October 11--Mordor II--then home!!

We left Durango at 7:45 a.m., just as a few drops of rain started to fall with 402 miles to go to get home. It was looking very black in Durango, so we planned on having breakfast in Cortez. The weather was mixed, sunny for a while, then cloudy. But on the stretch of road from Cortez, CO to Monticello, Utah we hit 50+ gusts on old route 666 in New Mexico and Hwy 6 Utah. That was horrid! It was the weather ahead of the Hurricane hitting the Baja. We tried to get ahead of it, it was headed north.

By the time we got to Moab, we were ahead of it, but then we met some other storm system from the west, and had more 50+ winds from Moab to the I-70 intersection. By now I was really dreading the stretch from I-70 north to Price, but it was surprisingly smooth until the last 15 miles or so before we arrived in Price. From Price on it looked okay, so we kept going.

By the time we got to SLC and looked towards Bountiful, it was looking pretty black. Steve drove through town at 80+ mph (just keeping up with traffic), and as we drove up Chelsea, it was black and threatening. We pulled into the drive, opened the garage, and pulled the bike in the garage 5 minutes before the snow started. (The picture on the far left was taken the day we left on our trip, and the one on the right was taken 4 hours after we got home.) And snow it did. The next morning we had 8 inches on the ground! Boy did we feel blessed and grateful to be home safely!

We traveled 9,802 miles, across 24 states and 5 provinces, and are glad to be home, but happy we made our journey and thankful for the opportunity to see so much of this wonderful country we live in.

October 10--uh-oh...then Jamie's place

The beginning of the ride up from NM was beautiful. Nice cool weather, no clouds, lots of nice sunshine. Jamie had warned us about the section from above Albuquerque to Aztec, NM. It started out a little windy, but by the time we were 30 miles out from Aztec the wind was ferocious. Just as we arrived in Aztec, NM, Steve was having problems with the bike and it turned out we had a flat front tire. He pumped it up, and we headed for the nearest tire store to see if we could get it fixed. Three miles later at the store, it was going flat again. It was a bad valve stem causing the problem, and the tire store couldn’t fix it. So we headed west to Farmington to the Four Corners Harley Davidson dealer. Two stops later to pump up the tire, a Harley Rider stopped and asked if we needed help. At that point, we said yes, and he rode on to the dealer to have them send a truck. In the meantime, Steve decided to try it one more time (this time with duct tape!), and we drove into the dealer just as it was going flat again. They called their truck back and got our bike in the shop within a few minutes of our arrival. They were greattt! people and a great dealership, especially O.D. and Jeff. The dealership is just in the process of buying the local Honda dealer out. If you have a MC and are going through Farmington, NM stop by and see the dealership and buy something from them. They are awesome!!!

So what we thought was going to be a fairly short day, turned out much longer than we had thought. Jamie made reservations for us at local camp ground along Animas River in Durango and picked us up after we got set up and took us to fabulous restaurant. We got to see her apartment, her new bicycle, and she located her roommates in one of the local bars and introduced us. After a nice evening, Jamie took us home and we had showers and tucked ourselves in and got ready for an early start on our last day of riding.

October 9--Dancing Cranes B&B--Jim and Jana's

We set out early in the cool of the morning just before dawn. It is pretty cool when the GPS screen on the Goldwing switches automatically at dawn from the night screen to the daytime screen. We had set our GPS for a “short-cut” to San Antonio, NM to avoid El Paso and 150 extra miles. Little did Steve realize that there are 4 San Antonio, NM towns in the GPS! By the time we realized it, it cost us most of the time and mileage savings we had planned on.

We stopped in Pecos, NM (I think) for gas and had some great chili pepper/choriso egg burritos for a snack from the gas convenience store. Too bad we didn’t have more because they were terrific!

We met a 73 year old judge (and former cop!) in Vaughn, NM. He was riding a 400 cc scooter back to his home in Texas. He’s had a lot of ‘rides’ including a K1200RS which he had just sold after getting a ticket and fine from a local cop and a friend of his, the local judge! He still has two BMW motorcycles in his garage but, since he was diagnosed with diabetes a couple of years ago, he likes to ride the scooter which doesn’t require a lot of strength to balance. What a character and genuinely interesting man!

It was a long day and Kathy was very sore! Before heading to Jim and Jana’s, we had a bite to eat and a beer at the brew pub in Soccoro to kill the pain!

Stayed at Jim & Jana’s Dancing Cranes B&B 505-517-9273 outside of San Antonio, NM (the one in Soccoro county). Wow, what a great place! They have put in a new pond since we were there last and Jim has been working on planting lots of high country plants and trees. He put three cat tails in early in the spring around the pond, and now it is almost completely lined with cattails! The garage building is in the middle of remodeling. A third of it will become another B&B room large enough for 3-4 people to use, and the rest will become the new Dancing Crane store. Jim showed off all the plantings, and we had a great visit talking about politics, life and our families. Jana, as always, served up a great meal and we consumed several bottles of Costco red wine. The king bed was fabulous, and we slept like logs!

Jim introduced me to the Agastache bush which is a fabulous hummingbird attractor. I brought the catalog home to shop from this winter and will see where I can put two or three.

Tomorrow (Friday) we are headed for Durango to spend the evening with Jamie before heading home. We’ve been watching the forecast in Bountiful, and it looks like it could be nasty on the weekend, so we want to try to get home as early as we can on Saturday.

October 8--West Texas

We woke up early to a beautiful morning and started off in 56 degrees under clear skies. Made it in short order to San Antonio, Tx. Kathy took over driving (her first time on the bike pulling the trailer with ‘two up’). She handled all 1,600 pounds of us just great! West Texas turned out to quite pretty but it was a long 500 plus mile day broken by some great BBQ at Coopers BBQ in Junction, Texas. Don’t miss eating at Coopers if you have a reason to be going East/West on Hwy 10 between El Paso and San Antonio. But then, why would you ever be there?

We decided we still ‘had legs’ when we drove into Sonora (Steve had taken back the driving) so decided to make an extra couple of hundred miles and make it to Fort Stockton before settling in for the night.

As we moved west across Texas, the topography got flatter and flatter, and windier and windier. I was thinking they should be putting up wind generators, and voila! I began to see them. First a few, then thousands of them! Obviously there were many that were not visible from the freeway, but just the ones we could see were certainly all rotating in the wind.

Fort Stockton appears to us to be Rock Springs moved to West Texas. If you know Rock Springs then you’ll appreciate just how ‘stimulating’ this culturally deprived place is to us. If you’ve never been to either Rock Springs or Fort Stockton, you really don’t need to put it on your must visit list. They also charge an arm and a leg for a room in Ft. Stockton, I think mainly because of all the oil work going on. The RV parks (they had 7 of them) were particularly unappealing so we got the best deal we could find and settled in.

Tomorrow, on to San Antonio, New Mexico to spend the night with our good friends Jim and Jana. ‘(only 383 miles)

October 7--Norman!!!

We got another early start and continued through Louisiana, passing lots more Hurricane damage. We hit a massive but short rain storm at Lake Charles, Louisiana. It was very UGLY looking, so Steve took refuge under the awning at a closed gas station. We were about to go up over a long bridge, and decided to stay under the protection of the awning about 30 minutes until the rain and wind almost stopped.


Steve made a ‘pound the pavement’ run to Houston (he likened Houston to Mordor) through ‘beautiful’ Beaumont, Texas. Refineries, plastic plants and tire manufacturing dominated the toxic landscape. We saw many effects and heavy damage from the last hurricanes, Ike and Gustaf.

The weather cleared as we entered Houston, but it was hot and muggy. The freeway into Houston from the East was narrow, no shoulders, and lots of large pieces of trash on the limited shoulders that they did have. Unfortunately, the GPS didn’t ’take’ Steve’s last instruction to go to Norm’s office rather than directly to his apartment. By the time he realized he hadn’t completed the programming, we were at Norm’s apartment door. . . and realized that Norm’s office was well back on our trail . . .on the other side of downtown. Oh well! We sat at Borders drinking cold coffee drinks until Norm returned from work. We had a great visit with Norm and caught up on what’s been happening with them. We ended up at a Cajun restaurant eating shrimp, etc. and drinking beers and then back to the apartment to an exciting evening watching Barack in his 2nd debate with McCain. Go Barack!!! It turns out that Norm and Phyllis will be in SLC the weekend of October 17-19, so we’ll get to see both of them then. It was great to spend some time with Norman and his pet fly, Ralphie the 14th!

Tomorrow, we are on the way to El Paso with intentions of staying in Sonora. We’ve decided to ‘make tracks’ and head towards home without doing the 300 mile detour to Big Bend National Park or Austin. We will save it for a spring ride with Kevin and Julia!

Oct. 6th--On the way to Mordor

I’m writing this from a hotel room in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on October 6th. We started out in Alabama and traveled through Mississippi past a lot of on-going roadside tree cleanup from Hurricane Katrina. I was surprised to learn that it was still cleanup from Katrina. We had a great meal at the Purple Parrot Cafe (terrific upscale place to eat and a great price!) in Hattiesburgh, Mississippi. After lunch and some driving, we stopped at a visitor information/rest area in MS. We were still seeing lots of people who had been at the NASCAR races in Birmingham. One of those nice people found us in the center and told us about a low tire on the trailer and offered to pump it up for us. But Steve was prepared with his own little compressor, and got it pumped up and looking good again. All along the route through Mississippi and into Louisiana we saw lots of Hurricane damage from Katrina, Gustaf, and Ike. And the RV camps were full with people living in RVs and helping with cleanup, or just living in RVs now. It is hot and muggy outside, so we decided to enjoy AC after a long day of traveling. Tomorrow we’ll be in Houston and are looking forward to a short visit with Norm.

Oct 5 and 6th--Alabama, MS, and LA

Well, we were up early on the 5th, and headed to Birmingham. Our plan was to get there early and drop the trailer at a motel central to the Museum of Art and the Barber Motorsports Park. We were in Birmingham by 10:30 a.m. We stopped first at the Quality Inn where we met their front desk clerk, a terrific guy. Yes they had a room for $79/night...oops, it’s still NASCAR Talledegas weekend and the computer shows the room rate is $130/night. He was a sweetheart, he tried everything he could to get us the normal rate, including calling the 1-800 number and acting like he was just a traveler. When he couldn’t, he suggested another hotel close by that was nice and clean and much more reasonable. What a dear!

So we checked in to his recommended hotel and dropped the trailer in front of our room, and headed to the Museum of Art for brunch. Unfortunately when we got there, they were completely booked up for brunch, so we ate at the Sheraton and then came back for the opening of the museum at noon. The museum had quite a wide range of art. One notable collection was an absolutely wonderful set of photographs by a woman named Marion Post Wolcott who worked as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration (part of the WPA) during the Roosevelt years. She documented the conditions of migrant and farm workers in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina in the 30’s. The other impressive collection was a set of 11 Leonardo Da Vinci drawings brought over from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin. The jazz group playing for the brunch could be heard throughout the museum, so we spent a delightful couple of hours wandering around.

Then we headed to the Barber Motorsports Museum and Track. What an incredible place! Steve was drooling for 3 hours, and I was so impressed with what they had and how they displayed it. They had two bikes, a BMW R100 and R80 ridden by a couple around the world back in the 80’s along with photos of their trip. As a result of their trip they made it to the Guinness record book! They had hundreds of beautifully restored bikes and bikes in original conditions covering 1905 to the present. They had pillars of bikes and walls of bikes. They had old bikes, new bikes, little bikes, big bikes. Norm and Kevin would have absolutely loved the place.

Random thoughts--

• Steve had a long and thorough discussion with Tennessee pig and bear hunters--concerning the relative merits of hunting these animals in the brush with a .44 caliber handgun or a .30-.30 lever action. . . and which meat was best to eat.
• The motto on the license plate for Alabama is “Stars fell on Alabama”. Isn’t that great?
• Steve lost the wrist rocker Jon gave him from his bike and the motorcycle stores don’t seem to keep them in stock. Guess we’ll have to order two or three when we get home.
• I talked with Meri today and Jamie yesterday, and everyone sounds well and appalled about Sarah Palin. Aren’t the SNL clips great!!! Tina Fay does an absolutely great Sarah Palin--she could be her double!
• We saw fields of the Katrina trailers today in MS, and they are still cleaning up blown over trees along the highway in MS after Katrina
  

We are headed towards Houston tomorrow, and plan to be there at Norm and Phyllis’ on Tuesday.

I’m writing this from a hotel room in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on October 6th. It is hot and muggy outside, so we decided to enjoy AC after a long day of traveling. Tomorrow we’ll be in Houston!

October 4 and beyond

Well, yesterday is a day we don’t really want to remember. We did a lot of traveling down the Interstate through Virginia in the fog, then we went through a small section of Tennessee and then into Asheville, NC to see the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. However, when we got there after driving through downtown Asheville about 3 p.m., (closes at 5 p.m.) we discovered that it was $47/person to do the whole estate tour, including the mansion and the wineries. We debated about this for a while, and then decided to skip it and head back up to the campground we had planned on staying at.

We found it, but unfortunately it was a very long, very uphill, very curvy gravel road, and about halfway up the drive, Steve was turning the bike with the trailer into the sun on gravel in a sharp right turn and started to slide. I, of course, screamed!!!! The whole rig was sliding backwards, and Steve was trying to stop it. He finally succeeded, I got off the bike, put a rock behind the trailer to stop any further sliding, and we both took one short deep breath. Obviously the next thing to do was to detach the trailer which by now was jackknifed. As I was gathering strength to do that, a couple came along behind us and saw our predicament. He helped me detach the trailer and was going to tow it up to the campground for us, but in the meantime, Steve had ridden the Wing up the hill (after we rescued him once from again sliding down the curve into the “low shoulder”*). He decided that we were having nothing to do with this campground and we would just turn the trailer around and tow it down. Then it wouldn’t start. So we had to get out the book and tools and check all the fuses to see why it wouldn’t go into neutral so it would start. After Steve finally got it started, he towed the trailer back down the gravel road, and I walked to the bottom. We headed out of Asheville as quickly as we could, and found a nice KOA out of town to the west to stay at.

So Asheville wasn’t a great experience for us, but Paul at the KOA was! He was a lovely fellow and worked as the maintenance man. He was from Rhode Island, but left about 2 years ago after a long life as a maintenance worker. Since he left, he has worked around at KOA’s until he found the one where we met him. He just LOVES his job and his life now. I called him Happy Paul, because he was just so “darn” (borrowed from Sarah Palin) happy!

This morning we got up and had coffee and beignets at the KOA office, Ummm, yummy. Then we headed out to Deals Gap, the motorcyclists’ mecca. 318 curves in 11 miles.

On our way to Deals Gap, and the beginning of the 318 curves, we probably took 320 curves, some marked ‘caution: 10 MPH”! What a beautiful ride! I snapped pics along the way, and we went through the 11 miles with no problems and with only 4 bikers passing us! Highly technical riding but not at fast speeds! Steve, Kevin, Norm and Phyllis and I once did a section of Hwy 1A in northern California that had a sign as you are going into it, “curves, next 21 miles”. It certainly was many, many more curves than Deals Gap was! But now Steve can say he rode “the Tail of the Dragon”! And it was beautiful, too.

After that, we stopped to buy souvenir T-shirts and stuff, have lunch and figure out the best way to get to Houston to see Norm. We reprogrammed the GPS for fastest way to Houston, and started out. Tonight we are camped at a campground just inside Alabama and tomorrow we are headed for Birmingham. We will spend the night in Birmingham, and see the Barber Motorsports Museum and the Birmingham Museum of Art (supposedly the finest regional museum in the Southeast) to see the Da Vinci exhibit! Then onto Louisiana the next day and to Norm’s on Tuesday.

October 2--The Shenandoah Valley

We woke up to an absolutely gorgeous day! The tent was dried out, hardly any signs of the previous day’s rain. Our destination today is Natural Bridges, Virginia via the Shenandoah National Park Skyline Drive and then the Blue Ridge Parkway.

It was just an absolutely lovely drive, 25 to 45 mph along the ridge line with about 20 curves to the mile on absolutely pristine blacktop. We stopped at the first visitor center, and learned that the park has the highest population of black bear on the North American continent. So, I kept my eyes peeled all day for bear, but all I saw were a few deer on the side of the road.

We also met a couple from NC on a Beemer motorcycle (R1200RT for all you gear heads) headed home from visiting grandchildren in NY state. We ran into them at a couple of the stops, and ended up sitting by them Skyland Lodge when we stopped for a small bite and ended up with a great late breakfast! They had been to Big Bend National Park in Texas, one of our proposed waypoints for this trip, and raved about how wonderful it was. They also recommended staying at the Lodge in the park, so I think that is our new revised plan when we get that far. We had been toying with skipping it and coming back another year, but after talking to them, we decided we should go on this trip. Heck, it’s only a thousand or so miles off the direct route!

Well, all day long we thought of our riding buddies, Kevin and Julia Smith, Norm LeFevre, and my son Jon. We talked about how much they each would have enjoyed the ride today. We ran into a number of motorcyclists throughout the day. Three guys touring down from Montreal, a couple guys from NYC ‘burbs, and lots of folks that we just waved at.

We had gotten a nice little milepost magazine from the Virginia Tourist Information people yesterday, so we followed it today as we toured. We ended up stopping at quite a few pullovers listed in the milepost magazine, all of them scenic and beautiful.

Today we figured out what good RV campers are for. If you are following them in the fall when the leaves are turning and falling, they leave behind them a trail of leaves floating in the sunlight, dancing behind them. It is almost like a swarm of yellow butterflies following them. . . and greeting us.

After leaving the Skyline Trail and entering the Blue Ridge Parkway, we came on Humpback Rock Visitor Center which sits on 800 acres of national park. They have built a small farm on it (actually, relocated all the buildings from somewhere else) and tried to replicate what life was like in the late 1890’s in the Shenandoah Valley. It was complete with a garden, chickens, tobacco drying, and a cabin. We met Ranger Melissa there, who grew up in the Valley and loved learning about all the different skills a pioneer had to have to live on the land. So she began her Federal career dressed in period costume. What a nice lady!

We finally turned off the Blue Ridge Parkway 62 miles into it, and headed west to our night’s campsite. Tonight we are camped at a Jellistone Campground that has wi-fi so that we can watch the Palin-Biden debate. Go Joe!!!!

Tomorrow, we head for Asheville, NC to see the sights.

October 1--Traveling!

Well, we got up to lots of water in the form of fog. We packed up our wet tent and listened to the wolves as we ate breakfast. Then we headed out to our destination for the night, Mt. Holly, PA. I got some great pics of a beautiful 2 lane we were on early in the morning, riding through the fog.

After we had been on the road for a couple of hours, we decided that we should pick a different destination for the night, since we would be at camp by noon at the rate we were going. So we reprogrammed the GPS for Front Royal, Virginia, the northern entrance to the Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Park, and then we kept to the freeways and made time and miles.

We got stuck in an awful traffic jam just after Harrisburg, PA for about a hour. They were doing construction repair work on the highway, and merged it down to one lane. Unfortunately, the work was being done right after an intersection of two major highways, so you actually had six lanes merging into 1 lane. Yuck! We just got through that mess, and then it started to rain! So we called it lunchtime, and got off the freeway to let Steve’s throttle hand take a rest, and hope the rain slowed.

After lunch we got back on the interstate and headed to Front Royal. So we traveled today through NJ, PA, MD, WV, and finally ended up in a campground right outside Front Royal, about 2 miles from the entrance to the Park.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a beautiful day, and we’ll head south on Skyline Drive and see how far we get. We’ve talked to folks this evening in camp who said that 25 mph is a good speed since there are lots of turns and deer!

September 30--Farewell to Jon and Family

Well, this morning we left Jon and Lori’s place. It was foggy, but only a little rain was actually falling. A herd of wild turkeys paraded across his drive right before we left, which was interesting! Kait said she had only seen them a couple of times, but Kodi said that he had seen them a lot. Jon had left for work early and we saw him off and then the kids off to school, and then got on the road about 8 a.m. On Jon’s advice, we took I-91 south through NH to Brattleburg and then across Route 9 West to Bennington, Vermont.

It was a good thing that the day was cloudy because it would have been too brilliant to drive by if the sun were shining. We finally and truly found ‘fall foliage’! The tree colors on Route 9 were absolutely spectacular. There were more colors of red than we’ve ever seen. The road was also a terrific road, with frequent passing lanes (we were being passed, not doing the passing). And of course, Bennington is the home of “New England cute”. Then we turned south and took a beautiful drive to Troy and Albany, New York, and then down the NY turnpike headed south. We actually made it to within 15 miles of NYC and had some talk of going to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station in Manhattan. Steve didn’t think it was a very good idea to haul a trailer through the streets with a motorcycle. Oh well, I guess he just doesn’t like the challenge of playing demolition derby with the cabbies!

So we took I-287 to I-80 which was very, very busy. Thank goodness it wasn’t rush hour. There was a dump truck taking up 2 lanes of traffic that we were a little nervous about, and got around him the first chance we could. He was clearly either drunk or tired, but definitely not staying in his own lane.

We headed to the turn off for Columbia, NJ and to the Camp Taylor Campgrounds (mile 6,099 of our trip), home of the Lakota Wolf Preserve and just on the border of NJ and PA. We missed the 4:00 p.m. tour, so we took our own tour and saw the timber wolves and fox, and saw (and smelled!) the lynx. I happened to see a letter posted on the Lakota Wolf Preserve board about Sarah Palin and her support of wolf aerial hunting in Alaska. I’m posting the html to the letter to the blog so you can read it yourself. I did a fact check on the information in the letter, and it is true, but of course, there is more of a story than is told in the letter.

During the evening we listened to frogs, some kind of noisy night bird, and the wolves howling. . .and the pitter patter of a very heavy rain storm. It was quite a pleasant evening.

I’m happy to report that Steve did not listen to NPR today, only music. This was the day after House of Representatives voted down the Revitalization Act and the market dived 777 points. We thought that one more day of listening to the giant sucking sound of the financial markets going down the drain might be a distraction to preserving our lives on the Goldwing!

We talked with Ann and Jamie and Jon this evening. All are well, and Sophie was headed to the groomers at Petco, and then to the vet for an exam. Jamie got her truck fixed and was pleased with the service and the results. The deer she hit probably is not as pleased. Tomorrow we are headed towards the Blue Ridge Parkway.