Day 0: Preparation

22 Aug 2024

The store clerks stare at me in surprise. We’re in Dublin, California and I’ve come into the shop to buy a toolkit and Rok tiedown straps for my duffel bag.

“You’re going all the way to Nashville on a Bonnie? That’s a pretty small bike. Are you traveling with someone?”

“No, just me,” I reply.

“You got Bluetooth in your helmet, or you just rawdogging that too?”

I do have it. Hardly a minute of my life goes by without music playing.

They convince me to get a 1L spare fuel bottle and a tire puncture kit.

–

“Hey look at those boots, those are real moto boots!”

We’re standing in the midst of an impressive vintage motorcycle collection, with Indians, Harleys, and BMWs going back to the 1920s. The owner must have a million miles of motorcycling under his belt, having traversed the Baja peninsula multiple times, riding all the way to the tip of South America, and covering huge chunks of Asia from Thailand to Mongolia to Vladivostok. In a remote yurt in Asia he ate a goat’s eyeball in a homemade stew before joining the whole host family in their only bed, spooning one another. He just got back from a 5000-mile ride through Canada.

“You have pants?”
“Yeah, Aerostitch pants.”
“You have a jacket?”
“Yeah, perforated.”
“With real pads?”
“Yeah.”
“Elbows?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Shoulders?.”
“Yep. Full face helmet.”
“Bluetooth? You a Cardo or SENA guy?”
“Cardo, because my in-laws have it.”
“Satellite phone?”
“GPS rescue beacon, for hikers.”
“Helicopter insurance?”
“No but I was going to do that today.”
“Camping or hotels?”
“Both. I want to stay in the national parks in Nevada and Utah.”

“I’ve been all over the world. I’ve ridden across Mongolia. Do you know how many times I slept in my tent?” he asks.

“ONCE,” he answers, waving a single finger in the air.

–

“Any advice for the trip?” I ask the maintenance department manager. We’ve just talked through the notes from the shop’s thorough inspection of the bike.

“Avoid the riff-raff.”

“Two- or four-legged?”

“Mmmm… both,” he replies.

“It’s been a long time since I did a long trip,” he continues. “Back when I used to ride back to Chicago.”

“What’s your preferred route?” I ask. I’m looking for advice on the most interesting roads.

“Super slab (interstate), all the way. 1000 miles a day, 2 1/2 days,” he replies.

I stare back blankly.

“And no Bluetooth or anything. Too distracting.”

Day 1: San Jose –> Sacramento

Memories:

1. Winding up the hills of the Twin Peaks neighborhood, circling the Sutro Tower, and coming downhill with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.
2. Taking a founders’ call from the picnic area of Blue Heron Lake in Golden Gate Park.
3. Crossing the Bridge
4. Traversing the marshlands along Highway 37. A deep channel snakes through the shallows of a roadside creek.
5. A military Osprey flying over the highway near Travis AFB.
6. Filtering through backed-up interstate traffic for hours.
7. The new cruise control is perfect.

Day 2: Down Day in Sacramento

Day 3: Sacramento to Tahoe (via Golden Lake)

Memories:

1. The smooth morning air heading north on CA-90, passing groves of olive trees stretching across the flat plain.
2. The prominent, but isolated, volcanic area on the horizon near Yuba City.
3. Weaving through deep river valleys with postcard-perfect mountain streams.
4. Casually looking behind me, being instantly astonished by the view, and immediately pulling over to have a better look.
5. Riding across a high, flat plain among rounded mountain peaks, with hundreds of cattle and horses grazing on the long, brown grass.
6. An incredible wall-side parking spot above Emerald Bay.

Day 4: Lake Tahoe to Great Basin NP

Memories:

1. Frost on the seat in the morning. Rode delicately for the first hour, worries about ice on the road.
2. Adversary F-16s passing low and fast over the highway while waiting in a queue for a construction area.
3. F-16 pilot practicing his landings. After a touch-and-go, he used afterburner to quickly climb to about ~5,000 feet while turning downwind. He then made a high pass over the runway, then turned downwind and arced down dramatically, touching down with a flourish. After maybe 4 passes of this, he switched to approaches looping in other directions.
4. Something like 24 aircraft launching within 30 minutes, including F-35C, Super Hornets, F-16s, and F-5s. Sometimes in mixed configuration, such as with a Super Hornet leading 2 F-5s. One F-5 was painted maroon tiger-stripe.
5. Seeing the contrails of maneuvering fighters at high altitude.
6. Dumping the bike while pulling into a gravelly pullout. The gravel was deeper than I expected. A woman in a Tacoma turned around on the highway to come help me set it upright. It started up again without a hiccup.
7. Turning a corner coming out of a mountain pass and seeing a straight line going off into the vanishing point of the horizion.
8. Looking in the mirror and seeing nothing but a straight line going off into the vanishing point.
9. Not seeing anybody at all for 10+ minutes.
10. Tapping the cruise control, putting my feet on the passenger pegs, and resting my chest on the tank bag.
11. Massive, massive desolate basins ringed by mountains.
12. My attention and interest never wavered for a minute, despite the monotony. What an incredible, beautiful, and awe-inspiring landscape.
13. Getting in to Great Basin NP as the sun is setting and praying there’ll be an available campsite. The gravel road is tricky and washboarded, and the ABS light keeps blinking. I almost dump the bike turning around after missing the campground entrance, where the turn was ambiguously marked. There is an open site: #9. I’m too excited to sleep. It was a 12-hour day.

Day 5: Great Basin NP to Bryce

1. “Not going to be too, too hot today,” says the park ranger. The forecast high is 88.
2. This little town sure has a lot of rodeo champions, according to the sign. And they all have the same last name.
3. Come through a mountain pass. See a road that stretches 20 miles into the distance in a perfectly straight line, to another mountain pass. Sometimes the road kinks in a different direction at the center of the basin, and goes in a straight line to a different mountain pass. Repeat for 2 days.

Day 6: Bryce to Moab

1. As I approach the rim of Bryce Canyon before dawn, I see a family sitting at a bench, silhouetted against a yellow sky. The color and scene changes every few minutes until the sun finally peep over the horizon.
2. There are no more beautiful roads in the the world than Highways 12 and 24 through south-central Utah.
3. One minute you’re doing 30mph weaving through a tight river canyon, thick with cottonwood trees and with deep red walls, and 30 minutes later you’re weaving through aspen forest high up on a mountain.
4. I come around a corner and there’s a big black cow in the road. I come to a stop. It chews its cud and stares at me. Eventually it walks on. A buddy is around the bend and declines to step into the road.
5. By the time I got to Eastern Utah, it turned into the first truly hot day, with full sun. It was like sitting in front of a hairdryer under a spotlight.
6. A tractor-trailer was fully overturned at an interstage on-ramp from a rest stop. Towing and salvage trucks were on-scene. It was sobering.
7. The road into Moab from the interstate had heavy cross-winds, so I aggressively avoided being alongside tractor-trailers.
8. The hotel room in Moab has a bunch of photos of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley for some reason. I approve, but strange when Arches is here.
9. The Max Krueger orchard within Capital Reef National Park was open for peach-picking. My lunch was 8 peaches, picked fresh from the tree and eaten on the spot. There was a mix of small, medium, and large, and more or less tender. The soft skin was divine.
10. A considerable part of my dashcam video from today will be me making a U-Turn in the road to go grab a photo. They are incredible.
11. The cruise control continues to be a godsend.
12. In a remote part of south-central Utah, I pass a guy who’s doing about 65, uphill, in a Vespa. I figure it must be souped-up, and he’s Doing A Thing (as am I).

Day 7: Moab to Carbondale

1. Coming through the towering, deep-red walls of the Colorado River canyon east of Moab, the 75-minute epic song “Dopesmoker” by Sleep comes on. As I pop up above the canyon into the flatter, barren wasteland leading into Colorado, the brutal monotony of the song perfectly matches the landscape.
2. There’s a sign on the interstate that says “WATCH FOR EAGLES ON HIGHWAY” and that’s interesting.
3. Headed up to Grand Mesa from Grand Junction, there are isolated rainclouds visible tens of miles away all across the horizon. The clouds take on the appearance of giant jellyfish, with bright white funnels underneath their dark bottoms.
4. Sitting on the motorcycle just feels normal now. Feels like being in office chair or something – everything is within arm’s reach and I know it instinctively.
5. The Days Inn in Carbondale is the first place I’ve felt like the bike could get stolen or vandalized.
6. Under ~40mph, the bike has a slight “lurching” feeling to it, unsteadily holding back like the brake has been lightly tapped, at about 0.5Hz. Is it a mechanical problem? Gusts of wind?
7. This part of Colorado seems to have it all. You have the desert, with its red rocks and interesting formations, (New) Mexican cuisine and culture, and the mountains nearby with forests and ski areas.

Day 8: Carbondale to Colorado Springs

1. There’s a 3-day concert festival in Aspen this Labor Day Weekend, so there was a steady stream of traffic against me, headed into town along the winding mountain roads.
2. At Independence Pass there was a group of 3 GoldWing riders positioning and re-positioning their bikes for a photo-op. It wasn’t clear when they’d be done, so I parked on the other side of the sign to get my own photo and move on. One rider decided to make his 3rd or 4th repositioning pass and grumbled about my bike’s position. I started to push a bit out of the way, but he ended up grinding the exhaust on the edge of the pavement getting by me.
3. The Aspen airport is crazy. They only use one end of the runway. So a plane will take off and then quickly change heading, and another aircraft will come in from the same direction to land. The traffic splits between different forks of the valley.
4. Thought about going up Pikes Peak as I passed it this afternoon, but there was a rainstorm on the summit. The last hour getting into Colorado Springs I was mostly obsessed with beating the rain, which I did.
5. The area where the wide and golden plain meets the Collegiate Peaks is hard to beat for visual drama.
6. Once the rain was done, around sunset, the sky cleared up completely. Not a cloud to be seen.

Day 9: Down Day in Colorado Springs

Day 10: Pikes Peak

Day 11: Colorado Springs to Hutchinson

1. My bags have gotten easier and easier to pack over course of the trip, in that I no longer have to force zippers shut. It’s not clear to me whether this is due to better efficiency, the bags stretching out, or my occasionally leaving stuff behind. Or some combination.
2. The road out of Colorado Springs is straight as an arrow, and perfectly aligned with Pikes Peak. Thus, in my rearview I can see the peak get steadily smaller and smaller until it vanishes.
3. I’ve never gone 50 miles without turning the handlebars before, but today I had several opportunities.
4. In a particularly dusty bit of prairie, there were at least 5 tall, thin dust devils spinning in the fields alongside the road.
5. This is the first day where the limitations of a small bike and windscreen became apparent. At 75mph on the prairie, there’s a lot of wind, and my neck starts to hurt. A stiffer posture is needed with the arms in order to react to sideways gusts of wind, so my arms begin to hurt as well. At the end of the day, my hands are numb from vibration and grip, which hasn’t happened yet on this trip.
6. The landscape is so monotonous that the only way I can tell that I’m making progress is that “West Kansas Growers’ Association” signs give way to “Mid-State Co-Op” signs.
7. Somewhere along the way there were three 90-degree turns in quick succession, and it felt like a divine revelation.
8. Taking a left turn from a stop at a 4-way traffic light near Hutchinson, I nearly dump the bike. I think the rear tire slipped on some gravel or dust in the intersection, and I was taking the turn in 1st gear. My left foot shot out to the street for stabilization, and I’m not sure if that’s what saved me or not.

Day 12: Hutchinson to Fayetteville

1. So far in Kansas there have been large grain elevators in each town, along the train tracks. But Hutchinson’s are huge. There are a few of them and each is several football fields long and towers above the city.
2. Coming southeast from Hutchinson, past the Flint Hills, I seem to lose a lot of elevation coming down into Oklahoma and Arkansas. This must be where you step down from the high plains.
3. The landscape of eastern Oklahoma and NW Arkansas is so familiar, and similar to the landscape south of Nashville, that it never occurs to me to take a photo. It all looks and seems “normal” and not noteworthy. But to someone coming from the plains or the desert, they’d be taken by how green everything is.