2021-04-29
This so belated it seems almost pointless, especially in light of the much more notable experiences I’ve had since.
I leave mention of the latter as the tantalizing teaser of a future Dispatch. But first, my chronic OCD compels me to complete the documentation of my latest and about-as-epic-as-usual cross country motorcycle trip.
*
I rose early in Canyon, Texas; I wanted to maximize available daylight considering I’d begin by riding directly opposite the direction to my destination in Alpine, Arizona.
There was a strict COVID protocol in the breakfast buffet at Holiday Inn Express, elucidated for my benefit by a be-masked lady who instructed that if I touch something, I take it, and that once seated I was welcome to remove my mask to eat. The bananas were too green; I selected an egg muffin and two cups of coffee which I took back to my room and consumed/transferred to my thermos while I completed packing.
Outside it was not quite cold enough to be considered “chilly” by this Michigander’s standards. Riding directly to Palo Duro Canyon was quite pleasant as was touring the relatively short park road. The comparisons to the Grand Canyon I’d heard were understandable.
This so belated it seems almost pointless, especially in light of the much more notable experiences I’ve had since.
I leave mention of the latter as the tantalizing teaser of a future Dispatch. But first, my chronic OCD compels me to complete the documentation of my latest and about-as-epic-as-usual cross country motorcycle trip.
*
I rose early in Canyon, Texas; I wanted to maximize available daylight considering I’d begin by riding directly opposite the direction to my destination in Alpine, Arizona.
There was a strict COVID protocol in the breakfast buffet at Holiday Inn Express, elucidated for my benefit by a be-masked lady who instructed that if I touch something, I take it, and that once seated I was welcome to remove my mask to eat. The bananas were too green; I selected an egg muffin and two cups of coffee which I took back to my room and consumed/transferred to my thermos while I completed packing.
Outside it was not quite cold enough to be considered “chilly” by this Michigander’s standards. Riding directly to Palo Duro Canyon was quite pleasant as was touring the relatively short park road. The comparisons to the Grand Canyon I’d heard were understandable.
That said, I’ve had the good fortune to have ridden through a great many more spectacular landscapes across the West.
I returned to Canyon and shifted north a few blocks to pick up US-60 westbound, the route I’d follow for most of the day.
Dead straight, angling southwest through the panhandle, the divided 4-lane was much less crowded and considerably faster than the interstate would have been; the locals obviously had a very clear and specific idea of what the speed limit should be and in the interest of safety I complied with the community standard.
Parallel to the highway ran a nearly continuous stream of freight trains in both directions.
I’d observed the previous day that truck traffic on I-40 was lighter than I’d expected. Much lighter. In particular there had been relatively few trailers bearing the J. B. Hunt logo, and the few I saw all featured the subscript “Intermodal”.
Now I know why all those J. B. Hunt trailers, once so ubiquitous on the interstate, were all but absent: they’re double-stacked by the hundreds on rail cars.
Shortly after entering New Mexico I passed the only Thai restaurant I saw on the entire trip. It was closed but as I passed I saw the scrolling marquee announcing it would open at 11:00 – just ten minutes in the future. I considered stopping and waiting; the morning’s egg muffin hadn’t been all that big. But I still had hundreds of miles ahead of me and wanted to keep rolling.
West of town, where US-60 had become a two-lane, I rolled up to the very end of an enormous line waiting for oncoming traffic to pass through a single-lane construction zone. The head of the line must have been stopped there for quite a while, but I arrived just in time for my lane to start moving again.
Nice that I wasn’t forced to sit and wait even a single minute; not so nice that miles of bumper to bumper traffic lay ahead of me and there didn’t seem much chance it would ever reach the speed limit – on one broad curve I could just make out that the head of the line was a decades-old pickup hauling a trailer encumbered with a very large classic tractor.
To a degree of delight exceeded only by my surprise, the vehicle immediately ahead of me was a new Nissan Titan driven by someone inclined to overtake as much traffic as possible at every reasonable opportunity. Such opportunities were remarkably common as the slow parade accordioned, and every opening the Titan driver thought reasonable was plenty big enough to fit us both. Together we leapfrogged well over a hundred cars in what was very nearly a single continuous maneuver. As we approached Fort Sumner I was third in line behind the tractor hauler, at which point a chance to pass it opened up which I could exploit but the Titan driver declined.
Driving through Fort Sumner I was amazed nobody pulled out in front of me, and as I passed the city limits there was nothing but open road ahead; for more than a hundred miles after that I had the road entirely to myself.
There wasn’t even anyone behind me; all those cars I’d passed had apparently headed north to Santa Rosa or south toward Roswell. There was very little oncoming traffic.
There was still plenty of traffic on the railway, though it was no longer precisely parallel with the road; often trains seen from many miles away were the only other manmade artifacts on a broad plain where visibility was unlimited. At intervals the tracks would swing close to US-60, then swoop back out into the countryside following some other presumably more favorable contour.
Eventually, predictably, other manmade objects appeared in the form of a wind farm.
A manmade object I should have investigated more closely was an ancient adobe structure quite incongruous in that ultramodern forest of gargantuan towers. I’d really begun to regret having passed up that Thai lunch in Clovis; I hadn’t seen a restaurant in Fort Sumner that looked open and had seen nothing even resembling an extant eatery since, and I’d been thinking about taking a break and whipping up some oatmeal with my Jetboil. That would need shelter, given the stiff wind that logically was blowing across this stretch of country. Fortunately for my riding comfort it was more or less a tailwind but regardless of direction, igniting the Jetboil and keeping it lit even for the short time needed to heat a cup of water would have probably been impossible without the kind of windbreak those adobe walls would have provided. It would have been a nice stop, and a memorable experience.
But I blew past it before making a decision, and rode on hoping to find another such, but never did. I eventually landed in Mountainair where I discovered a single open restaurant called The Mustang Diner.
The place was full of locals, not a single seat available, and nobody looked like they’d be leaving soon. The waitstaff ignored me completely and after a couple minutes of standing near the doorway I just turned and walked out.
My gnawing hunger remained unsated after a fruitless search for another eatery on the way out of town. This resulted in a less-than-gruntled mental attitude that in turn caused me to overlook refueling.
My neglect of this task dawned on me a bit too late. After enjoying a few curves winding between low ridges I found myself on a stretch of perfectly straight, smooth, and seamless new blacktop leading down into the valley of the Rio Grande. It seemed not unlikely there’d be gas when I reached I-25, but that hope proved vain. I headed south toward Socorro, keeping my speed uncharacteristically low and my head tucked down behind the windshield to conserve gas – I was really pushing the bike’s range. Fortunately, I made it to a station with fumes to spare. I then successfully sought out lunch, yet again finding myself the sole customer in a Mexican restaurant. It was called the Desert Diamond, and I initially mistook it for a jewelry shop.
US-60 continued west from Socorro. I’d ridden this stretch three times before, but never in this direction, so it was sort of like a new line on my map.
Coming into Magdalena I experienced the only time on the entire trip that a cop gave me a second glance; sitting in the shade of a tree on the outskirts he lit up for a second, but it was just a courtesy reminder to slow down in town.
When I got to the Very Large Array, I was disappointed to find all the radio telescopes clustered together at the center, quite distant out on the Plains of San Agustín. The last time I’d stopped here, on my K1300S Therese, one of the scopes was stationed on its railway less than a quarter mile from the historical marker, and the dish had even rotated while I stood there.
I returned to Canyon and shifted north a few blocks to pick up US-60 westbound, the route I’d follow for most of the day.
Dead straight, angling southwest through the panhandle, the divided 4-lane was much less crowded and considerably faster than the interstate would have been; the locals obviously had a very clear and specific idea of what the speed limit should be and in the interest of safety I complied with the community standard.
Parallel to the highway ran a nearly continuous stream of freight trains in both directions.
I’d observed the previous day that truck traffic on I-40 was lighter than I’d expected. Much lighter. In particular there had been relatively few trailers bearing the J. B. Hunt logo, and the few I saw all featured the subscript “Intermodal”.
Now I know why all those J. B. Hunt trailers, once so ubiquitous on the interstate, were all but absent: they’re double-stacked by the hundreds on rail cars.
Shortly after entering New Mexico I passed the only Thai restaurant I saw on the entire trip. It was closed but as I passed I saw the scrolling marquee announcing it would open at 11:00 – just ten minutes in the future. I considered stopping and waiting; the morning’s egg muffin hadn’t been all that big. But I still had hundreds of miles ahead of me and wanted to keep rolling.
West of town, where US-60 had become a two-lane, I rolled up to the very end of an enormous line waiting for oncoming traffic to pass through a single-lane construction zone. The head of the line must have been stopped there for quite a while, but I arrived just in time for my lane to start moving again.
Nice that I wasn’t forced to sit and wait even a single minute; not so nice that miles of bumper to bumper traffic lay ahead of me and there didn’t seem much chance it would ever reach the speed limit – on one broad curve I could just make out that the head of the line was a decades-old pickup hauling a trailer encumbered with a very large classic tractor.
To a degree of delight exceeded only by my surprise, the vehicle immediately ahead of me was a new Nissan Titan driven by someone inclined to overtake as much traffic as possible at every reasonable opportunity. Such opportunities were remarkably common as the slow parade accordioned, and every opening the Titan driver thought reasonable was plenty big enough to fit us both. Together we leapfrogged well over a hundred cars in what was very nearly a single continuous maneuver. As we approached Fort Sumner I was third in line behind the tractor hauler, at which point a chance to pass it opened up which I could exploit but the Titan driver declined.
Driving through Fort Sumner I was amazed nobody pulled out in front of me, and as I passed the city limits there was nothing but open road ahead; for more than a hundred miles after that I had the road entirely to myself.
There wasn’t even anyone behind me; all those cars I’d passed had apparently headed north to Santa Rosa or south toward Roswell. There was very little oncoming traffic.
There was still plenty of traffic on the railway, though it was no longer precisely parallel with the road; often trains seen from many miles away were the only other manmade artifacts on a broad plain where visibility was unlimited. At intervals the tracks would swing close to US-60, then swoop back out into the countryside following some other presumably more favorable contour.
Eventually, predictably, other manmade objects appeared in the form of a wind farm.
A manmade object I should have investigated more closely was an ancient adobe structure quite incongruous in that ultramodern forest of gargantuan towers. I’d really begun to regret having passed up that Thai lunch in Clovis; I hadn’t seen a restaurant in Fort Sumner that looked open and had seen nothing even resembling an extant eatery since, and I’d been thinking about taking a break and whipping up some oatmeal with my Jetboil. That would need shelter, given the stiff wind that logically was blowing across this stretch of country. Fortunately for my riding comfort it was more or less a tailwind but regardless of direction, igniting the Jetboil and keeping it lit even for the short time needed to heat a cup of water would have probably been impossible without the kind of windbreak those adobe walls would have provided. It would have been a nice stop, and a memorable experience.
But I blew past it before making a decision, and rode on hoping to find another such, but never did. I eventually landed in Mountainair where I discovered a single open restaurant called The Mustang Diner.
The place was full of locals, not a single seat available, and nobody looked like they’d be leaving soon. The waitstaff ignored me completely and after a couple minutes of standing near the doorway I just turned and walked out.
My gnawing hunger remained unsated after a fruitless search for another eatery on the way out of town. This resulted in a less-than-gruntled mental attitude that in turn caused me to overlook refueling.
My neglect of this task dawned on me a bit too late. After enjoying a few curves winding between low ridges I found myself on a stretch of perfectly straight, smooth, and seamless new blacktop leading down into the valley of the Rio Grande. It seemed not unlikely there’d be gas when I reached I-25, but that hope proved vain. I headed south toward Socorro, keeping my speed uncharacteristically low and my head tucked down behind the windshield to conserve gas – I was really pushing the bike’s range. Fortunately, I made it to a station with fumes to spare. I then successfully sought out lunch, yet again finding myself the sole customer in a Mexican restaurant. It was called the Desert Diamond, and I initially mistook it for a jewelry shop.
US-60 continued west from Socorro. I’d ridden this stretch three times before, but never in this direction, so it was sort of like a new line on my map.
Coming into Magdalena I experienced the only time on the entire trip that a cop gave me a second glance; sitting in the shade of a tree on the outskirts he lit up for a second, but it was just a courtesy reminder to slow down in town.
When I got to the Very Large Array, I was disappointed to find all the radio telescopes clustered together at the center, quite distant out on the Plains of San Agustín. The last time I’d stopped here, on my K1300S Therese, one of the scopes was stationed on its railway less than a quarter mile from the historical marker, and the dish had even rotated while I stood there.
Back in the saddle for the last leg, I finally turned off US-60 at Datil and followed the pleasant windings of NM-12 to US-180 where I hung a right and enjoyed more swooping curves until I reached Alpine.
I had good instructions how to find Alpine Buckboard Cabins, and Google Maps showed the location quite clearly, but for some reason what I saw on my screen didn't translate correctly to my brain. I ended up riding all over the neighborhood, passing 3 different signs pointing to the place at least twice each.
I knew I was close… and so did Larry, who in the still of the afternoon could easily make out the distinctive burble of Nada 3’s flat twin motor repeatedly waxing and waning as I puttered back and forth.
But eventually I found my way to my destination and was reunited with my oldest riding buddy. I was then introduced to the latest addition to his motosport stable, a 2018 Lexus ES-350 whose combination of modern competence and classic luxury made touring mountain roads much less painful for Larry than would have a motorcycle. An MRI scan was in the cards for a shoulder that has been giving him a lot of pain lately – the lingering aftermath of an unplanned rapid dismount from his Suzuki SX-650 Kato, during a track day at what was then known as Firebird Raceway, many years ago.
I had good instructions how to find Alpine Buckboard Cabins, and Google Maps showed the location quite clearly, but for some reason what I saw on my screen didn't translate correctly to my brain. I ended up riding all over the neighborhood, passing 3 different signs pointing to the place at least twice each.
I knew I was close… and so did Larry, who in the still of the afternoon could easily make out the distinctive burble of Nada 3’s flat twin motor repeatedly waxing and waning as I puttered back and forth.
But eventually I found my way to my destination and was reunited with my oldest riding buddy. I was then introduced to the latest addition to his motosport stable, a 2018 Lexus ES-350 whose combination of modern competence and classic luxury made touring mountain roads much less painful for Larry than would have a motorcycle. An MRI scan was in the cards for a shoulder that has been giving him a lot of pain lately – the lingering aftermath of an unplanned rapid dismount from his Suzuki SX-650 Kato, during a track day at what was then known as Firebird Raceway, many years ago.
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