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How to buy a new motorcycle: the long way
What fun is it to do things the easy way? Heck, around here, the big dealerships practically make it so you can buy a motorcycle over the phone, and have it delivered to your door. Booooring.
I did it the long, fun way.
4200 miles
100 gallons of gas
12 pancakes
5 National Parks
2 oceans
1 happy Doc
When I was living in Australia, I had half-joked about buying a bike on my way home from there, just flying to California and riding the rest of the way home to Massachusetts. That little dream came and went, too many complications. Then a few months passed by, and it hit me: stop talking about it and just do it! So I did. As luck would have it, a good friend was selling (well, at least after I suggested it...) a very suitable bike, and he lives in sunny California. Perfect! Money exchanged, paperwork signed, airfare booked, etc etc... Skip to the fun part...
Bags packed
Shiny new license plate in hand
Now time to leave this, still gripped by winter,
And trade it for this!
I did it the long, fun way.
4200 miles
100 gallons of gas
12 pancakes
5 National Parks
2 oceans
1 happy Doc
When I was living in Australia, I had half-joked about buying a bike on my way home from there, just flying to California and riding the rest of the way home to Massachusetts. That little dream came and went, too many complications. Then a few months passed by, and it hit me: stop talking about it and just do it! So I did. As luck would have it, a good friend was selling (well, at least after I suggested it...) a very suitable bike, and he lives in sunny California. Perfect! Money exchanged, paperwork signed, airfare booked, etc etc... Skip to the fun part...
Bags packed
Shiny new license plate in hand
Now time to leave this, still gripped by winter,
And trade it for this!
Erik
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Now before I share the photos, I really need to (once again) thank my most gracious host and motorcycle salesman. Not only did I talk him into a selling me his bike, he put me up for a few days, took me for local rides, and even had a little bit of my second home waiting for me. What a jerk, eh?
Man I missed my Bundy ginger beer these last months!!!
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Right, so on to the riding...
California, sunny, big, full of, well, everything! We head south, down the Pacific Coast Highway.
Spring has definitely sprung here!
Hey, what's that out in the distance?
Our first historic site - Hearst Castle. To pre-empt the questions, no, we didn't get to go up on the tour. Due to some unforeseen technical difficulty earlier in the day, we arrived here well after the end of tours for the day. No worries. It's impossible to see all the individual sites on a cross-country ride.
And the sun sets on, all things considered (see above), a great first day in the saddle. We turned inland and say thanks and goodbye to the Pacific Coast.
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my words, my "pro"pictures, my "fun" pictures, my videos.
What's up with that!!
Sounds like a great beginning to a great trip.
More, more!!
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
We woke up to another gorgeous day in San Luis Obispo. Time for a little more easterly riding. A note to fellow riders, California routes 58 and 178, on either side of Bakersfield are gorgeous roads. Ride them, tell your friends, but not too many...
Spring, I love it! The hills here are most definitely alive!
East, and more east. We cross through the southern tip of Sequoia National Park, through Walker Pass.
One of the things about long motorcycle tours is that due to the distances that need to be covered, you don't have a great deal of time to spend in any one spot. You might think that's not so much fun. Take your time! Compose your photos! Take it all in... Well, to that I say, I do! I take it in motion! When you ride so far in the course of a day, you get to actually experience the landscape changing. It's awesome. Those rolling green, spring blossom covered hills soon turn into some jagged peaks, and then, the wide open, relatively flat, near-desert. This is all before lunch.
No more switchbacks, you can see the highway for miles.
Death Valley. Heat. Stark, but beautiful landscape.
Sorry little critter(s).
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Looks great so far.
I have a hunch you aren't stopping by on the way across the country....
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Great Series so far
Although you'll notice a severe shortage of city photos, we did indeed wake up in Las Vegas on this morning. No gambling or wandering around town on this trip. Again, due to our "circumstance" on day 1, day 2 needed to be very, very long to keep us close to schedule. Yeah, schedules are no fun, but bosses expect you to be back at work at some point if they are going to keep paying you.
So anyway, seeya later Vegas! Just down the road, though, we stopped to take in what some people call one of the wonders of the world... a no trespassing sign!
Another sign
Not really sure how you do this one justice with a camera. Maybe at least if I had a wider lens...
Back in the 1930's, engineers had a sense of style, and it showed. They were respected, they did amazing things. Sure we're in the lab these days doing cool things, and call me nostalgic, but that was the golden age of engineering.
The little monument area is really cool as well. Take the time to give it a read, you'll learn some astronomy. Just one question though: why does California get the biggest state seal, front and center? We're not in California!
And don't forget to rub the toes for good luck.
Lake Meade, the flood level line is really interested, so sharp!
Now what you might not know about the Hoover Dam is that they are building another fantastic feat of engineering just above and next to it. The interstate simply can't all travel over the dam, at crawling speeds, and sending the trucks on a 100+ mile detour is not a permanent option...
Working from both sides. They're going to meet in the middle, think about that for a second... thousands of tons of concrete and steel...
And onwards we go. Making a slight left turn in Kingman, AZ, it was time to get our kicks...
...on Route Sixty-six.
So just a note, if you're ever in Seligman, AZ, where 66 and I-40 intersect, skip the novelty Roadkill Cafe across the street, and walk into Westside Lilo's for a proper treat. Not only can you get a good bratwurst and kraut (see the flag?), they make a bowl of chili that's out of this world. Maybe think twice about the fresh onions on top if you're going to be a closed face helmet for another 300 miles that day.
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Day 3 might have been the most chock full of sights, or at least that's what my photos say, or maybe I just planned it to have lots of sights, but leave me time to actually take some photos. But I digress, we rolled north, to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Yes, we parked, we stopped, we photographed, and we had to move on. Tourists, with a capital T (but how many other tourists rode over 400 miles that day on motorcycles???)!
It's just awesome, photos, at least mine, just can't do this one justice. We'd pay for it as we rolled into chilly Flagstaff later in the dark, but we took 20 minutes, after photos and such, to just sit and stare at this one. Wow. I'm coming back to hike those trails, for sure.
Still a bit of snow here...
The colors...
A very quickly stitched handheld Pano. None of them fancy ballheads and rails on this trip!
We rode the Park road all the way east. It snakes along the Canyon, with several much less visited vistas. We should have stopped there, but not the sun is already going down, and Flagstaff is nearly 100 miles distant. Keep on rolling. But there is time for one more stop as the Canyon dwindles and the Painted Desert begins.
What a gorgeous road!
Yeah, yeah, the usual bike glamour shot. It's new to me, gotta be done!
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I was pretty excited for this day. I'd get to ride through Petrified National Park and stop at the giant meteor crater!!! Yeah, so much for that...
They charge $20 (maybe more, my memory is blocking it out) just to walk in and see it. I'm all for supporting national parks and such, but come on! We paid far less to drive on the miles of roads through Death Valley. Lame.
At least the view back to Flagstaff was pretty.
Strike 2 on this day was the winds. I can't even begin to describe them except to say I've never been more tired after a day of riding. 25+ mph steady winds, with gusts thrown in for good measure. Good enough to make for advisories on the weather channel. We were riding in a constant turn, if you ride, you know what I'm talking about, it is NOT fun, at all. The side of my head was sore because it was pushing my helmet against it so hard. But we soldiered on. At least it was sunny and warm. But due to that fact, we skipped the park road through Petrified and only stopped at the visitor center. Yeah, again, I know, but we had nearly 500 miles to cover, and all the miles on the interstate were zero fun, see above.
Maybe the landscape has something to do with the strong, persistent wind?
Petrified wood is so cool!
When we couldn't take it anymore, we ditched off of I-40 and actually had a bit of a treat. Gained some elevation, and most important, trees! A very welcome, protected spot for a break.
Still early spring here, gorgeous trees, the red in them is bright.
After this recuperation spot, we hammered out the rest of the miles to Albuquerque where our Best Western restaurant treated me to a proper and delicious southwest burritto. More green chili please! Mmmm.
Now it's time to go to work, more later - get your togs ready, we're going to the "beach"...
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Man, this looks like a great trip. I have one of those bug shots too...almost the exact same place
love your ride btw.
Oh well, looks like you had a great trip otherwise. We've done a couple of cross-country moves over the past few years, and I always make it a point to ride my motorcycle across. Great fun. I just wish I'd chronicled them the way that you have.
Cheers,
-joel
Link to my Smugmug site
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thanks for the good words
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I haven't set the lab on fire yet today, so I've earned a quick break to post another day...
Another day that I was pretty excited about. After having some of my plans literally blown away the previous day, I was hoping for a little more cooperation from the weather gods. I can't say this ended up being the case, we actually rode through a dust storm on this day, but we'll get to that.
After a quick stop into Albuquerque BMW (that damned RT was plagued on this trip - we needed oil and a headlight bulb now), we rolled south until we hit the top end of the White Sands Missile Range, and took a turn east to follow along the top of it (near the Trinity site).
Hey, here it is! Can't comment on the food/coffee, it was closed. But the sign was cool.
At the same stop, I found a stowaway. Not quite as bushy as when I nailed it, but this tumbleweed skeleton hung on for quite a few miles.
Southward through Alamogordo and aforementioned dust storm (not so cool on a motorbike, pfffffft hack wheeze!) to White Sands National Park. Why is this even here? Even from space, it's a strange white spot. Very strange, very cool.
Welcome to the desert!
It's actually quite amazing that all these plants survive here.
This next picture gives you a good idea of two things. (1) How the sand dunes move, see them up in the air? That's not haze, that's flying sand! (2) How windy it still was. At this stop, pictured above, I made the stupid mistake of putting my helmet on the ground while we scouted around. Stupid, stupid. I had sand in my helmet for the rest of the day, it got into EVERY crevice. In fact, yesterday (after several thousand miles and days riding in rain) when I was doing a proper cleanup at home, I still found sand in it!!
Not a whole lot of scenery in this photo, but it is one of my favorite shots from the entire trip.
It's like we're spacemen on the moon.
Anyone for sand sledding?
Thoroughly sandy and impressed, we rode out of White Sands, up into the hills. Another case of very drastic change. Within 8 miles we had gone up, I believe, 5000 feet and were riding a twisty alpine road. Awesome.
The canyon up
Through a tunnel in a mountain
Followed by twists and turns. Excellent riding (Rt 82 East, New Mexico). The rest of the ride had pretty scenery, but soon the sun started to go down again, and we had plenty of oil country and desert to ride through to get to Carlsbad for the evening.
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I like your Scorpion helmet also. I have had one for a couple of years.
Ron
http://ront.smugmug.com/
Nikon D600, Nikon 85 f/1.8G, Nikon 24-120mm f/4, Nikon 70-300, Nikon SB-700, Canon S95
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Gotta agree. The scorpion was the only helmet I saved back here while gone to Oz for a couple years. I was weary about heading off on such a long trip with a helmet that I'd only worn a little bit (bought it on a whim, since it was such a crazy good deal). Turned out to be one of the most comfy helmets I've ever had!
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<!-- / icon and title --> <!-- message -->After some hit and miss hotel finding in Carlsbad (can you believe the first two we picked were booked up?!), we bunked down and slept off another full day of riding and southwest exploring. The whole point of sleeping in this town was to visit the Carlsbad Caverns NP first thing the next morning, so off we went...
The ride in to the visitors center itself was a nice windy little treat. I should have taken some photos, but was too eager to get underground.
Down we go!
And it gets darker... and darker...
From here on in the photography drops right off. Unless you're toting the latest DSLR with a big fat FX sensor, super high ISO performance, and wicked fast glass screwed on the front, you ain't getting much for photos in here. Especially, when, like me, you subscribe to Ansel Adams' belief in using available light. Good side story: there's a neat little photo exhibit in the visitors center with Adams' photos and a commentary describing how he considered the entire series, on both attempts, to be quite dreadful, since, of course, he had to use artificial light. Nonetheless some great prints hanging there by Adams' as well as some other fantastic cave photographers. Worth checking out.
Now, for my pathetic attempts...
The skinny ones are called soda straws
Hard to gage what is up and down and left and right and....
The park did an excellent job of adding ambience lighting in many of the side caves.
This is the only one I flashed, to get the tourist's eye view of the path that runs all down the natural entrance and around the big room.
Then you think to yourself: what if all the power went down? Yikes!!! Hop in the elevator and back to the surface.
And then it was all aboard the bikes and due east as much as possible. We rode some great "ranch roads" in western texas, which actually have great pavement and 75mph speed limits, and you won't see a thing for miles, 102 to be exact. Lots of ranch country, then lots of oil country - you can really smell oil country, by the way, I wasn't expecting that. Then join up with I-20 and slog off as many miles as we could. Abilene happened to be our stopping point that night, nothing special to report there.
That was about it for the southwest, which was the real focus of the trip. I knew it would be a while before I got back to that part of the country on a bike again, so I planned more of the sightseeing heavy on the beginning of the trip.
Finish off after dinner...
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I rode through White Sands in 1999 on an ST1100 - black the only color for ST's
I agree about The Meteor Crater - that is really a private, family owned, money making enterprise - but I didn't figure that out completely until we were already inside. I did get a few pictures of it.
You say you ended up in Abilene, Texas. You're going to miss Palo Duro Canyon then. That's a shame.
Keep the shiny side up and the rubber side down!!
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<!-- / icon and title --> <!-- message -->From here on the photos really dwindle. It was time to start covering some serious distance, with the hope that we'd be able to enjoy a bit of riding back east. Now I don't want anyone to take this personally, but this was a stretch of country that just needed crossing. Flat land, wind farms and oil derricks are pretty nice, but, well, after hundreds and hundreds of miles of nothing but that, well... anyway.
After days of glorious sunshine, Day 7 dawned looking a little like this:
550 or so miles of Interstate 20 later, we crossed the mighty Mississippi River, truly back "east" now, about 15 minutes before this started:
As wet as that is, we actually stayed dry all day. Despite the crazy weather fronts that were moving through at the time. We stayed in front of them. An amazing stroke of good luck. I offered a goat to the moto weather gods. Well, not really, but I promised that should happenstance provide me with a goat, preferrably an old, frail, or already maimed one, I would sacrifice it to appease the mighty powers that be.
Aside from this, the interstate from Texas, through Louisiana, and then Mississippi isn't really all that exciting. Open plains turned into some rolling hills, and trees started to pop up. So despite no specific points of interest, that whole experience of rolling through the changing land/environment/seasons was in effect.
Day 8 (Vicksburg, MS to Knoxville, TN) I could pretty much copy everything from the previous day, albeit with less wind, slightly chillier temperatures, and more vegetation and hills, but with fading green as we headed north through lush green spring (Mississippi/Alabama), then mid spring, then early spring in the hills of TN, where the green was yet to really burst, but already trees were blossoming. Again, no distinct points of interest, but I really do enjoy experiencing the land as it changes like that.
It had poured all night, so day 8 started like this:
And once again, I reaffirmed my promise the moto gods, although, still, no goat was provided to me. We were hit by maybe 7 little drops of rain all day, despite storm fronts moving all around us. Big ones! We had caught news that not so far from our route down in the south, tornadoes had ravaged parts of MS/AL. We rolled into Knoxville (just south actually) seeing weather in the distance, but not on us.
To that I say, Whew!
We're no iron-butt'ers, so nearly 1200 miles in 2 days was a pretty full schedule. Let's see what tomorrow morning brings... would we get to use the side of our tires in the Smokies? or would we be soaking wet and sticking to the interstate to just get it done...
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<!-- / icon and title --> <!-- message -->More rain at night, but yet again (our luck can't hold for much longer), we woke up to some very smoky Smokies, but no actual falling drops. Excellent! We loaded up and headed down the to the infamous Route 129. Dragon, here we come.
Under gray skies, but dry roads, and spring blooming away...
One of the many dams in the area.
These purple blossoming trees/bushes were everywhere in TN. Anyone know what they are?
And then we slayed the dragon. It was awesome. I've done it in a car on 2 occasions. First time was in the dead of winter, so no traffic. Second time was amongst hordes of squids. This time, it was not winter, but once again, some luck was on our side and we basically had the place to ourselves. We saw two maniacs on knobby tired dirtbikes ripping it up in the opposite direction, then near the end, a small group also going the other way, and just .25 miles before the Motorcycle Resort (and the NC border) we ran up to the back of a horse trailer. It was truly perfection. Just me, my GS (feeling very much a part of me), Dad and his RT behind. Excellent.
Obligatory tree of shame photo (dad didn't have his coffee yet this morning, hence a bit 'o shake).
And then we had to pay our dues. 20 miles down the road from the stop for coffee at the Moto Resort, the drops began. Boy did they begin! Full stop. Full rain gear. Settle in. Keep on trucking as best as possible.
And it rained.
And rained. And rained some more, for the rest of the day. We rolled on through the southern end of Smoky Mtn Nat Park, to Asheville, then up the very nice new I-26 (which certainly would have been scenic w/o the rain). Definitely no photos here. No underwater housing for the G9.
Another 500ish miles slain for the day, even with a nice detour to see the Dragon, we pulled over in Staunton, VA. Perhaps it would stop and we'd be able to make a quick visit to Shenandoah tomorrow...
Day 10 (Staunton, VA - home, MA)
Yeah, Shenandoah, not so much. Still raining when we woke up. Already quite tired and overflowing with miles at this point. We donned our full rain gear and decided to just blast home and use our extra vacation day the next day to dry off and rest before heading back to work.
Through the rest of Virginia, that tiny corner of West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and MA - the most states in one day. We're definitely back in the northeast!
The rain actually stopped about New Jersey-ish, so we decided to slow down one last time and ride a couple parkways in NY, crossing the Hudson on the nicer Bear Mountain Bridge. We lived here for a bit when I was a kid, so dad and I stopped at the Bear Mtn Inn, where we had spent many a weekend almost 20 years ago.
And so it ends. Thanks for coming along!
:ian
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