MikeRides.com

Today I enter the wide Nevada desert.  I’m tired and ragged.  But today I’ll try to make it all the way home, covering almost 600 miles.  I’ll move fast and stop rarely.

Ride like the wind, Blue Steel.

I’m sitting comfortably in my hotel room in Mammoth Lakes, California.  This is actually the first time I’ve sat comfortably all day.  The past two days of riding have been very, very interesting.

When I planned last year’s motorcycle trip I had my mileage down to a science.  Mileages all work out very well when you’re traveling at a consistent 65+ MPH all day long.  You normally arrive at your destination an hour or two before Google says you should, actually.  This would get me to the hotel at 4:00-5:00.  Then I would have plenty of time to relax, lounge around, have dinner, and maybe have a nap.

Not so this time around.  Not even close.

Let me introduce the first leg of Highway 1 in California:

This is the most technical road I have ever ridden on.  Seriously, if you’re not a very experienced motorcyclist don’t even get near it.  This route introduced itself as pure evil about 300 yards from the turnoff from Hwy-101 with a 15 MPH hairpin that will sneak up on you, big time, if you’re not ready, and it continued that way for 21 miles.  I was meandering along HWY-101 at 75 MPH, blah blah, then suddenly this.  No one needs morning coffee with a road like this.  If you’re a serious sport biker with a deep love for blind corners, then this is your road.

I did find myself having fun.  There’s a certain entertainment to taking corners way faster than you should, pushing beyond your comfort zone, and cornering a 580-pound-top-heavy-loaded-with-gear dual sport motorcycle into some very deep lean angles.  There was a relentlessness to the road, corner after corner, that simply would not let up.

All of this was great fun, but I realized that it took quite a while to cover those 21 miles.  This was no 75 MPH desert road.  I was fine with this little delay  because surely, once I reached the coast, the road would straighten out and I could cruise along briskly.

Haha, no.

The technicality of the road continued along the coast.  And it continued and continued and continued.  Even with me riding very aggressively, my average speed way short of 75 MPH, more like 35 MPH, and even then I would inevitably wind up behind an extremely slow vehicle which would slow me down even more.  I was getting way behind schedule, fast.

This brings up another point.  The San Francisco bay area has some traffic around rush hour.  I planned to hit the city just a bit after lunchtime, say 1:30 0r so, which would allow me to easily avoid rush hour.  Well, I was not getting there in time.  So add this stress to the experience.

I’ve said nothing about the coast itself.  The coast is incredibly beautiful.  The fog and scenery give the area a fairy tale appearance, which the locals must have noticed too because much of the architecture has a quaint storybook look to it.  Add in the miles of rugged coastline, with jagged rocks being pummeled by the churning sea sea, and you have a stunningly beautiful place.  The only problem, other than the extremely twisty road, is the freezing, biting weather.  That, and the fact that the road, without guardrails, often drops hundreds of feet straight down into the churning sea.  Spooky, obviously.

Now I expected a chill in the air, but I didn’t expect this.  I took one warmer pair of gauntlets and a hooded sweatshirt when I left home.  I wore all of it but it was absolutely not enough insulation.  The cold air wasn’t just humid, it was tremendously damp, even wet, and even the insides of my gloves were getting soaked.  Except for about five miles, I never, ever saw the sun on the coast.  Beautiful, yes.  But terrible at the same time.

Okay.  The coast was pretty but dangerous and cold, and the road was very slow.  By 2:30 I hadn’t eaten and I was still way north of San Francisco.  I decided to abandon my coastal route and head inland for Petaluma and the 101 freeway which would move a lot quicker.  As I’ve mentioned many times before, interstates are the enemy, but I had no choice.

After wolfing down a fast food burger I blasted south on the 101 toward San Francisco.  The city came up quick, but it was 4:05 when I reached the Golden Gate Bridge.  Way too late.  I was pissed.

As an aside, all along I figured that crossing the golden gate would be the apex moment of my trip.  I’m completely, totally scared of heights and I had been giving myself pep talks about the very high bridge all day.  When I reached it, it was so beautiful and so amazing that I was moved, not nervous.  It was quite overwhelming to have traveled so many miles and to have finally arrived.  Seriously, it was emotional.  The tops of the bridge’s towers pushed into the clouds and they seemed infinitely tall, like they extended far into the sky, above the fog.  It was an incredible scene.

From there I had to make my way through Golden Gate Park and through the west side of the city, which I did, despite traffic, very quickly.  Then it was onto the 280 freeway south out of the city and down to San Jose.  Traffic was moving.  Really moving.  At one point I was doing 90 MPH and not at all moving faster than the other vehicles.   I’ve always found it strange that traffic moves faster in the cities than it does outside them, despite traffic and lower speed limits.  There’s just something about the urgency of dense civilization that causes people to move faster and faster.  I’m not sure it’s a good thing…

I continued my ravenous freeway blast through Palo Alto, past Stanford, and then south on the 85 freeway just west of San Jose.  I figured that my best bet was to get out of the bay area as soon as possible, and slice through the Santa Cruz mountains by was of Los Gatos on Hwy 17 to the city of Santa Cruz itself.  It was fun actually, that I didn’t look at a map for any of this.  It’s nice that I knew all of these roads already!

I came out of the 17 fast, way fast and prepared to meet up with Hwy-1.  It was only 5:45 and I was already in Santa Cruz!  Then, traffic.  Lots of it.  Completely stopped.  Snarled. I sat and sat in stopped freeway traffic for a solid hour.

Now, in California motorcycles are allowed to lane-split.  This means that motorcyclists are lawfully permitted to drive between the lanes of traffic, on the painted lines, when traffic is heavy.  I knew this.  I watched other motorcyclists do it.  But I didn’t see any bikes nearly as wide as mine attempting this, and they seemed to have a bit of a difficult time dodging cars and having frequent near misses.  So I decided to stay in my lane and drive like a normal car.  All I needed was to drag a saddle bag all along the side of a black Mercedes.  No, this was not the time for me to learn to lane-split.  Now, other motorists, for whatever reason, became irritated with this.  Four cars, including one man driving the other way shouting “LAAAAAAANE SPLIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” at me told me that I should do it.  But I was too scared.  There.  I was chicken.  I said it.  And I paid the price and sat in traffic.  Oh well.

Anyway I was shaking from exhaustion when I passed Monterey and arrived in Carmel.  I was there and I had survived.  What a day.

NEXT DAY, FROM CARMEL TO MAMMOTH LAKES

I was very worried this morning.  I was worried because I knew, from looking at the map, that I had probably done the same thing to myself today that I did yesterday by planning a route on slower, technical roads.  And so it proved to be.

I left Carmel and its morning mists and fog early.  By Carmel Valley Village, the clouds were almost completely gone and within a few miles, the sky was clear and sunny.  Carmel valley is lush and beautiful.  The drive through it alone would have made the entire trip worth it.  But further up, crossing the mountains, the road became barely paved and very tiny and insignificant looking.  It was intensely curvy as well.  Along this road, through wild countryside, I got the suspicion that I was on the wrong road.  It happens at least once during every trip, this feeling of taking a wrong turn.  Surely this tiny road couldn’t be the one I’m supposed to be on, could it?  I stopped and checked my maps several times and the conclusion was, uh, I dunno.  There were no signs.  I was definitely headed east, which was good, and I figured the road had to come out somewhere.  But those mountains seemed to keep going and going, farther than they should…

Well, it turns out I was on the right road all along and I was freaking myself out for nothing.  Eventually the road spit me out in Greenfield, CA.  This was a town that I knew well because I lived in Greenfield for a few months in 2001 as a missionary.  Greenfield is smack in the middle of California wine country and many wineries do their highest quality growing here.  When I saw the vineyards, I knew I was close.

In Greenfield, even though it was still cool from the morning, I switched to full summer riding gear.  Mesh, helmet vents open, and perforated gloves.  I was headed soon to the California central valley, which is nothing if not hot.

After another longish technical mountain road (see a pattern here?) I came out in Coalinga, CA.  It was hot. It was flat. It was dry. But thankfully the central valley is wide open and so was my speed.  I was a little behind schedule but not bad and I blasted through the valley quickly and ate lunch in Madera, CA.  But ahead lay the Sierras, and I had planned a pass through Yosemite National Park, like an idiot.  It would certainly be slow going, but beautiful at least.

Slow, yes.  Beautiful sometimes.  It was certainly not beautiful when the national park service decided to completely remove 15 miles of roadway, leaving only dirt and gravel as roadway.  The surface gave a constantly unnerving, uneasy feeling where the tires refused to track and always felt like they were going to slide away.  Also, everyone else figured that we were still on a superspeedway and they blasted through the road, kicking up dust all over me, the bike, and my faceshield.  The shield was a nice dirty brown color, which I was forced to clean several times so that I could look through it.  Crappy.

Yosemite Valley was not crappy.  It was breathtaking.  El Capitan towers impossibly high above the road, so much that I had to look way up to see the top.  It’s amazing that one rock can be so huge.  The road took me out of the Yosemite valley and into the backcountry which is also very, very breathtaking.  It’s breathtaking in its beauty, and also in its danger, as the road drops hundreds of feet, again without guardrails, off huge cliffs.  If you screw up one of these corners, you wreck your bike, end the trip, and die.  No pressure.

Simply put, the path I chose through the Sierras and Yosemite was far too technical and curvy for a good travel road.  It was fantastic for sightseeing, but honestly all I really wanted was for the ride to be over.  I’ll have to return to the park soon when I can spend some quality time there and when the park is a destination, not an obstacle.  There is so much granite in the park it’s mind blowing.  The Sierras are incredible.  In profile, they’re shaped like a doorstop, with a long rise from the west side, and a steep face on the east side.  I’m on the east side of the range now, with towering, snow covered peaks visible all along the front of the range.  Unfortunately the huge range creates a massive rain shadow that makes Nevada and Utah terribly dry, and I have to drive through that Sierra-created desert tomorrow.  But that’s tomorrow.

Today was terribly long and it’s my third consecutive day spending more than 10 hours on the road.  I’ll do it again tomorrow probably, as I attempt to make it all the way home from Mammoth Lakes in one shot.  The mileage will be extreme but not the time spent on the road as I’ll gobble up miles very, very quickly tomorrow across the desert.  Good night and I’ll update soon.

I’m slap happy and sitting rather slumped over in my chair here in Garberville, California.  Today was a long day.  11 hours from hotel to hotel, actually.  That kind of time spend in a motorcycle saddle would normally be pure hell, unless of course it happened to be the best day of riding of my life.  Which today was.

Looking back it seems strange that I was in Sisters, Oregon today.  I was there so long ago, and things were so different there, that it’s unreal.  This is a travel phenomenon.  Scenery changes gradually, so slowly that you don’t really notice it until you arrive someplace hundreds of miles later and suddenly realize that everything is different.  This, of course, is the beauty of travel, that you come to see how very varied places are, even close to your home, or places far away.

Yesterday I marveled at the beautiful pine forests of the mountains of central Oregon.  And yes, compared to the sage covered wastelands of Nevada and Utah, these places were impressive.  But honestly, nothing could have prepared me for the grandeur of old-growth pine forests found on the west side of the Cascades.  I was completely blown away.  Floored.  Distracted.  Amazed.  Just past Crater Lake I found myself riding among the tallest pine trees I had ever seen, dense and lush.  The road seemed to be at the bottom of a giant canyon of growth, and I was only a tiny spectator, allowed for a few moments to see such a beautiful natural display.  Looking up was dizzying, and I had to concentrate by looking ahead to keep the motorcycle on the road.  And looking into the growth itself, eye level, revealed a dark, dense forest floor covered in ferns.  The Cascade peaks themselves were spectacular too, sharp and rugged, but their scale was completely lost to me.  The seemingly endless forest which towered overhead was more intimate, and somehow I felt smaller beside those great trees than I did below the high peaks.

All of this amazement and new found natural glory only lasted about three hours, however.  That was the amount of time that passed between the forests of the Cascades and the first redwood grove that I saw in California.

In short, I was awestruck.

I had seen photos of the giant redwood trees.  I knew how tall they were.  But I can’t explain the amazement of riding through a forest of trees so tall that their height would seem appropriate among the steel skyscrapers of Salt Lake City.  Nothing has made me feel so small.  The groves of the largest redwood trees are remarkable because they have no branches for most of their height.  Only higher up the trunk do they branch out.  So rising from the lush forest floor there are only the shafts of the giant trees, like pillars supporting the evergreen ceiling of a natural temple, blocking all direct sunlight.  In these forests, nature truly has created a great building, surpassing the greatest cathedrals of the old world.  The density of the forests keeps the winds away from the forest floor, and with no fauna to be easily seen, it seems as though nature has consecrated these forests, and kept them silent, untouched, and holy.

There is so much to talk about today.  The temperature plummeted 35 degrees within 30 miles as I approached the coast…the chill was not just cold and windy but humid too, causing it to be a biting cold…the coast was rocky, chilled, and forbidding…the coastal road was tightly winding and just a bit damp, all with speed limits at least 10 MPH too high to be safe…the ocean seemed to swell and suddenly explode as it hit the rocks out in the ocean…I thought Eureka would be a beautiful town but it was worn and neglected looking…I found myself at the head of a column of BMW motorcycles, moving probably quicker through the twists than we should have been, until a slow Honda Civic messed everything up…it’s strange to look into the distance across the ocean, knowing that there’s nothing out there until the Hawaiian islands…passing through a grove of redwoods against the coast, just as a sheet of fog, 20 feet up, rolled in between the trees…how can the clouds look so much like rain yet never open up…if ever you’re traveling on the CA-101, take the time to travel instead on the Avenue of the Giants, you’ll never be the same…there are hundreds of drifters along the coast, walking along with their backpacks, looking like they haven’t shaven or perhaps eaten a good meal in months…by the time I reached Garberville I was shaking from exhaustion yet I mentally could have gone on forever…

I can’t recount everything.  I’m overwhelmed.  My brain can only handle so much overload in one day before it must close the book and accept it as enough.  I must do the same here in this blog.  I’m sure I’ll bore all of you with stories of this day for years to come.  Good night.

I’m sitting on my hotel room patio in Sisters, Oregon watching the night fall.  This is a beautiful place.  Not one sagebrush in sight, this country is filled with huge evergreen trees and the smell is fresh and amazing.  Sisters is a small resort town with a quaint downtown and it’s remote enough to keep away from the noise of city life.  The name Sisters sounds contrived until you see the sisters themselves, three giant volcanic peaks just to the southwest, snowy and rising impossibly high.

It was a good ride today.  Only 288 miles–which is about half of the ground I covered yesterday–of scenic mountains and pine forest.  The ride was slower, only about 60 MPH most of the way, which is just about the perfect motorcycle touring speed.  At 60 you’re able to take in miles while never being stressed.  The countryside is more alive at a slightly slower pace.

Winding mountain roads are fantastic on a motorcycle.  There’s a flow to motorcycling that is only realized in the curves.  From one curve to another you can feel the weight of the vehicle press not away from the corner, as a car rolls away from it, but down into it and with it.  Yellow recommended speed signs can be rather flippantly disregarded as long as you’re sharply focused on your riding.  65 in a recommended 35 is safely doable.  The bike leans sharply and the weight of machine and rider presses firmly to the road, but a perfectly executed corner feels amazing.  So it was throughout the day.

I won’t be able to enjoy a day like this again on my trip.  For the rest of the way I’ll be more or less focused on eating up miles rather than enjoying the ride.  Even when the scenery turns beautiful as it will tomorrow on the seashore, speeds will be higher and the route will be straighter.  I made sure to enjoy myself today.

Today’s ride began as so many other have, with open country covered in sagebrush.  But suddenly, like flipping a light switch, I found myself in dense pine forest.  Everything was green and my helmet suddenly filled with that unmistakable fragrance that only evergreen forests have.  I had arrived in the Pacific northwest.  Throughout the day the pines came and went, but gradually they became more commonplace, until, as they do here in Sisters, the pines grow everywhere.  As I type this and the night grows darker, there are silhouettes of huge pine trees throughout my view.

I’m not in Utah anymore.  In Utah you have to search for green country.  Here, it’s everywhere.  The next two days of riding will be filled with pines and mountains and coast.  While the ride for those two days will be more distance intensive, the beauty should continue.

Nights like this one make these long rides worth it.  After a full day of exhausting riding you suddenly find yourself in a new place, energized, and happy you made the journey.

Sorry that I didn’t write anything about my trip through Idaho on Sunday but
I
fell
asleep
totally.

Like, I was gone.  See, motorcycling is a tiring activity even though you’re sitting down the entire time.  About halfway through the trip today I started thinking, “Oh yeah, I remember this now.”  “This” is extreme exhaustion, seemingly endless distances, and constantly asking myself why I’m doing this.  Mixed in with all that, though, are some of the best memories of my life.

The day started as all motorcycle trip days do, with enthusiasm.  The morning air is cool and comfortable and the sun isn’t yet beating down.  It’s odd starting out on the first day because there’s so much unknown ahead of you and it feels like you’re just leaving to get some groceries.  Except, of course, that you don’t stop once you’re way out of town.  To me, it felt like I was really “gone” when I turned north out of Wells, Nevada onto a road I had never traveled on before.  Twin Falls, Idaho was at the other end of that road, which was familiar ground to me, but that road was new and strange and I loved it.

Utah and Nevada have a lot of sagebrush.  I rode through countless valleys filled with it before, like a mirage on the horizon, Cactus Pete’s rose from the sagebrush and it was time for lunch.  Cactus Pete’s, for those who haven’t heard of it (neither had I), is a delightfully seedy casino hotel in Jackpot, Nevada.  Outside of Las Vegas, casino hotels have none of  the glitz and glamor and high lifestyle appeal of the big casinos.  They’re more like overgrown, gaudy bingo parlors, filled with elderly people glued to slot machines like they might find the fountain of youth if only they keep pulling those handles.  Thankfully, where there are casinos there are buffets and I filled up at the buffet at Cactus Pete’s (all yours for just $17.95).

From there it was northward until Twin Falls, Idaho.  Now, I’ve had a big change of heart and I’m taking back all the bad things I’ve said about Idaho in the past.  Truly, the agricultural center of the state has a unique beauty where lush, green fields meet starkly dry surroundings.  The agriculture is there because of the Snake River which runs through the region, making everything green and providing potatoes for people like you and me.  Also, I’ve found that small towns in Idaho have The Nicest People in the Solar System.  Seriously.  Their sincerity friendliness restores my faith in humanity.  Having a teenager, in front of his friends, genuinely say “Wow, that’s a really nice motorcycle, mister” is surreal.  In most of America he would have earned social bonus points for either making fun of me or pushing the motorcycle onto the ground.

From Twin Falls westward is where I made the best and worst choices of the day.  Actually, they were the same choice.  I decided beforehand to take US-78 away from the interstate and out into the countryside instead of sticking to I-84 through Boise.  This was good because, on a motorcycle, interstates are the enemy and they are only used as a last resort.  You miss the best parts of the country and run into the worst people on the interstate.  But this was a bad decision because US-78 runs way out into the desert, along a path that has no need for existence and it makes Nampa, Idaho seem like it’s three planets away.  All this was compounded by the fact that it was 100 degrees and I was very tired.  For the first half of this leg of the journey I was in paradise.  The road was pleasant and I love driving through farmland.  The second half was on the surface of the moon and Nampa couldn’t arrive soon enough.   Oh well, I survived.

So I arrived safely in Ontario, Oregon and I’ll be off to the Cascades tomorrow.