Wandering aimlessly.....

     So, instead of daily updates this time around, I waited till the kind of middle of the trip. It has been a very nice trip so far. I had no plans overall, but I have had a really good time. I did end up in Arkansas. I decided to do a bit of scouting for a trip that The Kel and I are thinking about in a couple years.

     First off, I think I actually might have blown this cute little redneck mind. I was sitting next to my bike, looking at a good old fashioned paper map, and he walks up and asks if I am lost. I respond, no....I know where I am, I just don't know where I am going.......he looks at me and says "well, you are in Dardenelle..." I thank him and continue looking at my map. He then asks me where I think I might be going. I respond "I have no idea, but I have 4 more days to get there". He stares blankly at his feet for about a minute. Then he looks at me and asks if I have been to hot springs yet. I answer that I have a hotel room there. He says "Well, Hot Springs is right down that highway about 80 miles or so" and walks quietly to his truck and drives away. I really wanted to laugh, but then it dawned on me that there are so few people in the world that are just so inherently nice that they feel bad if they can't be helpful and I could possibly have just ruined his day.

     I have also managed to put my finger on the difference between the R1150 and the R90. While I was going up Mt Magazine today, with all of those really tight and fast curves, I noticed that there is a small delay between steering input and steering action. I really didn't notice it exactly before, but I had been on the R90 for a couple weeks, and then jumped on the 1150 and took off. It is really only noticable in real tight twisties but it was odd. Day one was a straight run up to Denton to see a friend of mine from college. She just got her MC license, and had her first wreck. A bruised knee and a broken finger later, she is now looking for her own motorcycle. This is just more proof that motorcyclists are either stubborn as hell, or downright dumb. Having taken that slide a couple times, I feel like I qualify for the latter. Later on that evening, I went to spend the night with other friends from college.



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Day two was a direct run up into Oklahoma. My original intent was to see how far north I could get before I lost interest, it turned into playing in the Ouachita Mountains. On the way out of Dallas, I stopped and visited my nieces. I thought they were going to explode when they saw me outside their house. It was a total surprise visit. After that, I rolled directly up US75 into Oklahoma. I made it into a little town called Mcalester around 5:30. I really did not plan to stay the night there, but the nearest hotel rich cities were two or more hours away, and it was saturday night. The last thing I wanted to do was get caught without a place to sleep in this area. All of the hotel parking lots I passed were filled with motorcycles, so I figured it would only get worse as I went on.



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Day three was a beating. watching the weather in Mcalester, I saw the great yellow and red "amoeba of doom" marching slowly across Oklahoma toward me. My plan was to get up at 5:30 and roll out at first light. Hopefully miss the storm. I left at 6:15 and the storm was visible in the west. I picked a fairly direct route, and very fun, to get to hot springs through Talihena, OK. I managed to stay almost exactly 25 miles ahead of the storm the whole way. If it wasn't for one wrong turn, I would have beat it by 50 miles. On the bright side I found a great dirt road that The Kel and I need to go back and visit. Ark 63a, no idea where it goes, but I bet we can find out..... Once I got through Mena, AR and over the Ouachita mountains, I was clear of the storm. It hit the mountains and turned north. I made it into Hot Springs much earlier than I had intended, and pretty exhausted. Checked into the hotel, scheduled a spa visit, and surfed.



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Day four has been great. Started the day with an 85 minute massage, and then rode up to Mount Magazine. I wanted to see what the area looked like because we are thinking about taking the Merry Band of Idiots up there for a trip at some point. Ark 7 is as much fun as I remember. Ark 309.....I had to stop halfway up and take a couple pictures. I did not have time to take a solid breath let alone look around. I was very busy with the very tight, very fast, changing elevation curves. I almost poo'd. Starting at Havana, AR at 480 foot elevation and going up to the top at 2300 foot or so was interesting. At the overlook, you are looking down on the town. I could not make out the gas station from there. I want to do it again. Maybe next time on the R90, that would be crazy.



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Ok, fallout time.  Getting up early and headed somewhere new tomorrow.

Dave

Route 66, Day 8....Palo Duro Canyon side trip

We decided to burn a day and go out to Palo Duro Canyon near Amarillo, we also stopped by Cadillac Ranch on the way. We had a lot of fun at the ranch, and of course I had to mark it. We found some spray paint on the ground and I put my "heart with wings" on a Cadillac. Kel marked it too with a KDVG 2010:





The ride down into the canyon was very twisty, but the speed limit was only 30mph. It was also only about 7 miles to the bottom of the canyon, and then 7 miles coming back up. Unfortunately the video camera failed so I don't have any video of the trip down into the canyon. That just means that we will have to go back

We had lunch at the trading post at the bottom of the canyon and then made it back to the hotel by 3:00.

Tonight we had dinner at The Big Texan. If you ware staying in a hotel along I-40, they will send a car out to pick you up.



Here is our route


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Route 66, Day 7....Amarillo by dinnertime.....

We managed to make our way to the National 66 Museum in Elk City, OK. It is a pretty nice little complex. They have some real neat stuff there. I got a few pics, they are in the slide show further down. Overall it was a very relaxing ride today. We pretty much wanted to get to Amarillo so we vould go and explore some in Palo Duro Canyon and then have dinner at the Big Texan. I think today we actually managed to find a higher percentage of original pavement than we have any other day. Except for about 9 miles on the interstate, we were on Route 66. For most of the trip it was the frontage road, but you have to be very alert and switch sides of the highway or you will be forced onto the interstate due to a creek. This will happen if the bridge is on the other side of the highway. Then there are times where the access road will take off into the middle of nowhere and pass through a few towns and then come back to the interstate.

I think the funniest thing I saw was just west of Texola, OK. When you cross the border you end up on the frontage road of I40. It is a 2 lane 2 way road. The neat part about it is that there were yellow wildflowers growing on the side of the road that were high enough that you could not see I 40, but you could hear it. By the time you got to where the flowers were short enough to see over, we were behind the trees again.

Crossing back into Texas also meant Texas bugs. I collected a huge grasshopper in the cooling fins on my motor. It was kind of scary.

Here is the shot of the U Drop Inn in Shamrock, TX:



It was actually a pretty tiring day of riding for only going about 150 or so miles. Route 66 miles are like dog miles. They feel much longer than the odometer says. This is maily due to the fact that you may end up going 70mph, or you may end up going 10mph on a gravel road. You may also circle an intersection a few times trying to figure out how to get there from here. Then realizing that the only way to get to that section of 66 is to take the back exit of a hotel parking lot.

After we got back from dinner last night, we checked on the bikes and my kickstand had sunk half an inch in the parking lot. The nice people at the Outback Steakhouse gave us a couple small cooking tins to put under the stands so we wouldn't sink.





Here is the route we took, hopefully, I will shoot some video from Palo Duro Canyon tomorrow.


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TTFN

Dave

Route 66, Day 4, It has begun......

First day on the Route, we made the state line out of Joplin. Since we took the very old alignment of 66, there was not much of a state line sign, so this is what I got instead:



The little bit of Kansas that we went through actually provided some fairly interesting stuff. We ran across this little place called 4 women on the Route. They are the ones that provided the truck that was the inspiration for 'Mater in the movie Cars. In fact, here is a picture of the truck that is featured in the DVD special features for the movie:




Next we went off toward the Rainbow Bridge. It is the last single span concrete Marsh Arch style bridge left on the route. It is only one lane wide, so only southbound traffic gets to go over it. Here is the shot:




After the bridge it was pretty much time to head for Oklahoma. There was some pretty scenery on the way, when we got to this little town called Commerce, OK there was a bit of a wrong turn. This put us on a very old section of 66 called the Ribbon Road. This was interesting on the motorcycles. The road is pretty much gravel with a strip of 90 year old asphalt down the center. It was like off-roading with the wrong bike. I am sorry I couldn't get pictures of it, but there was no way we were going to stop that long on that road. It was 13 miles of terror at 10 mph. After we made it back to real pavement, it was on to Foyil, OK to take a look at the totem pole. Then on to Catoosa to see the whale. Here is the whale, I will get the totem pole up later:



After Catoosa, it was a matter of going by interstate through Tulsa and then back off at Sapulpa, OK. Then we followed 66 all the way to Pop's 66 and had some dinner. Then we just hauled it to the hotel by interstate. Tomorrow is going to be the first long leg across the plains. This is likely going to be nasty. Hopefully I will post more from Amarillo, but likely I will wait till I get to Tucumcari, NM for a longer post. Here is a quick preview of all of the pictures I got:




And here is our route for today. 270 or so miles....


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Ok, time to fall down and sleep lots.

Have fun,

Dave

Weekend Trip to Scarborough Faire

This was an interesting little trip. It was kind of a spur of the moment attempt, that turned into a pretty normal little road trip. When I say pretty normal, I mean there were a lot of little things that all went kind of funky, but we all made it back alive, and it was fun.

The idea for this trip came from the fact that Diz got herself a new bike, and wanted to try it out on the highway. Here is a pic of the new bike:



This was our first long ride as a full line. 6 bikes. It was definately a challenge keeping the whole thing together. The trip up to Waxahachie went fairly smooth. We formed up in temple and followed I35 all the way up. The only real excitement, other than getting split up by traffic fairly often, was when my right side carb float stuck open. It wasn't that bad on the highway, but when we hit the first stoplight in town, it started dumping gas on my right boot. I had to pull the bowl and clean it out to get it to stop leaking. After that, it was all gravy....and a boot that stunk of gasoline.

Here is a shot of the line in front of Logan's on the trip back:



This was the funniest looking line I have ever seen. We ended up with a Yamaha, a Honda, a Harley, a Kawasaki, and 2 vintage BMWs. It was actually kind of humorous.

Faire was fun, we each got to do pretty much what we set out to do. I got to ride, Slap got his turkey leg, Diz got to try out her new bike, Glenn got a Steak on a Stake, Kel got to see Queen Anne's Lace on opening weekend. Here is a shot of the girls:



Not a great shot, but you get the idea. If you happen to get out there, go see them. They are great.

The trip back was where the real excitement was. It was decided to come back the long way through Stephenville so we could get BBQ at Hard Eights. To do this we were headed out 287 to 67, then have BBQ. Then we would just follow 281 back south to Austin. The only hitch in this plan was that once we got onto 67 headed for Stephenville, we discovered the 40mph crosswind. All it took was a couple of the bridges to convince us that we should turn south and head for Waco. Once we got to Waco, we had lunch at logans road house and sat around for a while just happy to be alive.

As far as the shakedown run on the new setup for the R90 goes, it was pretty good. One stuck float, but that is actually fairly normal right now. I still need to do some work on that thing. I have a few rattles on the tins that I need to sort out, but other than that, it is looking good.

Here is the route we took for this little trip:


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TTFN

Dave

Home again, Home again.....

Today was a very nice day. The weather was pretty chilly, but we had our cold gear. Basically, it was a quick loop through the hill country, and then the long way home. I will post a bit more detail after I get some sleep, here are some pics to distract you till then.

Stonehenge II:



Finally got around to getting a picture of Mike and I next to our bikes:



Here is the nice couple that took the picture for us. Opus and Rebecca. They are on a road trip from Seattle to North Carolina on an R100RS. Yes, two up.




Finally, here is our route:


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TTFN

Dave

An exercise in random stupidity.

Today we ran from the nasty cold front coming in from the north. Originally, the plan was to go up to pops, then a bit of riding on Route 66. The nasty cold front is beating the hell out of OKC, and we are heading southwest. We made it into Stephenville, TX this evening.

Before we left Paris, we had to go and take a look at the Mini Eiffel Tower. It was a tower...of steel tubing.......and it was very Eiffel-ey.

Here is the pic of the bikes in front of the tower.



We also had to stop at the Paris Cemetery to see "Cowboy Boot Jesus". It turns out it was not exactly what I was expecting. If anyone has the urge to go see it, you kind of have to search for it. Enter the Cemetery from evergreen street, follow that gravel road past 3 intersections, and the grave is on the left. It turns out that the statue is actually a very large grave marker with a statue of Jesus carrying a cross. It just so happens that his robe is riding up on one side to show his cowboy boots.

Here is a shot of the statue:



The leg of the trip to Denton was actually not bad. Quite a bit more traffic than we would have liked, but survivable. The leg out to Jacksboro was horrible. The leading edge of the front was coming in, so we had about 25-30 mph cross winds the whole way. Once we made the turn onto 281 and headed south, it was actually kind of nice. The only real excitement was the rock that was thrown up by a truck in front of me. It hit my fairing hard enough to crack it, and then hit my left bicep hard enough to leave a small bruise.

Here is a shot of the crack in the fairing:



Looks like tomorrow, we will make the run to Kerrville, then spend the rest of the trip playing around in the spagetti bowl.

Here is today's route:


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TTFN

Dave

Film from Brenham and Roswell came back finally

I am re-discovering the joys of film photography. With digital, you take the picture, look at it, post it, and forget it. With film, you take it, get home, get it processed, get around to scanning it, sort through the shots and then post it. With that delay, you get to enjoy the rest of your trip. When you get back you end up waiting up to a week to get the film processed. It gives the trip a bit of time to sink in, and then when you get the pictures back they are viewed in the context of the trip, not just a single day. The shots from Brenham were taken with a Ciroflex TLR. It is an old box camera from the mid 40's. It shoots 6cm x 6cm square negatives. The shots in Roswell were taken with a Speedgraphic 2x3 view camera with a 6cm x 7cm roll film back attached.

Here are the shots from the Brenham shakedown trip with Vern and Glen:




Here are some shots from downtown Roswell (the roll of the wind farms did not come out):




Here are the shots from our first day trip to Stonehenge II near Fredricksburg:



TTFN

Dave