping off my gear, took a ride around town.

Along the sidewalk in front of a group of small shops, stood a mannequin wearing a form-fitting pair of jeans. The jeans had some type of ruffle or something built into them, and they were very stylish and---yes, I know it was a mannequin---very sexy. (You know you’ve been on the road too long when you see a mannequin and think she’s got a nice ass. But really, she did.) The mannequin stood in front of a store called Fernando’s Fashions, and the jeans looked so new and stylish that I thought I’d buy a pair of them for my friend Donna, who is herself quite stylish. Entering the store I was greeted by the smiling and energetic Fernando himself. He only had the jeans in a few sizes, none of which I suspected would fit Donna, and so I left, thanking him, and feeling bad I couldn’t give him some business. The store was very small and looked like it might be on it’s last leg. Fernando gave me a business card and suggested I call back in a few days and see if he’s got some more sizes in stock. During dinner I looked at his business card, which had written on one side, Fernando’s Fashions, and when I turned it over I saw written on the other side, Landscaping By Fernando. Fashion and landscaping. Only in California.


Blog Thirteen Salinas 9/12/06

I left Santa Barbara reluctantly, this morning. What a nice town. I’m somewhat familiar with the seedier side of towns, and I don’t think Santa Barbara has one---my only complaint.

Hitting the road, I was hoping that the Pacific Coast Highway would improve considerably over what I’d already seen. It did.

Along the 101 (which runs with the PCH for a few stretches), I stopped at a Kawasaki dealer who had a Harley dealer next door. Half an hour later, everything I’d written in yesterday’s blog about motorcycle dealers was refuted! (I was glad to have been proven wrong, I might add.) When the Kawasaki dealer saw that I was a traveler, they took me in immediately and changed my oil, filter, and rear oil.

While they were working on the bike, I wandered next door to the Harley dealer, where the manager assured me that the Harley boom was still going strong. We talked for a while, and he told me that the yuppie market is alive and well, and though the yuppies don’t ride very much, they sure do spend money. He said he gets five-year-old trade-ins with fifteen-hundred miles on them, but he makes a ton of money in clothing and chrome from those same customers. He was an old-school Harley salesman, a guy who actually rides and has been riding for a long time. Many of the Harley Davidson sales guys I meet are guys who’ve been selling all their lives, not riding. He also said that he’s sold a lot of bikes to people who went on to get themselves killed or maimed while riding them---and they were all members of the new Harley generation, the yuppies. He wouldn’t tell me the exact number, but he said he’d lost a lot of customers that way.

Back at the Kawi dealer to pick up bike, the service manager asked me who balanced my front wheel. I told him some jerk-off dealer in Trenton, and he said “Well, the guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. He put two weights about eight inches apart on the same side of the rim, and you’re not supposed to do that.” He also told me my back tire was about 500 miles away from needing replacement, but that he didn’t have one in stock. I called ahead to a dealer in Salinas, CA, my destination for the night, and they’ll put one on for me tomorrow.
Hauling ass down Highway 101, I came upon a tractor trailer doing 55 mph in the right lane, and in the left lane, a group of five cars all bunched up behind a big Dodge Ram pick-up truck, also doing 55, and staying right next to the tractor trailer so that no one could pass. It was clear that the pick-up truck had been staying next to the tractor trailer for some time, clogging up the highway, because the cars behind it were all bunched together, constantly tapping the breaks (a sure sign they were tailgating) and continuously peeking out over the yellow line to see around the Dodge. This went on for miles and miles and miles! I got a look at the driver of the Dodge through his rear window, and I could see that he had his arm up and elbow out, and his palm pressed against his ear in the universal sign for I’M ON THE CELL PHONE. NOBODY MATTERS BUT ME.

Can you imagine being so self-absorbed, so ignorant and reckless as to slow down an entire lane on the highway for miles and miles and miles? Talk about oblivious.

Stopping in a little town at a Taco restaurant, I ordered my shrimp taco and turned to see what was, without-question, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my entire life, almost as funny as the time some friends and I were sitting in a restaurant and we saw a man walk by and suddenly disappear straight down into an open manhole. (The guy was okay.)

Sitting at a table was a man eating a big, sloppy burrito---actually he was attempting to eat a big sloppy burrito. He had one arm immobilized in a sling, leaving him with only his other hand to pick up this long, rather flexible burrito! I watched as five times he lifted the burrito to his mouth and five times it disintegrated and fell back to the plate before he could eat it! Even when he tried to use his fork to scoop up the pieces, he only succeeded in pushing them around the plate like a little kid playing bulldozer. Fucking hilarious! Like watching a man eating a bowl of soup with a fork. The poor guy spent half-an-hour in a restaurant and left hungry. I couldn’t wait to write about this in my blog, and then I realized that I have a better chance of getting people to believe that I stopped by the governor’s mansion in Sacramento and banged Maria Shriver (which I actually did---after I checked her for a pulse. Is it me or does that woman look deceased?) than I do of getting them to believe that a one-armed man was attempting to eat a burrito. And so I took a picture of him with my cell phone camera!

Back on the road, I stopped at The Hearst Castle (but not before spotting some zebras hanging out with some cows in a field. That’s right, zebras, in a field, right next to the Hearst Castle.). How do you know you have too much money? When you call your house in California a castle. It is an enormous, audacious monstrosity that reminded me of my apartment (in that my apartment has a bathroom, so does the castle. My apartment has a kitchen, so does the castle. In fact, from now on, I will call my apartment The Castle. I’ll bet it will help it with the chicks!).

The Pacific Coast Highway eventually separates from Highway 101, and once I was on the PCH and off the highway, I was livin’ large! Now this is the Pacific Coast Highway I was looking for. Lots of curves, rolling hills on one side of the road, ocean on the other. No towns, no lights, just California Coast. And those cool rolling hills that look like big, brown camel humps (and the weird grass that covers them looks like hair).

The hills eventually become mountains and I rode for hours, whipping through the curves. Things were going great until three times in five minutes I had to slam on the brakes to force tailgaters to go around me. Sorry, but I don’t allow myself to be tailgated, and I’ll explain the slamming-on-the-brakes thing in another blog. (Just like lane splitting, slamming on the brakes is not as dangerous as it sounds, and it’s FAR less dangerous than allowing yourself to be tailgated. Think of it as a controlled deceleration—rather than the uncontrolled deceleration you might have to do in a panic stop, causing the tailgater to run over you.)

When the road would dip down near the ocean, it would be 59 degrees or so, and I would be freezing my balls off. Then, I’d climb towards the sun and it would be 85 and I’d be sweating my balls off, and then I began to feel bad for the much-maligned testicles. They are the storehouse for the seeds of life, and yet when one needs a phrase to indicate the severity of a subject, the testicles are the first to go. We freeze them off, sweat them off, work them off---the only thing we don’t do is jerk them off. And as you know (or are about to find out) testicles rescind or extend in or out of the body depending on the outside temperature. Well, along the Pacific Coast Highway, my testicles felt like they were a yo-yo!

As the road climbed higher, I again found myself riding through the clouds. A whitish haze was everywhere, and I couldn’t see any scenery what-ever. And then... the road rose above the clouds! And now I’m rolling through wicked curves and looking down on a flat sea of white. A steady layer of billowy clouds as far as the eye can see. How cool is that?

I stopped for gas and discovered that I’d crossed the 50,000 mile mark on my odometer seven miles back.

My friend Gene at N&N insisted that I stop at Nepenthe, a restaurant in Big Sur (what the hell does Big Sur mean, anyway? I’m sure it’s not named after the Johnny Rivers song, is it?) Way to go, Bambino.

Nepenthe is a restaurant built right into the side of the mountain, and from your table you look down at that flat sheet of white clouds. What a view! A smooth, flat layer of soft white clouds stretching to the horizon... sweet mamma mia! I suppose that if the clouds weren’t there you’d see the Pacific Ocean stretched out before you, or possibly you’d see a Wal-Mart. I don’t know what’s under those clouds and I don’t care. The view is amazing.

I don’t dine at the restaurant though, I dined at the outdoor café (more about that later) and as I’m waiting in line to place my order I notice that the girl behind the counter is having a hard time understanding the guy in front of me. I’m not really paying attention, and I assume he’s a foreigner. But then I hear what he’s saying and I realize what’s going on. And then I hear her say, sympathetically, “It’s okay, you probably think we have accents, too,” and I want to say to her, He doesn’t have an accent, sweetie. He’s fuckin’ deaf! Did you think he came from the country of Deafland? Oh, hey, I’d recognize that accent anywhere, my mother came from southern Deafland, it’s just outside Stutterville, another easily recognizable accent.

I didn’t dine at the restaurant upstairs for several reasons. One, the café downstairs was empty of customers and the view is the same, if not better. Two, the restaurant was really crowded and the customers were mostly, well, rich people. I could tell this was not my kind of vibe. Three, I sat at the bar for a minute, but the bartender was a guy who had clearly worked in hotel bars during the hey-day of Disco---places with names like the Tiki Lounge or the Maui Room---and he missed those days very much. I have to be in a certain mood to sit at a bar with a guy who is actually thankful the management makes him wear a vest and who curses his mother everyday for not naming him Slick. Sometimes these guys are hilarious---What can I get ya, tutz? White Russian? You got it, babe.---but not when I want to admire the view.

Back on the Pacific Coast Highway, I got into Monterey... Cannery Row!---and into a traffic altercation. Why do I keep forgetting that people who own big black SUVs with tinted windows are better than me and that they are entitled to drive any way they choose?

From Monterey I rode into Salinas, hometown of John Steinbeck and home of the National John Steinbeck Center. I wander around the center for a while and then ride around Salinas for a bit.

My friend Neil insisted for years that I read John Steinbeck and I stubbornly insisted that I’d read Of Mice and Men and it was good, but I don’t really feel like reading any more by a guy who started writing in the 1920’s. I’d read The Old Man And The Sea, by Hemingway, which I loved, and then read several other things by Hemingway which I didn’t like at all. For some reason, I assumed Steinbeck books and Hemingway books were very similar, and after the bad experience with Hemingway I just couldn’t find the motivation to read any Steinbeck. Well Neil, once again, I’m sorry. Once I started reading Steinbeck I never stopped. Steinbeck is now my favorite writer, and so visiting his hometown of Salinas and riding through Monterey was my biggest goal of this trip (well, biggest goal after not getting killed, maimed, arrested, growing my hair back and being forced to wear a perm, waking up with a Slavic man next to me, finding out I’m Korean, getting beaten up by Arnold Schwarzenegger for making fun his dead-looking wife, getting beaten up by Maria Shriver for making fun of her, getting beaten up by a one-armed man who caught me taking pictures of him attempting to eat a burrito, and making a funny face and then having my face freeze in that position for the rest of my life.).

I relaxed in my hotel room for a few moments, studying my map, when I saw that the town of Hollister was twenty miles away from Salinas. What? I thought Hollister was way up North! I have to go to Hollister. For those who don’t know, Hollister is truly the birthplace of the American biker. It’s a place that’s been in my psyche since I was 12 years old and covered the walls of my bedroom with Dave Mann centerfolds that I’d removed from Easyriders magazines! (Forget Playboy, when I was a teen, I had choppers hanging on my wall.) In Hollister was born the One Percenter. Nu’ff said.

Also, Commuter (Neal), a fellow motorcyclist from the Kawasaki Forum, lives in Hollister and said he’d meet me for a drink at Johnny’s Bar & Grill, the downtown Hollister bar where they shot the movie “The Wild Ones”, with Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin. That was the original motorcycle movie, the one that launched a lifestyle. (And Neal seemed like a nice guy with the personality trait that I love and admire most: he liked my writing.)

Riding into Hollister was awesome! It was dark, I couldn’t see a thing, and there was nothing to distinguish Hollister from any other town, except that it was HOLLISTER! THE Hollister! (Understand, I’ve heard about this town for all of my life. It’s like a kid from Ethiopia seeing a donut for the first time. A donut it not a big deal to you and me, but it’s more calories than this kid has consumed in the last three years—added up!) (I know it’s not nice to make fun of people who are starving, and actually the analogy doesn’t even make any sense, but to be honest, making fun of people who are starving IS FUN, unless you’re starving when you do it—like I was starving the other day when I got to my hotel—and then it’s annoying.)

I called Neal on his cell phone and he gave me directions to Johnny’s Bar, and a few minutes later I backed my bike up to the curb in front of the bar where they took the cover photo of Life magazine in 1947 of a drunken biker (a staged photo, I might add, it was a Hollister local sitting one someone’s bike) that launched the outlaw biker world into the public light!

Neal seemed like a nice guy, but truthfully he was a maniac! Just kidding, he was a very nice guy, but I was disappointed when I found out he was in the car business because I realized that all the nice things he said about my writing were probably lies. Can those guys even distinguish truth from lie anymore? Kidding again. Neal tried to buy me a shirt from Johnny’s, but they were out of mediums (the size I claim I am when asked) and he said he would order one and mail it to me (You meet the nicest people on a Kawasaki!) but I said if he was going to buy me anything from Johnny’s as a souvenir, I would prefer the flat panel TV.

We had a fabulous time looking at pictures on the walls of Hollister motorcycle history, such as some original Boozefighters memorabilia (one of the first motorcycle clubs ever—gee, with a name like Boozefighters I wonder why people were afraid of them?) including some of the ashes of original Boozefighter Willie Fortner (another famous name from my youth). (I say SOME of the ashes, because Wille was a big man and there were only a small amount of ashes in that jar. Neal wisely pointed out that Wille drank in a LOT of places, and they probably divvied up his ashes.

The bartender and some locals filled us in on whatever local yore Neal hadn’t heard already, but it was hard to pay attention to one local, and not because of the two pounds of chewing tobacco he had in his lip and the horrid stench that blew forth from it, but because I realized that if he were to keel over and require mouth-to-mouth in order to survive, I’d be going to jail for letting a man die. But he was a really nice guy who had lived in Hollister all his life. He knew a lot of local information (except, I’m guessing, where the local dentist is—hey, I’m not making fun of the guy, but his teeth were black and rotting out of his head, if you can’t poke a little fun at a guy like that, who can ya poke a little fun at?)

Neal left to go home to the dinner that his wife prepared and that I rudely interrupted by calling him to tell him I was in town just as he got home from a long day of twisting around interest rates to inflate the monthly payments of unsuspecting and unsophisticated car buyers so they think they’re not paying six times more than they would if they just went to their bank and got a loan. Kidding. I don’t know what Neal does in the car business, for all I know he steals them or paints them. Or both. I stayed at that the bar for a while longer (two hours) and chatted up the locals who were great. Thanks Hollister, thanks Neal, thanks Dr. Mulnick (my dentist back in Philly).

Today, I’m off to Sequoia National Park. Big-ass trees.

Blog Fourteen Steinbeck 9/13/06

I left Salinas this morning under beautiful California skies, stopping on the way out of town at the local Kawasaki dealer to have my new rear tire installed, after which I’d be hitting the road. The road, baby! Where was I going, what might I see, where would I be spending the night? A hundred miles away? Five hundred? Who knew? But that’s the beauty of the road--the unknown. All I knew was that Salinas, California, beautiful as it is, would soon be a rapidly-diminishing dot in my rear view mirror.

And so where do you think I ended up? The one place I would never have guessed. Salinas, California. I felt like it was Groundhog Day when I walked into the Ramada Hotel, exactly as I did yesterday, and said to the exact same desk clerk, “Checking in.”

“Ah, you liked us so much you’re coming back,” said the Indian fellow behind the counter.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I just can’t get enough of that smell.”

As it turns out, that strange noise from my bike that I started hearing yesterday is a cracked exhaust pipe and so I’m stuck in Salinas for the night while a new set of pipes gets delivered to the dealer. The bike sounds a little funny, but I can still ride it around town without burning up an exhaust valve if I keep the speed down.

I went back to the Steinbeck Center, and then to the Steinbeck Childhood Home, where in the very room where John Steinbeck was born I chatted up the lovely little ninety-two-year-old volunteers who serve as guides. There is a little café/restaurant in what was the childhood living-room of John Steinbeck, and when I first walked into the vestibule, one extremely unfriendly elderly woman cast an appraising eye on me. Evidently not liking what she was seeing, she informed me that they were serving lunch and I couldn’t just wander around the house while people were dining. I wasn’t just wandering around the house while people were dining, I was standing in the vestibule. I hadn’t entered the house yet.

“But if I want to dine?” I asked.

“Well, then I’ll seat you in a moment. We'll be closing soon." she said.

“And what if while I’m dining I choose to wander around the house? Then I would be wandering around the house while people were dining, but I’d also be one of the people dining. Tell me that wouldn’t be trippy.”

“Just a moment, please,” she said and walked away.

Another woman came back and she was as friendly as could be, but not TOO friendly. I don’t like it when they’re too friendly. I understand that they volunteer, and for that I’m grateful. I also understand that they’ve probably lost their spouse of 60 years and that their kids never call them, and for that I’m sorry as well. But that doesn’t mean I need them beating my ear about every little detail of wherever it is I happen to be visiting and they happen to be volunteering. Here’s a tip, if you tell a visitor seventeen times about the eight minute film prepared by the historical society that he MUST see, and seventeen times he says, “Well, I’m not sure I have time,” what that really means is THERE IS NO FUCKING WAY I’M WATCHING THAT FILM, I DON’T CARE HOW GOOD IT IS! Also, I love Steinbeck and his writing, but frankly, I don’t give a goddamn about the upholstery or the frescoes in his childhood home. I never give a goddamn about the upholstery or the frescoes ANYWHERE I go. I don’t even know what a fresco is.

When I visit a place, often just being there is enough for me. Let me look around and take it in, let me think what I what to think while absorbing what I want to absorb. If I had one just wish in life it would be to have an on and off switch FOR MY EARS! Occasionally, I have a question, and it’s great that they know the answer, but if I ask one question, can I have just one answer, please?

I stop at little museums and tourist-type places all the time all over the country and inevitably there is someone there so bursting with pride and the need to be helpful that I often think of faking a heart attack so that when he or she runs to call the ambulance I’ll have a few moments to browse the displays unmolested. I also like it when people bring their children to places like The National Steinbeck Center and let them run wild. It must be a real treat for the kids. I know when I was seven years old I was forever bugging my parents to take me to a place where I could read about displaced families and migrant farm workers, not to mention great literature. “Mommy, Mommy! Tell me again how Steinbeck’s use of syntax and the participle was a non-formative approach to verb-agreement.”

“Maybe later, dear.”

“NO, NOW!”

“Young man, that is the type of behavior up with which I will not put!”

Sure. Kids love learning about great literature. It’s so much more fun than, say, swimming.

Though it’s a fifteen minute ride away, I decided to skip visiting Cannery Row in Monterey because I realized that the Cannery Row of today is not going to be the Cannery Row of John Steinbeck’s day, the Cannery Row that he so vividly painted in his novella. I think I want to leave those images in my mind just as they are and not replace them with the gaudy, touristy, neon-infused commercialism that is no-doubt the Cannery Row of today.

I think great writing gives you a minimum of details. Or should I say, great writing gives you only the important details, the interesting ones. The details that you might never have guessed and that only the keen eye of the writer could have noticed. The reader should delight in those details, not be bored by them. This, however, like all writing, requires the reader to be worthy audience, almost a partner. I believe that no writer can be better than his reader. If the reader is a dull, unimaginative clod with no appreciation for the subtleties and deliberateness that great writing provides, the reader will not be impressed. This is not the fault of the writer. It’s like offering me a fine cigar and a glass of expensive cognac. Uh, could I just get some nachos and a shot of Jack, please?

So while John Steinbeck’s writing points me in the right direction, I can fill in the blanks with my own imagination. He gives me room to invent my own images while providing me with the things I could never have invented because I am not him. How many writers today tell us things we either knew or didn’t need to know? It’s everything in between that makes great writing.

So how should I spend my Wednesday night in Salinas? Should I go see a band, hit a nightclub, buy some crack, protest the G-8, see a movie, get a great steak dinner, or stay in my room and watch spank-o-vision? Fortunately for me, none of those options are available in Salinas.

Instead, I ended up I walking around town, sitting for a spell on a bench on the porch of John Steinbeck’s childhood home (wonder what he’d think of THAT sentence), and had a wonderful dinner of spaghetti and meatballs. Half-way through my spaghetti and meatballs I recalled that I’d been purposely eating healthier as of late (one side of bacon, not two, for example) and realized that I should send this twelve-thousand-calorie heart-stopper back to the kitchen and call it a night (don’t forget the loaf of garlic bread and butter that one simply must consume while eating spaghetti and meatballs), but I didn’t want to insult the chef by sending back my plate half-full. In fact, fearing that he’d witnessed my momentary hesitation (chefs can be so sensitive), and not wanting to offend, I finished the ENTIRE plate of spaghetti and meatballs and wiped it clean with the last of the garlic bread. Continuing the charade for the chef’s benefit I ordered tiramisu for desert. They don’t serve decaf--can you imagine? But rather than being outraged, I was instead impressed. Good for them. I gave up coffee a month ago and now drink decaf all the time, but if I were a restaurant owner I would not serve decaf. I would say to my customers, “If you want to drink coffee with no coffee in it, go somewhere else, you jackass.”

It should be an early night for once, as my trusty steed sits silent outside my door. I’m tempted to risk burning up a valve by going for a ride, but instead I think I’ll stay in my room and find things to photograph with my cell phone camera.

Blog Fifteen John Holmes 9/14/2006

I left Salinas this morning under gray—wait a minute—didn’t I leave Salinas yesterday morning?—under gray skies and cool temperatures. I stopped at the local Kawasaki dealer and had my new Vance & Hines pipes installed. Mind you, the Vance & Hines pipes that I had on my bike were less than two years old—but they had thirty thousand miles on them. The salesman in the Kawasaki dealership asked where I was from—Philly, I said—and then he asked what I rode—Nomad, I said—and then he asked if I ever thought about upgrading. I just stared at him for about a minute and he pretty much read my mind, except for the expletives.

While my pipes were being installed I walked around Salinas and had a wonderful cheese quesadilla at the Mexican restaurant. I was munching my cheese quesadilla and thinking how great it is to have authentic Mexican food, how good Mexican food is, and then I realized that I what I consider to be semi-exotic ethnic food is the Mexican equivalent of a cheese sandwich. Frickin’ tourists.

Leaving Salinas later than I’d hoped, I rode through the town of Hollister again on my way to Route 26, which runs down to 198, which takes me into Sequoia National Park. I stopped in Hollister at the Kawasaki dealer to see if he had any exhaust gaskets. They had reused my old ones in Salinas and I wanted to keep some new ones with me just in case. They had ‘em. As I was getting back on my bike the salesman (do these guys ever quit?) came outside to ask me if it was windy when I was riding (it was a windy day). No, it’s only windy when we’re standing here on the sidewalk. Once I start moving it becomes dead calm.

“Where ya headed?” he asked.

“Sequoia National Park,” I answered.

“Which way you headed?” he asked.

“Down 26,” I said.

“I can show you a faster way,” he offered.

“No thanks,” I said. “I don’t want faster, I want scenic, and 26 looks to be a great road.”

“It IS a great road. You won’t see ten cars on that road. But if you want to get there faster—”

“I don’t want to get there faster.”

“Just take 158 to Route 41—”

“I DON’T WANT TO GET THERE FASTER. BUT THANK YOU.”

I rode through downtown Hollister (that took four seconds) and then I got on 26. Holy sweet Mamma Mia—THAT is a great road. The sun came out, the sky was brilliant blue, and there was no traffic. None. This road is a sport biker’s dream! (My Nomad occasionally thinks it’s a sport bike. I don’t have the heart to tell it that it’s not.)
Dozens and dozens of sharp curves and switchbacks! No towns, no lights, no nothin’. The road twists and turns for sixty miles through rolling brown California hills covered with golden wheat (or holly or hay or whatever that blonde stuff is that stands three feet tall and bends in the wind). There are fields filled with cows and fields filled with horses. But the curves are amazing—they go this way and that, great visibility, great road surface, good road markings, terrible road signs. California has TERRIBLE road signs. The only good thing about their road signs is that there are so few of them!

Along the way I stopped at Pinnacle National Monument. I like the word pinnacle (except when it’s used in the past tense describing my life). There are supposedly many California condors (ten-foot wingspans) flying around here, but I didn’t see any. Instead, I took a picture of a picture of a condor and that will have do for now.

I stopped to feed some cows that were near a fence but when I approached they took off running, or galloping, or whatever cows do when they are moving quickly. I was hurt and offended and felt that I had done nothing to deserve this bovine slight. I shouted to them that I would be having steak for dinner tonight for certain and even that wouldn’t ease the insult that they delivered to me undeservedly! I did and it didn’t.

The road was amazing! Scraping the floorboards became routine, and then I hit Route 198—another great road!—which was just as curvy and hilly and a blast to ride as Route 26! Eventually it straightened out though and began to run razor-straight and dead-flat through mile and miles of farmland and row after row of green plants. California is one BIG farming state.

But then, as the wind really picked up it began to blow the dust from the dirt fields across the road in great clouds that blotted out the horizon and occasionally the sun. (The fields had been plowed or tilled or something, and nothing was growing there yet—unless they were growing dirt.) Once or twice the dust got so thick that I could see nothing in front of me and had there been a truck stopped in the road I’d be part of his cargo now. The dirt left a thin coating on me and my bike, annoying because I’d just washed these clothes two weeks ago and now I’d have to wash them again in less than a week.

This went on for some time—those fields go on for miles and miles—and then I finally hit a town or two. Then it was back to a long stretch of twisty two-lane that headed right to the park.

Entering the park was a whole new world! Not only did the scenery become spectacular—mountains, streams, rocks, woods, but the road itself was also great. This was the Dragon, baby! Forget North Carolina! Curves that you simply had to slow to five miles an hour to take, curves that were pure U-turns, curves that were curved, curves everywhere! Nothing but curves!

I rounded one curve and saw a black object walking across the road. I slammed on the brakes and whipped out my cell phone camera. I had seen a similar creature a few weeks ago in Oklahoma but didn’t stop to take a picture. This time I would get photographic evidence of what was terribly scary and icky to me, but that I simply had to get a shot of… an enormous black tarantula. I’ll admit that I don’t like spiders and that they kind of skeeve me out. Ok fine, I’ll admit that I’m scared to death of spiders and would rather fight a mountain lion that even look at a spider. But this time I was determined to overcome my fear, if only for a moment, and take a photo of this spider (known I’ll remind you, as the black widow—and not because it’s African-American and lost a husband).

Valiantly stifling the desire to bolt or vomit or both, I bravely took aim with my camera and snapped a picture. HA! How tough am I? I’m not gonna let a little spider frighten me! I’m a real man! But taken from seventy-five feet away, the picture of the spider was worthless as proof of my bravery. The spider looked like a black dot among five thousand other black dots. So summoning up my courage, I said to hell with it! Life is about risk! That’s why I ride a motorcycle, isn’t it? So I stepped six inches closer to the spider, almost in the same zip code now, and took another picture. Same result. I removed from my bag a bottle of Jack Daniels that I carry for just such an emergency and took a swig! I was instantly taller and could run faster (and was much better looking and could sing). So I stepped another six inches closer to the spider. The picture was still useless. And then a mini-van stopped in the road and a six-year-old girl got out and stuck her nose three inches from the deadly Black Widow spider and yelled, “Yep. It’s a female,” and then got back in the car.

Shamed now, I had no choice but to approach the spider and take a picture. Unlike the ill-mannered cows I’d encountered this afternoon (sorry, I can hold a grudge for hours) the spider sat perfectly still on the highway as I took some pictures. I was even able to pull my bike up right next to it and get them both in the picture. Eventually the spider started getting into it and striking a pose or two. “Get me four pairs of heels,” I yelled flamboyantly!

Leaving the spider behind, I continued on through the park and was physically incapable of getting the smile off my face. Holy sweet mother of god! Now THIS is a scenic road! Curves galore! Unbelievable curves! Did I mention the curves? And no traffic! And then the road starts to climb the mountain and now you get a long view of the valley below. And then a sign that reads 3000 feet. Already? Now mountains are in clear view all around me; I see them as I’m heading due west and a second later I see different mountains as a curve heads me due east. Then west again! Then a sign that reads 4000 feet! I look off to my left and see an enormous mountain range BELOW me! Hey! Where did that come from? Oh, that’s the mountains I’ve been climbing for the last hour! The sun is starting to set and there’s a golden glow over everything. I’m a connoisseur of sunsets and this is going to be a good one.

And then a sign that lets me know I’m approaching the Giant Forest. And then I round a curve and I see why it’s called the Giant Forest. Good heavens! It’s a logger’s wet dream! Trees that are thirty feet around and hundreds of feet tall! Gargantuan trees! Trees that are mind-boggling. Nature’s genetic quirk has produced trees that are unaffected by even forest fire! In fact, forest fires are how their seeds are spread! (And no, not on the boots of the firemen, wise guy.)

These trees have been around since the time of the Romans! I need a moment to absorb that. And now my mind is all over the place. Can you imagine the continent’s earliest explorers wandering around and walking into this? I wonder if anyone was ever born and raised in the Sequoia National Forest and didn’t leave until later in life, say late teens. Imagine how they must have felt walking out of there and into a normal forest for the first time! I wonder if these trees are how all trees are meant to be, and the genetic quirk is actually everywhere else? I wonder what it sounds like when one of these monsters crashes to the forest floor! I know it happened because there are some enormous dead trees laying on the ground; the pieces are the size of railroad cars.

I have to stop and stare at these trees. I suddenly feel incredibly small and for just a second I consider moving to the Sequoia National Forest as part of my weight-loss program. The only thing that stops me is that I’ll never be able to spell Sequoia.

My mind has a hard time adjusting to the perspective. I really do feel puny. Even the bike looks small. (No way I’m taking a whiz beside these monsters. I’ll hold it until I get around some normal trees.) And then I visit General Sherman, the John Holmes of the tree world. It’s the largest living organism in the world! This tree weighs over six thousand TONS! Did you read that? TONS! Six thousand of them! It’s 275 feet tall! It has a circumference of 83 feet and 2 inches! If I knew what a circumference was I’d surely be impressed by that number. One of the branches on this tree has a diameter of over six feet and a length of over one hundred feet. A branch.

I spend some time with General Sherman and I think we bond. I do most of the talking, but he seems agreeable and then I say goodbye and promise to write. But with a pen, not a pencil, and not on paper.

I stop at a lodge/restaurant at seven thousand feet and have a steak. I chew vigorously and I hope that that rude group of cows feels every bite. I know I’m really hanging on to the insult, but I also know that those cows were raised better than that and it’s a slight on their mommas that they would treat a stranger so shabbily.

I have a room booked for the night somewhere above Fresno (Madera, I think) but when I exit the lodge it’s getting dark and at seven thousand feet it’s getting cold, so I stop at another lodge down the road and take a room for the night. Why ride three more hours in darkness through this beautiful park and miss it all? My headlight cuts a brilliant path through the pitch-black and before I get to the lodge I pull over and shut the bike off. I can’t believe how quiet and dark it is. And then I take out my earplugs. It’s still dark, but now I can hear the noises of the forest. It’s clear to me that the only reason I can’t hear the sound of a black bear sneaking up on me is because it’s being drowned out by the sound of the ravenous mountain lion sneaking up on me. The mountain lion who’s acquired a taste for human flesh, particularly the type of human flesh that’s only recently been scrubbed and powdered in a town called Salinas. I can’t hear actually hear the mountain lion either, but it’s clear to me that both those animals, as well as a rattlesnake and a tarantula (freshly made-up and with his agent in tow) are just feet away, cloaked in darkness and ready to pounce, held at bay only by their admiration for my new Vance & Hines pipes.

Inside the giant central room of the lodge I play piano and then sit by a roaring fire to write my blog. Someone asks me to play the Charlie Brown theme song, which I hardly know and is difficult as hell to play, but I give it a shot because it’s the maintenance man asking and if you don’t oblige those guys they can make your life hell. I know he’s the maintenance man because he has half of the contents of a Snap On tool truck hanging from his key ring.

Tomorrow, Yosemite!


Blog Sixteen Yosemite 9/15/2006

I awoke in my bed in my cabin at the lodge this morning at eight AM local time, delirious with exhaustion. That damn Swedish waitress at the restaruant last night must have given me regular coffee instead of decaf and I was wide awake and wired until almost five AM. Nothing like a city boy laying in bed listening to the sounds of the Sequoia National Forest all night. At one point I distinctly heard a bear trying to get into my room. Good thing I’d chained the door, but where he’d gotten a key to my room I can only wonder.

It was 41 degrees when I left at nine AM, but in that curious mind-over-matter thing that we humans excel at, the temperature didn’t bother me. Motorcyclists are experts at the weather and we can tell when it’s 41 degrees outside and going to STAY 41 degrees--in which case we consider it to be FREEZING OUT!--as opposed to when it’s 41 degrees but in an hour it will 50 degrees and an hour later 65 degrees, in which case we don’t even bother to put our cold weather gear on. We tough it out for an hour and then are rewarded with that wonderful sensation of being thawed out by the warm golden sun as we ride down the road! Motorcyclists love extremes (provided they’re in short doses) and going from cold to hot while in motion is way-cool.

Instead of heading towards Yosemite, I headed in the opposite direction, back to The Giant Forest and back to visit my new friend General Sherman, the largest tree in the world (or Big Sherm, as I think of him). It’s a good little work-out walking up and down the trail to see that enormous tree and it got my blood pumping. However, I’m 20 pounds overweight and so getting my blood pumping while at an altitude of 7000 feet was quite a dizzying adventure. It’s a fifteen minute walk down a steep incline (the Saints help going down) and a thirty minute walk back up (the Saints only watch) and I wished I’d invested in a Med-Alert (help me, I’ve walked down a steep incline and I can’t get up) or saved room on the bike for a portable defibrillator (CLEAR!). But the old ticker held up and in honor of my impromptu workout I’m going to skip my morning exercise routine tomorrow and possibly the day after. (I’ve started doing a sit-up and a jumping-jack each morning and I’m pretty sure I’ve already lost an ounce! You know, losing weight too fast is not good either.)

Eventually though I pointed the bike in the right direction and rode out of the Sequoia National Forest, up through Fresno and into Yosemite National Park! Entering Yosemite was pretty cool. The roads were nice. The scenery was nice if not exactly mind-blowing, especially when one considers where I’ve been in the last week or so. But I was having fun, the bike was running great, and then I rounded a curve and saw it. The motorcyclists nightmare. The worst thing you can see when entering a National Park... a motor home in front of you and a sign on the side of the road that reads PARK ENTRANCE 27 MILES. Twenty-seven miles! It will take me an hour and half to get there the way this guy is driving! Pretty soon I was stuck in a parade of cars being led by a retiree in a massive motor home who’s next appointment in life is for a colonoscopy, scheduled for roughly three years from now. Until then he’s free as a bird and drives like it. (I have dreams of the doctor doing the colonoscopy finding a leather motorcycle boot, size eleven!)

For roughly ten minutes (and two miles) we follow this slow-poke until all of our wishes come true and he turns off heading to god-knows-where (but I can assure you wherever he was headed he’s not there yet). All of us in the pack of vehicles step on the gas and for about three minutes we’re flying down the road in joyous freedom, secretly wondering what we did to deserve this reward, and then it all comes crashing down around us. Another frickin’ motor home. Because it’s the road leading into the park there are no passing lanes, no passing zones, and at this rate there is a very real possibility that the sun will be down by the time we get to the park (it’s now noon, after all).

By now, the pack of cars and me on my bike have gotten to know each other. (That’s what happens you’re in a pack of vehicles traveling at the speed of cats.) The guy in the red car is steady and calm, the lady driving the white minivan is swerving a little but still within the lines, the guy in the black car is getting pissed, and the guy on the motorcycle (me) is dreaming of rocket launchers and wondering how bad a long stretch in a Federal Pen could really be. (Eventually we all exchange addresses and the guy who was driving the blue Chevy invites me to his daughter’s wedding in June.)

An another problem with traveling like this is that you don’t get to check out the scenery because your eyes are in two places only: on the brake lights of the vehicle ahead of you, and in your mirror at the hood ornament of the vehicle behind you, the one that keeps getting bigger and smaller as he creeps up on you and then backs off.

I spot a sign that reads PARK ENTRANCE 14 MILES and I roll my eyes, aware that taking your eyes off the road is not a good idea when you’re riding a motorcycle, but I was going twelve miles an hour and I could take my pants off at that speed and not crash.

Eventually we get to the park entrance and I ask the nice gentleman at the booth some questions about where to get fuel, where to eat, etc. He cheerfully answers me and then lets me into the park. As I put it in gear I see directly in front of me an enormous billboard that answers every question I just asked him. Typical moron tourist, I think, not afraid to call the kettle black since in this case I’m the pot AND the kettle. (Ok, so I’m no Steinbeck.)

Eight seconds later I’m doing fifteen miles an hour through Yosemite Park as I get stuck behind another motor home (the motor home that had led us into the park is still at one of the entrance booths, probably asking the fee-taker a million stupid questions instead of looking up and seeing the enormous sign in front of him that tells him everything he needs to know! Fuckin’ tourists!). This goes on for four miles and then I stop to get fuel. I don’t need fuel, but I want to let that motor home get ahead of me for a while. I fill up, I stretch, I drink some water, I walk around the gas station, and then I get back on my bike and three seconds later I’ve caught up to the motor home. He does 30 MPH downhill and a safe 15 to 20 MPH around curves. There’s a BMW behind him and a white car behind the BMW and then me. The white car is never more than five feet from the BWM’s rear bumper and the BMW is never more than five feet from the motor home’s rear bumper, even on those rare stretches where the motor home goes downhill and hits 35 MPH. Between the slow-ass motor home and watching these dumb-ass tailgaters I’m not enjoying Yosemite.

I see a scenic pull-off and I pull-off. So does the white car. I park and walk up to the driver, a twenty-something kid, and ask him seriously if he wants to kill people. He speaks perfect English but he can’t understand my question. I explain that if that BMW in front of him had to slam on the brakes, a very real possibility since the driver of the BMW could not see ANYTHING ahead of him due to his being so close to the motor home, that he, the driver of the white car, would slam him into the BMW before even getting his foot onto the brake pedal, and if the BMW had little kids in a car seat in the back they might very well be killed. I say, “How close were you to that car? Five feet tops?” and I stand in five feet in front of his car. He says yes. “Well then you would have impacted his vehicle before your foot ever touched the brake pedal.”

“You’re right,” he says humbly. “I was doing that for a while.”

“One car-length following distance for every ten miles an hour,” I say. “Otherwise you may seriously hurt or kill somebody. And don’t EVER tailgate a motorcycle.” (I’ve given this speech many times.)

He thanks me and says that he’s glad I gave him a reminder and that he’ll stop tailgating. I take a picture of him and his girlfriend for him with his digital camera and I leave.

Ten seconds later--WHAT THE—? I’m stuck behind a line of cars that’s stuck behind a tour bus doing 20 MPH.

This goes on for roughly a week and the scenery is nice, but it’s not spectacular and we’re getting higher and higher in altitude and it’s getting cool, and riding at between 20 MPH and 30 MPH around these great curves through this huge forest is getting old quick. I’m trying to remember if there’s anyway out of Yosemite or once you’re here do you have to stay on the loop to the other side (you do), and I’m even considering making a U-turn. And then we hit a passing lane! I blow past the bus and the cars (at 40 MPH) and then I enter the REAL Yosemite.

Wow! Huge, rock cliffs that rise 1000 feet straight up on either side of the road! I’m riding through a canyon with these huge cliffs around me and a river next to the road. The road I’m on is also lined with very tall trees, but the cliffs are so tall that they can be seen over the trees. This is an incredible feeling and I love it! The rocks jut out over the tree line ahead of and beside me, and the cliffs are so large and occupy so much of my peripheral vision that if I stare at the road ahead while I’m moving I get the sensation that me and the cliffs are standing still and the trees are moving past me! Awesome!

I spend some time in Yosemite Valley but I want to head back down to where it’s 80 degrees again (it’s 50 degrees in Yosemite) so I hit the road. Immediately I’m stuck behind a minivan doing 20 miles an hour in a 45 zone. Let me explain that THIS doesn’t bother me at all--until she passes the first “Turn-Out For Slower Vehicles” and she doesn’t turn out. Then I get pissed and pass her on a double yellow line with a roar of my new pipes.

I don’t want people to exceed the speed limit and go flying through our National Parks. I only go over the speed limit by five or ten MPH (still wrong, I know). And I also have no problem at all with people who drive really slow through our National Parks. They want to see the scenery, look for wildlife, take a relaxing, slow drive. I understand that and I think it’s great. But when you see a vehicle behind you (or a line of vehicles bunched up behind you) THEN PULL THE FUCK OVER AT THE NEXT TURN-OUT AND LET THEM PASS! That’s why they have the turn-outs and the signs that read SLOW VEHICLES PULL THE FUCK OVER AT TURN-OUTS. I’ll patiently ride behind someone doing HALF the speed limit forever. I only get annoyed when they pass a turn-out without using it. To me, that proves that they’re self-absorbed, inconsiderate assholes and I’ll bet anything they voted for George Bush.

Ahead of the mini-van I get behind another motor home, and then more mini-vans, and then more motor homes, and by the time I get out of Yosemite General Sherman has grown three feet taller. Doing 30 MPH on a bike, constantly braking, constantly shifting, and being in the center of a procession of vehicles really sucks. I can’t wait to hit California back-roads again.

Finally outside the park, I hit a passing lane and pass a mini-van that has been going really slow and has been drifting over the yellow or white line, sometimes halfway onto the shoulder (which kicks up dust and rocks in the path of the vehicle behind, which is me). Five minutes later I’m a mile ahead of him when I see in my mirror that he’s coming up behind me fast. Traffic ahead of me slows and I slow and I see that he’s still coming fast. He brakes hard, and I use some of the extra distance that I kept in front of me to give him more room to stop behind me (this maneuver is crucial for safe motorcycling). We’re moving slowly around a curve and traffic picks up speed to about 40 and then slows again, as if there’s a traffic light or something that I can’t see around the curve. Again he brakes at the last second and stays one foot from my taillight while we’re still moving. I keep plenty of distance from the car ahead of me, and my eyes glued to the mini-van behind me.

We take off and he does it again and this time I come to a complete stop and get off my bike and walk back to his mini-van and he rolls down the window half-way and I tell him to get out of his car and try kill me. He says no. I say get out of your fucking car you fucking pussy and try to kill me, and I grab his window and pull it towards me so he can’t roll it back up. His wife is next to him and there are two people in the back but I can’t see who they are, I just know they’re there. Come on you fucking pussy, I yell in his face, you try to kill me when you’re in your car but you won’t get the fuck out and do it right here, man to man. (I’m somewhat glad he won’t get out and try to kill me because he’s twice my size and doesn’t seem the least bit intimidated!) Don’t tailgate, you stupid fuck, I say. You’re gonna run me over if I have to stop and probably kill me. “I won’t kill you,” he says and I detect a Russian accent. Do you speak English, you dumb fuck? I ask. I try one more time to get him out of the car but he’s not interested and I don’t know why. (Thank God, he’s not interested! He’s big and strong, like Russian bear.) His wife is frantically looking for her cell phone (they always do that) and I let his window flex back and I make a fist like I’m going to punch him in the face. (Hey, when you try to kill me I can get a little angry. And don’t think that driving two or three feet from my motorcycle and braking heavily at 30 PMH to avoid hitting me isn’t an attempt on my life.)

He stays well-behind me after that, but I turn off soon anyway and have lunch at the ’49er restaurant. I’m not sure where to go after that, maybe Modesto, maybe San Francisco. I’d passed the town of Porterville (the name of a little-known but excellent Credence Clearwater Revival song) and this got me thinking about CCR. I love that band and so I decide to go to Lodi, California! (Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again.) John Fogerty either was born there or lived there, I couldn’t recall which, but that’s the town he’s singing about in that song and I decided I was going there. I call ahead and book a room in Sacramento, near Lodi.

I took Route 49 and moments later was in heaven! The weather (as usual in this part of California) was perfect, and Route 49 is a great, great road! Another sport-biker’s dream. The road corkscrews up a mountain and as you ride through a combination of gentle and sharp curves you have a spectacular view of the valley below and a huge lake glimmering in the sun. The you descend and the curves and the view are great. I’d do this all day before I’d ride through Yosemite again!

I ride through Sonora and some other little owns, but mainly 49 is a two-lane back road with great scenery, curves, and hardly any traffic. This part of California is really, really nice, and those rolling brown hills covered with golden holly (or hay or wheat or rye or weeds—what IS that stuff) again reminds me of hairy camel humps. I pass another huge lake and just keep rolling through those great curves for a few more hours.

I get to Lodi and stop in at a motorcycle shop to see if they can give me the dirt on the great John Fogerty. The twenty-year-old-girl behind the counter doesn’t know who John Fogerty is and I ask her to go in the back and get someone old. The owner comes out and says that John Fogerty lived in Lodi for a while, but he doesn’t know where his apartment was. We talk for a while and he strongly suggests I ride through San Francisco on my way back to the Pacific Coast Highway, although he confirms that I will hit a ton of traffic and I will have a hard time finding the interstate (which runs through downtown San Francisco for a while). I’d already booked a room in Sacramento for the night (I still aim to bang Arnie’s wife—if the smell of the formaldehyde doesn’t turn me off) and he suggests a good route to my hotel.

I leave Lodi and eventually I get to Sacramento, where I ride around downtown three times because I can’t remember where my hotel is and I don’t want to pull over and spend three seconds looking in my bag for the directions. I often do this, though. I get to a town and ride around until I stumble upon my hotel. It’s a great way to see the town, the people, get mugged, or catch an episode of Cops being filmed live.

Sacramento is a BEAUTIFUL city! Spotless clean, fantastic buildings, some old, most new. Great shopping, big sidewalks, no traffic (it’s after six and they are shut down for the weekend).

I might head to Sacramento tomorrow because I just remembered that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California and I want to look him up and ask him if it’s true that EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN is what he said to Maria Shriver when he asked her out on their first date!


I find my hotel and have dinner at the seafood joint next door where I have steamers (steamed clams—a new addition to my list of favorite foods. They’re like snot but I love them now!). Lou at the Brick Tavern back home serves his steamers in a garlic broth; this place serves them in dirty dishwater with some pieces of garlic in it.

Tomorrow I’m off to… ! Well, I haven’t decided yet.
Blog Seventeen The Last Of The PCH

No way I’m going to San Francisco, I decided as I left Sacramento this morning. For one thing, I avoid cities, even great ones like San Francisco. Secondly, my trips are about RIDING my bike, not parking it. I like taking side roads, and meeting the people who live AWAY from big cities, so I decided to skip San Francisco. I had been hoping to do some gay night-clubbing (since the Cartwheel back home closed I have no place to show off my leather chaps) and maybe visit a Turkish Bath for men, but there’s just no way I’m going to ride through San Francisco. NO WAY! I’M NOT FIGHTING THE TRAFFIC, I’M NOT SPENIDING ALL DAY TRYING TO FIND A PLACE TO PARK, I’M NOT GOING TO SAN FRANCISCO.

I got into San Francisco a little before one PM and fell instantly in love. As I crossed the Bay Bridge I looked down at the waterfront, the people, the colors, the farmers market; and then at the breathtaking view of the skyline of San Francisco. From the Bay Bridge I could see the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and I could see those famous streets that are the steepest in America.

Highway 101 runs through downtown San Francisco, but not as an interstate—instead it turns into plain old city streets, with traffic lights, buses, traffic, people, etc. I rode past the Fisherman’s Wharf where I could see restaurants and people, and otters sunbathing in the waters of San Francisco Bay! I saw beautiful women and I thought, do I need ANOTHER reason to love Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys? Once again he’s right. California has the cutest girls in the world! (Usually I only wish they all could be California girls—today they were!)

Before I stopped at San Francisco’s waterfront I rode around the city. I rode up a street that looked and felt like it was going almost straight up in the air! What a thrill hearing and feeling the Nomad generate the torque to climb that hill! I rode up and down those streets for a while, loving every minute of it.

And then back to the waterfront for lunch. A cart containing roasted chickens was giving off an odor that should be criminal. “I’ll have a chicken and a fork,” I said. He laughed, but I was dead serious. For nine more dollars I also got a small container of roasted potatoes like mom used to make (except she only charged me five.)

I sat by the water ate my chicken and people-watched. The women here are spectacular! The vibe is great, the people are nice, the weather was perfect, 75 and bright sunshine—which I heard was a bit of a heat wave for this town.

I saw a sign that said San Francisco is the GAY CAPITOL OF THE WORLD, but even for a straight guy this city is perfect. (Although it’s clearly a very gay-friendly city, and it’s influence on me was profound. I wasn’t there fifteen minutes when I suddenly wondered if I’d overpaid for my shoes.) I also considered getting a civil-union marriage license when I was there, but although they’ll give a marriage license to two men or two women (about time!) they won’t give a marriage license to a single man if his life-partner happens to be his left hand.

A woman suggested that I ride down Lombard Street, the crookedest street in the world. We have a Lombard Street back in Philly that’s also crooked, I told her. But only because we have a lot of jewelers and law offices on that street.

I rode around and rode around and although I rode up and down plenty of unbelievably steep streets, I never did find the crooked part of Lombard Street.

I seriously considered staying in San Fran for the night, but the weather was perfect so I hit the road. San Francisco is definitely a city that one should fly into and stay for a few days or more. What a great town.

I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and left San Fran behind. The view from the bridge of the bay and the city behind me was spectacular. I rode through Sausalito and thought that Sausalito is a much better name for the Gay Capital of The World than San Francisco. It just sounds gayer.

I left the 101 to get back on the Pacific Coast Highway, but the traffic was so bad there, and I’d had just about enough of the crowded sections of the PCH, that I flipped a U-turn and got back on the 101. I rode through Sonoma but didn’t stop at the vineyards or the wineries because frankly I don’t give a damn about wine, and wine snobs tend to be idiots.

I was in the left lane passing a car when I saw a Harley broken down on the shoulder, its rider working to fix something. I didn’t have time to get over and stop, but I saw there was a side road running right next to the highway and so at the next exit I took that road and went back to find the rider. He walked down the hill and told me through the fence that his buddy went to get him a new shifter, his had fallen off. I sat there for a while using my cell phone to call ahead and book a room in Eureka, California, for the night, and taking a break, while he went back to tinker with his bike. I watched several packs of Harleys ride past, as well as solo or small groups of riders ride past without stopping. They couldn’t see me from the highway, so it’s not like they saw me and figured he had help. They just didn’t stop. Not a one, out of dozens. When I rode a Harley it would have been inconceivable to not stop and help a broken down rider. Inconceivable.

I took a side road off the 101 to get back onto the PCH, and the side road itself was amazing! Once again, it was a road made almost entirely of curves! And then it entered a forest of HUGE trees! Thick and super tall! I was close to the Redwoods and I guess this was a little teaser of what was to come!

Back on the PCH I had to admit that it was a great road. The enormous, seemingly-infinite Pacific Ocean to my left, the mountains to my right. Tons of curves, no traffic, few towns. I did stop in Mendocino and ride around. What a great sea coastal town, exactly like any coastal town in Maine, except that Mendocino had far more fake breasts.

I rode the twisting curves of the last stretch of the PCH for hours and as I neared the end of the road, the sun began to set and ignited a brilliant layer of blue and red across the horizon. The ocean and the sky looked amazing! I took a few pictures and then rode my ass off! I flew through those twisty curves, up and down the mountains while looking at the water and the sky! That golden twilight was intoxicating.

Eventually the PCH ended and I rejoined the 101! I was as happy as could be! It was a great day, a great ride, and I was in heaven. It was dark now and I had about an hour and half ride to get to my hotel in Eureka. I was really looking forward to riding through the Redwood Forest tomorrow. The road here was two lanes in each direction, few streetlights, but hardly any traffic or towns.

For some reason I was in the left lane, I forget why. I NEVER ride in the far left lane unless I’m passing a car, and then I get right back into the right lane after I do. Maybe I’d just passed a car. But I was in the left lane and I decided to get back into the right lane.

There was a sudden strange sensation. The rear wheel began to slide to one side and I knew instantly that I was going down. There was no way to counter steer, the handlebars snapped to one side, and that’s all I remember.

I woke up with a fireman and a highway patrol officer standing over me. They prepped me for the ambulance, which was on its way, and the highway patrolman asked me how fast I was going. Sixty or sixty-five, I said. He told me that a witness had said I passed his vehicle doing 80 a ways back. True, I said. I always speed up to pass and then when I’m a good distance ahead I get back to the right and slow down. He also asked me if I knew my helmet was not a DOT approved helmet but a novelty helmet. No, I said. And he asked what state I was from. Pa, I said, and he asked if we have a helmet law there. I said No, and he said, No wonder you didn’t know (meaning no wonder I didn’t know the helmet was a piece of shit. I’d bought that helmet in 1991 and I loved that helmet).

In the ambulance they checked me out and I was in some pain, but I generally felt alright. They pushed here and pushed there and my wrist hurt, my neck hurt, and my face hurt, but other than that I felt like I was going to be okay. A medic told me that there a flap of skin hanging above my eye and that they would glue it back on at the hospital. I had no idea where I was or what happened. When he told me that I was in Northern California I recalled that I’d been on my annual cross-country motorcycle trip and that I was supposed to be entering my 49th state tomorrow.

“Did I hurt anybody?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “They were doing construction work and you hit a bump in the road. You were by yourself.”

In the Emergency Room they checked me out some more. I felt like my injuries were minor but I wasn’t sure. They seemed to be taking my injuries very seriously and I kept hearing people come in and out saying the phrase, “motorcycle accident at highway speed” and that kind of scared me. They started x-raying me and gave me a cat-scan, and the doctors and the nurses were incredible! Kind, caring, gentle, professional. The only guy who was an asshole was the guy who gave me the cat-scan. He slammed me around, even bending my head to get my neck straight in the pillow and slamming stuff down right next to my head, which by now hurt like hell. I could tell he was an asshole, but I was only with him for a few moments and then I was back in the ER.

At one point, I was on my back and I lifted my right leg up in the air but when I went to lift my left leg it wouldn’t move. Something in my pelvis had it locked in place. I told the doctor and he said the x-rays will be back in a few minutes and he’ll see if anything is wrong with my pelvis and my wrist, which was swollen.

I was freezing and asked if I could turn onto my side and get under the blanket. They said yes and when I did, my left leg started to move and it was fine!

The doctor told me that I was going to be ok. “You must know how to take a fall,” he said, and I told him it was pure luck. Had I done what most people do, which is to stick out their leg and attempt to hold up a 900 pound motorcycle doing 60 miles an hour that is DEFINETLY going down, my leg would have been sucked under the bike and I would have lost it. Instead, I had evidently gotten on top of the side of the bike (the side became the top once the bike was on it’s side and sliding) and rode it out. Pure fucking luck! I had only a few minor scrapes on my leg.

He told me my wrist wasn’t broken, but that I had some small fractures around my left eye. He would send me to an Ear, Nose and Throat guy Monday who would tell me if I need surgery. More than likely the small fractures would heal on their own, but I might not be allowed to fly back to Philly, I may have to drive. “Good,” I said. “Flying can be dangerous.”

He went to suture up my eye and I warned him that I was a terrible patient. I squirm, I curse, and I’ll probably throw up. He numbed me pretty good and they gave me morphine and I was alright.

The CHP officer showed up and gave me my wallet and a form with the accident report number on it. He asked if I’d been drinking and I said no. The nurses scrubbed the pieces of asphalt out of my face and out of the scrapes on my legs and arms, telling me it would burn a little. It burned a lot, but the nurses were great.

Then they told me I could go! They called a cab and they called the CHP to find out where my bike was so I could go get my bag from it! My clothes had been cut off of me and were blood-soaked anyway, so they gave me a really cool set of scrubs to wear. The cab ride cost me 300 dollars (60 miles down to the tow yard, 75 miles back to my hotel in Eureka) and the tow yard charged me 80 bucks to let me in after hours to get my bag.

It was about 4:30 AM when I got to the tow yard and I didn’t know how I would react when I saw my bike, which I assumed would be wrecked. I was thinking I might give up motorcycling and a start a new chapter of my life, get one of those little Dodge pickup trucks I like instead of replacing the bike. (One of the reasons I can afford to take off for a month and ride across the country is that I don’t have a car to pay for all year! I just have my bike and my plumbing truck. Most people spend five grand a year to own a car. These trips cost me less than that each year.)

I built my first Harley when I was nineteen. I’ve been riding for 20 years, I have well over one-hundred-thousand miles on bikes (52 thousand on my three-year-old Nomad), and every vacation I’ve ever taken except two has been on a motorcycle. This is my very first accident! I ride all the time. I ride after work every night, I ride to the local bar/restaurant to get a Piper burger five or six days a week, I ride on the weekends, I ride in the cold, in the rain, in the brutal heat. I love my bike and I love riding, but if I could crash over something so stupid maybe it’s time to call it quits. Motorcycling owes me nothing. I’ve always said that by this time in my life I have so many years and miles and memories and have had so much fun on motorcycles that if I die tomorrow or become a vegetable, to me, it would be worth it. It’s like a man being married to a wonderful woman for twenty years and then she dies. The pain is infinite, but the pleasure of those twenty years makes it worth it.

So I was thinking that I might give up bikes when I walked in to see my baby. It didn’t look that bad! “Can I ride it home?” I asked the tow guy. “No way,” he said. “I think the frame is bent. It slid over a hundred feet.” My eye was swollen shut and my glasses were scraped and bent and I didn’t feel so good, so I didn’t get a good look at her. “Did you see what I hit?” I ask him, and he held his fingers about five inches apart! He tells me they repaved the right lane recently and it was higher then the left lane.

That would explain that weird sliding sensation. That was the rear wheel not making it up and over the freaking curb they put in the middle of the highway.

I got my bag and took the taxi back to Eureka. My laptop still worked!

My face has three big scrapes on it, and the left side is swollen to twice its normal size. My eye has been swollen shut since the wreck. There are a few minor scrapes on my leg and my arm and hand, and my wrist is in a brace (no burritos for me!). But other than that I’m fine! In a few weeks I’ll be good as new, just have some scabs on my handsome mug. I’ll call the Ear, Nose and Throat guy tomorrow, but I’ll bet he says the fractures around my eye can heal on their own (I’m SUCH an optimist!)

Tomorrow (Monday) I’ll call a Harley dealer in Oregon and see if they’ll finance me a new bike over the phone and if they’ll deliver it to me in Eureka. (Don’t think I should buy a Harley in the state of California since they have all that emission stuff on their bikes.) If not, I’ll try to find a rental car place around here that rents one-way to Philly and I’ll drive home. I’ll be in this hotel room for a few more days though because my face looks horrible.

Or maybe I’ll rent a U-haul truck and drive home with my beloved Nomad in the back. I feel bad that I wrecked her when she’s treated me so well. I miss her terribly.

I don’t know why the state of California thinks it okay to leave that kind of difference in the height of their lanes, but I blame myself not them. I’ve always said that I don’t care what they put out there, it’s MY job to survive it (although there is an expectation that our highways will not have fucking curbs in the middle of them!)

FOOTNOTE: Some months later my insurance company read the police report confirming that the State of California did indeed put a curb in the middle of the highway with no warning and no lighting and the insurance company (Progressive—who was great) ruled me NOT at fault. Oh, happy day!

Blog Eighteen 9/19/2006

Well, I don’t want to be a braggart, but I have over one hundred miles under my belt without an accident! Or should I say since my LAST accident, which was also my first accident and hopefully really will be my last. In fact, I hope it’s the last motorcycle accident EVER!

At eight AM the phone rang in my hotel room (I’m not saying the ringer was loud, but did you hear it at your house?). It was Jennifer from Progressive Insurance (they’ve been great, so far) asking me if it was too early to call. Too early to wake up a man who’s recovering from a motorcycle accident at highway speed? Never! She wanted to get the show on the road since she knew I had to get back to Philly. Good lookin’ out, Jen.

Since I was awake I figured I would seize the day and sprung into action. My face was swollen and stiff but I was thankful that for once I could walk the streets without being mistaken for Brad Pitt or George Clooney (although I would miss petting all those seeing-eye dogs). I packed up my stuff, tossed my bloody and torn clothes into the dumpster, and took a cab to the U-Haul place where I rented a truck (with a ramp) one-way to Philly.

I drove the U-Haul 75 miles south to the tow yard where my bike was and paid the bail. Then I fired her up and took her for a ride! The bars were a little crooked, a mirror was missing, one of the floorboards was a tad higher than usual, the spotlights were smashed, the windshield was scraped from top to bottom as well as pushed in towards me, and I had a short in my turn signal circuit and kept blowing fuses. (I took apart my switch box and bypassed my (former) spotlights, deer whistles, and four-way flashers, and the turn signals started working fine.)

I rode into town and stopped at the local bike shop where they GAVE me a mirror for free! Perhaps they didn’t want my grotesque face scaring away their customers for the time it would have taken to write the bill, but I think they just took pity on me.

Then I rode the bike up the ramp and into the U-Haul truck, sliding sideways on the shiny metal floor once got inside! I decided I would ride the bike home and headed back to return the U-Haul. Along the way I stopped at the hospital where I’d been treated the night of my crash and a doctor checked me out. She said I have a lot of fractures around my eye, but she checked with the ophthalmology department and they said I should be okay crossing the Rockies to get home (they were worried about the altitude).

The guy who towed my bike back from the scene of the accident told me exactly where I’d crashed and I went to visit the spot. I’d written in the last blog that I was changing lanes when I crashed but I didn’t know why I’d been changing lanes—I didn’t recall passing a car—and I discovered today that the reason was because they had the right lane closed for construction, and I crashed just after the construction zone, when it opened back up into two lanes. I had been going from the left lane (which was the only one open in the construction zone) into the right lane when I hit that little curb between the lanes. (Also, I was wrong: I had assumed there’s been signs that read UNEVEN LANES, but there were not. Only signs that read WORK ZONE and ROUGH ROAD!)

When I drove that U-Haul truck through that zone today and saw the lip that I had hit and which caused me to crash I was STUNNED! It had to be four inches and in spots close to five! It looked positively enormous and I NEVER EVER would have attempted to change lanes had I realized how big that was! NO WAY, NO HOW! Even the U-Haul truck bounced off of that thing!

The factors that caused me to crash are the following: It was night, I was a little tired, and I was a little complacent. I’d been riding all day, whipping through those sharp curves of the Pacific Coast Highway—much harder riding than a big ole four-lane. When I hit the four-lane I figured this would be a breeze. An hour of this and I’d be at my hotel for the night. An EASY ride! I wasn’t as vigilant as I’d been all day and as I usually am.

Also, the day prior to the wreck my spotlights stopped working. I hadn’t been doing much night riding so I wasn’t worried about fixing them. This night, however, the last hour of riding was in the dark, and it was pitch-black when I crashed. I use my spotlights to illuminate the road immediately in front of the bike, looking for potholes, debris, slick spots, UNEVEN LANES, etc., and I adjust my headlight to look further down the road.

Without the spotlights to show me the uneven lanes, and being a little relaxed at the end of the day, I missed how big that curb was. Both lanes were made of that really, really black asphalt, and the height difference between the two lanes was hard to spot even today in bright sunlight, but when I got a look at it… ! Holy Cow! I never would have attempted it had I realized how big it was! I clearly didn’t hit it at enough of an angle (well, we knew that—why else would I have crashed?) but seeing it in daylight I realized how the angle at which I hit it would never have gotten me over it!

Back at the U-haul place, getting the bike back DOWN the ramp was even scarier than riding it up! But I got it out of the truck and when I returned the truck, expecting to pay for a one day rental plus mileage, the guy said, “Forget it. I’ll just credit you the full amount of what you paid for the cross-country rental this morning.”

Wow! This beat-up face is getting me a lot of free stuff!

And then I hit the road north-bound! GET ME THE HELL OUT OF CALIFORNIA! No wonder I avoided this state for all of my life.

Three feet beyond the Oregon border I found a hotel for the night and called it quits. EVEYTHING HURTS! But I got my baby back under me, a little beat-up, a little weary, but we’re both ready to ride!

Tonight we rode into our 49th state!




Blog Nineteen Oregon

Oregon, you big beautiful fool, if you only knew what I went through to get here! Your neighbor California tried to stop me from coming to see you—she is jealous and insecure in your shadow, as well she should be, but NOTHING can keep me away now! I’m leaving you tomorrow, but I promise I’ll be back next year on my annual motorcycle trip and I’ll be riding my new Harley Davidson (yes, RIDING it, Oregon, not EVERYBODY trailers it).

Oregon is spectacular! I’m in love. I&#