At first light I checked the rear tire pressure.
It hadn’t budged.
That cleared me for a fast but otherwise standard departure.
The ride down CA-180 was, as I’d predicted the night before, “not nearly fun enough”.
It took me a while to properly warm up my riding muscles. I'd left the rear tire significantly overinflated, just so it would have some spare air molecules, which made it a bit less grippy.
But I don’t consider the experience lackluster primarily because I was riding on a plugged tire; after a few miles during which the rear’s pressure only bumped up a bit as the tire warmed, I'd started to feel pretty confident about the repair.
No, the biggest problem was that the road was over-populated with lackadaisical locals and puttering Griswolds, and a stream of gravel trucks and cement mixers heading up the mountain.
I arrived at Herwaldt Motorsports in Fresno at 9:05, five minutes later than my intention; but by 9:30 Therese had been rolled into the service bay and I was having a breakfast burrito at a gas station kitchen down the block.
Thanks again to Steve, Chris, Brandon, and Hank for putting Therese at the front of the line and getting me back on the road. By 11:48 I’d refueled and was ready to head east.
Getting out of Fresno was easy; traffic was light. Then I settled into the long straight grind southeast on the CA-99 freeway to Bakersfield. The eucalyptus trees in the median make the highway something of a tree-lined avenue, but aside from that, the scenery is an uninspiring amalgam of industry and agriculture, of fruit groves and enormous processing plants, a dry dusty flatland where the atmosphere is a brown murk beyond which, just barely, could be seen the silhouettes of the mountains where I should have been riding.
It was warming up. According to Therese, just like yesterday today would peak at 91 degrees F under yet another cloudless sky.
That is assuming smog doesn’t count as a cloud.
The drivers were atrocious. Innumerable morons spent miles blocking fast lane traffic, and I don’t know how many times some obliviot lane-changed into me. Those occurrences were never a surprise – I suspect I usually knew it was going to happen before the driver did – but no such event ever ratcheted my mood upward.
The ride was an exercise in enduring tedium. I had music via the iPod/Sena headset speakers, but at freeway speeds even with the volume maxxed the music was often barely recognizable over the wind noise. It helped to pass the time but was hardly a satisfactory listening experience.
Things started to get better after departing Bakersfield. I started to move into the hills of Tehachapi pass. Now there was something interesting to look at, and the occasional curve. The highway climbed gradually, Therese effortlessly overtaking all other vehicles, not even breathing hard.
I should have stopped for gas at Tehachapi where the station was right off the freeway. Instead I waited until Mojave where I discovered the nearest fuel was several miles from the exit.
I don’t usually drink soda pop, but it seemed like the right kind of place to have a Coke from an actual glass bottle. I sat in the shade on the gas island, my back up against the pump, and texted a couple progress reports. Then I checked the map and decided since I’d already driven this far off the highway, I might as well drive past the Mojave Air and Space Port.
Maybe somebody would be flying something interesting.
Alas, no. There wasn’t even an open hanger door to peek into.
It hadn’t budged.
That cleared me for a fast but otherwise standard departure.
The ride down CA-180 was, as I’d predicted the night before, “not nearly fun enough”.
It took me a while to properly warm up my riding muscles. I'd left the rear tire significantly overinflated, just so it would have some spare air molecules, which made it a bit less grippy.
But I don’t consider the experience lackluster primarily because I was riding on a plugged tire; after a few miles during which the rear’s pressure only bumped up a bit as the tire warmed, I'd started to feel pretty confident about the repair.
No, the biggest problem was that the road was over-populated with lackadaisical locals and puttering Griswolds, and a stream of gravel trucks and cement mixers heading up the mountain.
I arrived at Herwaldt Motorsports in Fresno at 9:05, five minutes later than my intention; but by 9:30 Therese had been rolled into the service bay and I was having a breakfast burrito at a gas station kitchen down the block.
Thanks again to Steve, Chris, Brandon, and Hank for putting Therese at the front of the line and getting me back on the road. By 11:48 I’d refueled and was ready to head east.
Getting out of Fresno was easy; traffic was light. Then I settled into the long straight grind southeast on the CA-99 freeway to Bakersfield. The eucalyptus trees in the median make the highway something of a tree-lined avenue, but aside from that, the scenery is an uninspiring amalgam of industry and agriculture, of fruit groves and enormous processing plants, a dry dusty flatland where the atmosphere is a brown murk beyond which, just barely, could be seen the silhouettes of the mountains where I should have been riding.
It was warming up. According to Therese, just like yesterday today would peak at 91 degrees F under yet another cloudless sky.
That is assuming smog doesn’t count as a cloud.
The drivers were atrocious. Innumerable morons spent miles blocking fast lane traffic, and I don’t know how many times some obliviot lane-changed into me. Those occurrences were never a surprise – I suspect I usually knew it was going to happen before the driver did – but no such event ever ratcheted my mood upward.
The ride was an exercise in enduring tedium. I had music via the iPod/Sena headset speakers, but at freeway speeds even with the volume maxxed the music was often barely recognizable over the wind noise. It helped to pass the time but was hardly a satisfactory listening experience.
Things started to get better after departing Bakersfield. I started to move into the hills of Tehachapi pass. Now there was something interesting to look at, and the occasional curve. The highway climbed gradually, Therese effortlessly overtaking all other vehicles, not even breathing hard.
I should have stopped for gas at Tehachapi where the station was right off the freeway. Instead I waited until Mojave where I discovered the nearest fuel was several miles from the exit.
I don’t usually drink soda pop, but it seemed like the right kind of place to have a Coke from an actual glass bottle. I sat in the shade on the gas island, my back up against the pump, and texted a couple progress reports. Then I checked the map and decided since I’d already driven this far off the highway, I might as well drive past the Mojave Air and Space Port.
Maybe somebody would be flying something interesting.
Alas, no. There wasn’t even an open hanger door to peek into.
This high desert town has been a historical fixture of the space age since the X-plane pilots used to fly the earliest jets out of Edwards AFB, which in those days was known as Muroc. One of the cheap motels along the main drag that caught my eye looked about the right vintage that Chuck Yeager might have spent a night or two there.
Mojave still seems to have that kind of character, a distant desert outpost place where just as in years past, today’s space pioneers pass through during their day jobs of sending rocket planes out to the upper edge of the atmosphere.
Things got more interesting as I continued further into the Mojave Desert. Out at the east end of Edwards is a ridge topped by various structures I’ll have do more than just take a picture of. They might be rocket test sites; but might just as easily be borax mines or casinos.
Mojave still seems to have that kind of character, a distant desert outpost place where just as in years past, today’s space pioneers pass through during their day jobs of sending rocket planes out to the upper edge of the atmosphere.
Things got more interesting as I continued further into the Mojave Desert. Out at the east end of Edwards is a ridge topped by various structures I’ll have do more than just take a picture of. They might be rocket test sites; but might just as easily be borax mines or casinos.
But I can't investigate further at the moment. As has become the norm on this trip, my laptop’s WiFi adapter is not playing nice and again I have no decent internet connection while I write.
Once I get this written it will be a tedious process of pasting words and pictures into the blog editor using my creaky old iPhone 4S as Personal Hot Spot.
As the afternoon progressed the mountains through which I was passing were thrown into more dramatic relief, the descending sun casting shadows from the ridges and spurs. I thought about how long it would take to walk across these valleys and basins to reach the hills in the distance – a few hours to make it across this one, a day for that one, two days to reach that one out on the horizon.
If you didn't die in the process.
I relished the sensation of making another epic journey across the wasteland.
Or tried to, anyway.
Sometimes the mood I’m striving for just won’t gel when I’m surrounded by semi-trucks and rental vans and home-made trailers and all those folks just heading to a junket in Vegas.
Once I get this written it will be a tedious process of pasting words and pictures into the blog editor using my creaky old iPhone 4S as Personal Hot Spot.
As the afternoon progressed the mountains through which I was passing were thrown into more dramatic relief, the descending sun casting shadows from the ridges and spurs. I thought about how long it would take to walk across these valleys and basins to reach the hills in the distance – a few hours to make it across this one, a day for that one, two days to reach that one out on the horizon.
If you didn't die in the process.
I relished the sensation of making another epic journey across the wasteland.
Or tried to, anyway.
Sometimes the mood I’m striving for just won’t gel when I’m surrounded by semi-trucks and rental vans and home-made trailers and all those folks just heading to a junket in Vegas.
That all changed when I exited for Nipton.
I pulled up on the shoulder of the overpass and stepped off to have a good look at the other-worldly vista of the Ivanpah solar power station catching the last rays of the sun as it set behind the western ridge.
I pulled up on the shoulder of the overpass and stepped off to have a good look at the other-worldly vista of the Ivanpah solar power station catching the last rays of the sun as it set behind the western ridge.
Looking south was a vista straight out of Lawrence of Arabia: a broad desolate valley, bordered by distant mountains washed by that lowering sun. The sun had already set behind me, leaving a growing shadow reaching eastward across the basin. Many miles away, still in the sunlight on the eastern slope, was Nipton, a patch of green clutter distinct from the random granulation of the open desert. I headed down the two-lane and with the road now virtually empty a proper sense of an epic desert journey returned.
As I approached Nipton I could see that I was about to ride out from the shadow; in my rear view mirror the sun was rising.
I stopped at Nipton to watch it set again.
Then I continued to chase the shadow up the eastern slopes. The sun rose again, though never quite clearing the western peaks, until I finally left it eclipsed when I topped the ridge and began the ride across the next valley to Searchlight, which I could clearly see all those miles away at the rim of the world.
The temperature had dropped to comfortably cool.
The sky to my right was now a rainbow of pastel hues from the ground up to the darkening blue sky wherein floated the crescent moon. I’d been watching that moon all afternoon, ever since I’d turned south on CA-99 back in Fresno; even then it had been remarkably prominent in the brightness of the day.
It was a singularly beautiful evening.
I was concerned that I was about to be riding in the dark, but despite the sun having fallen there was still a surprising amount of light; the dusk lingered for a long time. After turning south on US-95 at Searchlight, I got to watch the pastel sky and crescent moon in the forward view; to the west the sky was still bright before it faded into the other colors farther up. When I finally turned east at Laughlin Junction the cars I passed were still casting shadows.
When something like darkness finally did fall, for only the last few minutes of the ride, it wasn’t too scary. I could still make out the shapes of bushes and rocks and more distant landscape. I could plausibly pretend that I’d be able to spot a deer, or more likely a coyote, off among the scrub brush. Leaning into the smooth highway’s sweeping reflectorized curves was a visual treat and a lot of fun.
As I crested the last ridge the entire valley of the Colorado River was spread out before me, a glittering carpet of lights along the river banks as far as I could see. Closest were the towers of the Laughlin strip, the most prominent of them awash in green light like the spires of Oz. It was another of the many magical moments from this trip.
Pulling up the Edgewater’s driveway I glanced into the parking garage right where I knew the bikes would be parked.
Larry and Gary were there.
I stopped at Nipton to watch it set again.
Then I continued to chase the shadow up the eastern slopes. The sun rose again, though never quite clearing the western peaks, until I finally left it eclipsed when I topped the ridge and began the ride across the next valley to Searchlight, which I could clearly see all those miles away at the rim of the world.
The temperature had dropped to comfortably cool.
The sky to my right was now a rainbow of pastel hues from the ground up to the darkening blue sky wherein floated the crescent moon. I’d been watching that moon all afternoon, ever since I’d turned south on CA-99 back in Fresno; even then it had been remarkably prominent in the brightness of the day.
It was a singularly beautiful evening.
I was concerned that I was about to be riding in the dark, but despite the sun having fallen there was still a surprising amount of light; the dusk lingered for a long time. After turning south on US-95 at Searchlight, I got to watch the pastel sky and crescent moon in the forward view; to the west the sky was still bright before it faded into the other colors farther up. When I finally turned east at Laughlin Junction the cars I passed were still casting shadows.
When something like darkness finally did fall, for only the last few minutes of the ride, it wasn’t too scary. I could still make out the shapes of bushes and rocks and more distant landscape. I could plausibly pretend that I’d be able to spot a deer, or more likely a coyote, off among the scrub brush. Leaning into the smooth highway’s sweeping reflectorized curves was a visual treat and a lot of fun.
As I crested the last ridge the entire valley of the Colorado River was spread out before me, a glittering carpet of lights along the river banks as far as I could see. Closest were the towers of the Laughlin strip, the most prominent of them awash in green light like the spires of Oz. It was another of the many magical moments from this trip.
Pulling up the Edgewater’s driveway I glanced into the parking garage right where I knew the bikes would be parked.
Larry and Gary were there.
Larry, Gary & John
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