Continued stories from the cross-country ride.
I've moved the hunt for the new bike to September so that the whole story is on one page.

 
August 

Thumbnail Essays from the Cross-Country Trip

 

Planning vs. Being in the Moment

I wanted to plan this trip, not just a general plan like, "we'll take a southern route to go east, and a northern route to head west." I wanted to determine which roads we would take, which city or town we would stay in each night. It would be okay if we didn't stick to the plan due to circumstances, I just like having a plan. This is not how Peter travels for pleasure.

Acknowledging Peter's superior sense of direction and familiarity with the southern routes and the routes in the north east, I acquiesced to the plan of no plan. We started the trip with a general idea of where we wanted to go and about how much ground we wanted to cover on a daily basis. I had no idea of how many variables we were going to deal with. Weather. Road conditions. Traffic. The nature of the road. Our bodies' tolerance for 10-12 hours a day of riding.

Let's start with weather: triple-digit dry heat in the southwest, 90-degree heat plus 90% humidity which evolved into rain storms in the south. In the northern Midwest we raced the wind across the prairie. A mischievous playfellow, the wind would cross our path in randomly occurring 50-mph gusts. In Montana, when the hail and wind from the rain storm had soaked through my jacket, we stopped to put on our rain suits. Of course, within ten minutes, we rode out of the storm into sunshine. In Nevada we hit the calamitous rain storm, complete with hail, thunder and lightning.

Road conditions. Here in the west, we can maintain our roads nearly year 'round. In the Midwest and in the east, there is a much shorter window when road can be worked on, so our planned progress would collide with the reality of road work. And then there were the vehicle collisions, sometimes with each other, sometimes with road embankments. People drive too fast, get distracted, and whammo. Runnamucka drivers fall asleep at the wheel and drive off the road. In Tennessee, we were delayed over an hour. The traffic was stopped for miles. There's not much you can do except wait for the med-evac helicopter and the tow trucks to show up and clear the wreckage. Peter and I would have been in real trouble without the bottles of water in my tank bag. It is one thing to sit in your car, maybe run the air conditioning for a little while. It's something else to be standing on unshaded tarmac which is reflecting heat on your leather-covered body.

Then there's construction. A minor annoyance is traffic funneled into one lane - remember, California is the only state where the legality of lane-sharing - lane splitting - filtering is ambiguous enough that it is widely tolerated. Lane sharing in Arkansas was out of the question. For me, a major annoyance is when the road surface has been cleared down to the dirt and gravel road bed. Riding on an uncertain surface isn't the only challenge; the vehicle in front of you will kick back small stones and dirt clods. Visor down.

Traffic. I'm skipping over traffic, which you can only do with words, not with rubber-tired vehicles.

The nature of the road. Single-lane twisties are wonderful for the pure pleasure of riding. Country back roads take you through towns and open space you are never going to see from an interstate. We only had three weeks, not three months, so we had to pay homage to the mileage-covering interstates.

Body conditioning. We were in good physical condition before we left. We stayed at or just above the posted speed limit for most of the trip - neither of us wanted an additional souvenir. As a result, to cover the distance agreed upon for the day, we often rode ten to twelve hours a day. There are touring bikes and there are sport/touring bikes. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise - if you ride long distances on the sportier of the sport/touring bikes, you are going to experience cramps in your legs. Your shoulders are going to ache. Both Peter and I did stretches and strengthening exercises at the end of each day, and in the morning. I'm glad we did this trip now. If I want to do this trip in twenty five years, I'll need one of those Gold Wing trike conversions.

* * *

I thought I would go nuts from the spontaneity of this trip. Instead, I've realized how much time and energy I waste getting wrapped around my own axle over "the schedule". And, I've accepted that Peter really does know when there's enough gas to get from here to there, no matter what my gas gauge says. So I will try to be more relaxed about this sort of thing in the future. My new mantra is "Relax, dammit!"

 

Wearing full riding gear in hot weather

"Aren't you hot?", asked a friendly Harley-Davidson dude wearing a screaming eagle T-shirt, clean jeans, and no helmet. "It's blazing hot. You don't need a helmet here in Arizona. And those leather pants. Man, how can you stand it?"

Peter and I heard this question a lot from all sorts of people, all over the country. What can I say? We've made a choice to wear full-face helmets, riding jackets, leather pants, boots and gloves. Would we be more comfortable without the gear? Well, yes, it would be nice to have the wind in my hair and feel the sun on my arms.

And no. I've seen road rash from bicycle accidents. If I hadn't been wearing full gear when I hit the cricket-slime, I wouldn't have walked away. For me, wearing full riding gear is a safety-oriented choice, it's not a political statement. Yes, I'm hot. I could buy one of those vests that you soak in water and let the water evaporate while you ride. Instead I soaked my bra-top with water at every gas station. Wearing an airflow jacket on top, I was still hot, but able to concentrate on riding and enjoy the scenery in triple-digit heat.

On the topic of helmets, I do support a rider's right to choose. However, being a tax-payer, I also think that if a rider goes down and sustains a head injury, by not wearing a helmet the rider has tacitly provided a do-not-resuscitate order to the paramedics. Do you want your tax dollars being spent on someone who made a conscious decision not to protect their head from impact? I'm just asking. I'll probably get some unkind messages for stating my point of view. Oh, and yes, I do have a signed DNR with my motorcycle registration and proof of insurance.

If the sky were glowing red at noon, you would know something was wrong. If you cut into an apple and the seeds cry out, you might wonder what was wrong. If you begin brushing your teeth and your gums sense that the toothpaste is warm, your mouth will want to spit right away. Hot toothpaste is wrong, simply wrong, but that's what happens when you ride eight hours in triple digit heat.

 

The Connectedness of Riding as a Pair

We had to learn to ride as a pair. It took a few days but by the end of the ride it was if we were connected by a rubber band. Peter learned that I'm affected more by the turbulence of riding behind a truck than he is, so he started his lane changes earlier that he would have had he been alone. I learned that to make it easy for him to verify that I was "right behind him", I needed to be in one of three positions: in his mirror and to his right (most frequent position), in his mirror and to his left (blocking for him so he could move to the left lane), or directly in back of him (as far away from the bow wave of the truck we were passing as I could get).

Once we got the hang of it, we often changed lanes at the same time. Like a lot of things, done well it looks simple but making it look simple takes a lot of paying attention and throttle control. I rode in the right-side position, with Peter on my left. When we moved to the left lane to pass, I moved all the way over to the left side of the left lane to get out of the truck's turbulence but also to get into the truck's mirror, if possible. When moving back to the right lane after passing a truck, Peter traveled the width of one lane, I traveled the width of two lanes. I subtracted style points if I sailed past him on the right (not shedding speed soon enough). In general I tried to stay one second behind him, offset by about six to eight feet.

Hand signals and turn signals were our sole communication en route. Sure it would be nice to have those two-way radios built into our helmets, but part of the joy of this ride for me was to be alone on my bike but with Peter on the adventure. More than a few times, I forgot to cancel my right turn signal on after moving back to the right lane. Peter would see the neglected signal, and think I wanted to exit the freeway. He would give me the laughing clamshell movement with his left hand held over his head. If I didn't click off the turn signal immediately, he would assume that I needed to exit. When I did want to exit, I had to turn it on early enough for him to perceive it. To confirm that we were going to exit real soon he would echo my turn signal with his own.

On occasion the lactic acid in my legs would build to a point beyond my tolerance, and I would have to stand on my pegs. There is something odd about standing on your pegs at freeway speeds on the freeway. I had to wonder if the person in back of me thought I was being rude. I was careful to stand up straight, and not waggle my butt from side to side. If that didn't relieve the burning sensation, I'd pull up next to Peter and slap my thigh and he would know that I didn't need a pit stop, I just needed to just stop and stretch my legs.

Being connected on the bikes for ten to twelve hours, and yet being fundamentally hermits, we needed time to be alone on the trip as well. This was mercifully worked out by chance. Once at the motel, Peter's habit was to shuck his riding gear, flop onto the bed and watch the weather channel, then catch up on sports news. I headed straight for the bathroom, washed out my bicycle shorts, top, and socks in the sink, then stood in the shower until I felt human again. When I would emerge, Peter would be finishing his exercises. We would swap places - I would do my exercises while he was in the shower. This routine gave us a minimum of an hour of "alone" time each day - an important part of the success of the trip.

 
Pity the Vegetarian in a Roadside Diner

Many years ago, Peter and I were in Carlsbad, New Mexico, looking for bats in the caverns. After a simple but remarkably tasty dinner, Peter was craving an espresso. We asked around at several restaurants, but no one had espresso. The clerk at our hotel said, "Wait, I've heard of espresso, you get it at a health foods store, right?"

On this trip, we did not expect to find tofu in the road houses, but we were going to avoid fried and processed foods. Neither of us eats meat or drinks carbonated beverages. Beer is an exception, what do you think we are, nuts or something? How much more difficult could we make it for ourselves?

Breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Due to the heat, it was often the case that we only stopped at lunchtime to rest and drink fluids. Often we were too tired to eat a full meal at dinner. So our first meal of the day became a monotony of scrambled eggs (no cheese), toast or hash browns (dry) and fresh fruit. When you say "dry" when ordering hash brown potatoes, the cook doesn't add extra oil to the grated potato. In some states, when at Denny's, it is illegal to order breakfast "with no meat". It has been three weeks since we returned from the trip and I still can't eat eggs.

Lunch and dinner. So, there's tuna fish. It's possible but hard to ruin canned tuna. And there's cottage cheese. Two good sources of protein. Cottage cheese with canned fruit was one of my mainstay lunches. Baked potatoes are a nice source of carbohydrates as long as you don't go crazy with the butter and sour cream. Fresh green vegetables are hard to get. At one restaurant I discovered "beans and greens", and then discovered that they had been cooked with pork. Not one to waste food, I finished them. Delicious. Absolutely delicious. After several days of salads with iceberg lettuce, I was in dire need of protein and real dark green vegetables. I caved and ordered the "beans and greens" side dish again.

There's also the ubiquitous tostada, which has beans and cheese. Want some cheap entertainment? Try ordering that with no meat and watch the face of the waitress. More than once, we just accepted the situation and ordered chicken something or other. In New York Peter ordered a "cheese pie" for himself. In California-speak, we would call that "a pizza with nothing on it", just the tomato base and cheese. It arrived at our table with the classic orange grease sheen, which disgusted me but delighted Peter. Foods from our childhood are hard to give up. Greek salads are the best because the spinach, olives, anchovies, tomatoes and feta provide a nice balanced meal.

The best meal we had was in an upscale Malaysian restaurant in Charlotte, NC with my sister and her significant other. Second best was probably that Greek diner in Newburg, New York. The biggest surprise was the discovery of the prepackaged spinach salads at Wendy's. We did find tofu in a Chinese restaurant in Memphis, but it wasn't really a road house, too far off the main highway - there was confusion about where the inn we were looking for really was. While I was pretty grumbly about having to go back and forth across a section of the Memphis maze, it was alright in the end because the Chinese restaurant had vegetarian selections.

We would have been in real trouble if we had not brought along about two dozen protein bars. There were times when we were delayed on the road for over an hour, right about the time we needed to eat. There were times when we arrived at the hotel, and were too tired to eat. And there's always the mid-afternoon bonk time. I intend for you to take American English meaning of bonk which means "to run out of energy; not the UK English meaning which means "to engage in sexual intercourse". The things you learn writing a blog.

I can't say that the protien bars taste good, they are pretty much all slabs. You have to read the ingredients to make sure that there are no partially hydrogenated oils, and some bars are optimized for protein and others for carbohydrates. In either case, please take note: Do not eat these slabs without drinking a lot of water. Serious impairment will result without sufficient liquid in your belly to help the digestion process.

 

Mormon Crickets - What I Didn't Learn in Grade-School Geography

The first Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. I can't find substantiation for this anecdote, but I've heard that as they looked down upon the valley, the earth was black, and people were happily anticipating starting their farms with that rich soil. But the soil wasn't black, what was black was the swarms of insects.

Nearly 4,400 emigrants had arrived by 1848. That's a lot of people who were dependent on first harvests from an untried land with an unknown growing season. As spring of 1848 arrived, the pioneer farmers were reporting with pride that their crops appeared to be doing very well. But unexpected April and May frosts leveled some of the crops, and late May brought another devastation—hordes of katydids that were munching their way through the crops.

These insects were later dubbed "Mormon crickets," though they are not true crickets. Both the Mormon cricket and the docile black field crickets I find in my back yard are order orthoptera which breaks down into two principle groups: crickets, and grasshoppers & locusts. The black field cricket is a cricket. The Mormon cricket is a shield-backed katydid (family Tettigoniidae, subfamily Decticinae), scientific name: Anabrus simplex Haldeman.

Back to 1848. "For more than a month, the crickets devastated the fields, devouring the new crops. Farmers unsuccessfully battled the crickets with a variety of methods. By early June, relief arrived in the form of the seagull. For the next three weeks, gulls appeared daily. They fed on the crickets, drank water, and then regurgitated the hard shells before eating more crickets, thus saving some of the remaining harvest. In honor of this assistance, the indigenous California gull became the Utah state bird, and in 1913 the Seagull monument on Temple Square was dedicated to commemorate the birds' role in the 1848 crisis."
Richard W. Sadler, "Seagulls, Miracle of," in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 3:1287–88..

Mormon crickets continue to be a pest to farmer and motorcyclists. Like the mosquito, they seem to make no positive contribution to the balance of life on this planet.

 
 

Hearing? What?

After several days of riding, Peter and I found that even with ear plugs, our ears were ringing at the end of the day. Peter was wearing those little cream-colored foam Tootsie roll ear plugs that you can buy over the counter. I wore custom-molded ear plugs, fitted at the last motorcycle show. For normal commute to work and ride home riding, the foam ear plugs are acceptable. For long rides, Peter pronounced them sub-optimal. If you aren't in software world, the translation is, "they suck". Both foam and custom-molded earplugs help, but after ten hours on the road, they don't guarantee that you'll be able to process any verbal input until a few hours without road noise have passed.

Desiccated Eyeballs

I got each of us a pair of Panoptix goggles. Triple-digit heat and high winds laugh at full-face helmets. That visor doesn't protect your eyeballs very much, even if you are wearing normal sun glasses. Halfway through the ride, Peter's eyes were bloodshot. He had tried the goggles at the beginning of the ride, but they didn't fit well with his helmet. When we hit high winds in Montana, he tried the goggles again in desperation, found a way to work with them, and was loving them for the rest of the trip.

I wear gas-permeable (hard) contact lenses. By the end of the first day of the trip (Barstow, CA), I realized I wasn't going to be able to wear contacts, even with the goggles, and switched to glasses. Had I ordered prescription lenses for the goggles (the vendor I talked to makes this easy), I would have been okay.

We used eye drops often, usually when we stopped for gas. They help a lot, but next trip, we'll take the time to verify that the helmet and the goggles work together, and, I'll cough up the money for prescription lenses. If you ride at night, you may want clear lenses in the goggles, and deal with sunlight with a dark visor.

Since we're talking about the ears and eyes, we might as well talk about the nose. In dry heat, especially at altitude, your nose is going to bleed. Not gush blood, but when you blow your nose, don't freak out when you see blood in the mucus. It clears up as you acclimate, or, return to lower altitudes.

 

Fresh Hay, Pine, and the Air Just Before a Rain Storm

One the most sensual aspects of riding a motorcycle is that you can smell where you are. When I ride to work in the morning I smell roasting coffee, freshly baked bread. When I ride home at night on 101, I can smell the chocolate enrobing of Its-It ice cream cookies.

There are some great smells, like the fresh hay from the small farms in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana when we were on Routes 80, 76, 224, and 24. Or the pine trees as we were coming into Flagstaff, AZ. There were so many rain storms, I can't name all the place we encountered them, but there's an unmistakable metallic quality to the air just before the rain starts coming down. On many days we got up at 3:30 in the morning to be on the road a first light. Early morning itself has a distinct smell no matter where you are.

On Highway 50 the aromas rising from the dry earth brought to mind porcini mushrooms, shaved chocolate, lemon sage, and occasional whiffs of burnt toast. A smell I will recognize in the future is the distinctive fetid odor of the Mormon crickets.

We stayed in many motor inns on this trip including Super 8, Days Inn, and Holiday Inn Express. We tried to get a non-smoking room on the first floor so that we could park the bikes right outside the door. At some Days Inns, the first floor is designated for pets. I have three feline companions, and I understand completely about wanting to travel with a fur-covered, four-footed family member. I don't understand why people don't take better care of their pets' needs.

If you are going to stay at a pet-friendly inn, go check out the room first. If it doesn't meet your sniff test, go back and get another room. Peter and I now know what it is like to sleep in a cat litter box. Why didn't we go get another room? Peter didn't think it was "that bad". I was too tired to protest, and I kept hoping that I would stop noticing the industrial-grade urine-masking scent. I didn't. It was easy to leave that inn early in the morning.

 
Beware of Automatic-flush Toilets

The interstate highways have installed automatic flush toilets that are just as aggressive as testosterone-poisoned lane-splitting hooligans here in California. If potty-related stuff offends you, skip to the next section, 'cause I'm just gonna tell it like I felt it.

So when you sit down and do your business, you expect that you'll be given a moment to use the toilet paper for the purpose it was intended. But no, that sensor sees your back move and Ka-whoosh! Now your bottom is wet. You realize that you turned too far and the sensor registered the change, and thought you were done. So this time, you adjust your body just a bit, wipe, drop the paper into the bowl and stand up.

But there's still a problem. You wouldn't want to use a bowl that had paper left in it from the previous person, would you? You feel morally obligated to flush that toilet once more, but how? You cup both hands and hold them in front of the sensor. Nothing. You move back and forth - what the heck do you have to do make this thing flush? Then you figure it out, you have block the sensor, then provide it with a clear line of sight to the door of the stall. So you stand aside, hands at your sides. The toilet obligingly flushes, taking the offending wad of paper down the pipes, and leaving a light mist of water on the seat.

In hot weather, that mist will evaporate in time. But if there's a line, as there often is where women's public toilets are concerned, the next person may be using the stall before the seat is dry. You're already feeling bad about the "eew" feeling she is going to have when she sits down and wonders if that moisture was water or something less desirable. Sure, some toilets have those sanitary paper seat covers but often times the dispenser is empty.

At first, I tried to wipe the seat dry with a few squares of toilet paper but to my dismay, Ka-whoosh! I gave up. If the mist on the seat isn't yellow, and there's toilet paper at hand, just sit down and be grateful that you're not in a porta-potty. That's all I have to say about that.

 

Last Resort Advice for Numb Nuts Who Get Caught in Lightning Storms

The National Weather Association provides this advice for thunder and lightning storms:

Avoid unprotected open structures like picnic pavilions, rain shelters, and bus stops. Open-frame vehicles (convertibles, motorcycles) do not count as lightning shelters. Do not go under trees to keep dry during thunderstorms.

If you are outside and far away from a safer place, proceed to the safest location. If lightning is imminent, it will often give a few seconds of warning: hair standing up, tingling skin, light metal objects vibrating, seeing corona discharge, and/or hearing a crackling or "kee-kee" sound. If you are in a group, spread out so there are several body lengths between each person. [Just as you don't want to be under trees, you don't want to be standing near that two-wheeled lightning rod, either.] Once spread out, use the lightning crouch - put your feet together, squat down, tuck your head, and cover your ears.

Peter, who runs, rain or shine, and has been caught in more than a few thundershowers over the years, tells me that if lightning is really close to you, your survival instinct will force you in that crouch, it won't be something you have to remember to do.

 

Sightseeing? No. It's about the Ride. Just the Ride

By now you've figured out that Peter and I both have a meditation practice, so I'm not going to carry on about "the ride". It is one thing to want to visit National Parks like Yellowstone, or Monument Valley, and give them the time they need to be explored and enjoyed. If we had wanted to truly appreciate either of those parks, we would have spent a few days in each one. Some day we will.

Deciding to ride across the continent and back was another thing entirely. Had Peter and I not had family on the east coast, we simply would have picked points of interest along the latitude of our southern route, and we might have gone into Maine before turning westward.

My fast-riding friends tease me about being a slow rider. I'm never going to be a fast rider. I marvel at my racing friends who have spacial-temporal reasoning abilities that enable them to assess risk and respond competently under race conditions. Race conditions are never going to be a challenge that I take on. I just like being on the bike. I like the smells around me, the sensation of the vibration of life transmitting between the engine and the road through the frames of my bike and body, the bass line and percussion of the engine, and the multi-octave range of the wind, the feeling of exposure and vulnerability to the elements, and the access to the power-to-weight ratio that gives the bike acceleration potential that I rarely take full advantage of. Most of the time I'm going somewhere and I need to be there by a certain time. The extended riding periods on this trip allowed me the freedom to simply enjoy the ride.

 

Sometimes You Gotta Just Lie Down and Sleep

Peter's turn signal starting flashing as soon as he passed the first rest stop sign in Flagstaff, AZ. Our habit was to get up early, ride a hundred miles or so, have breakfast, ride until the first stop, use the facilities and switch from the clear visors to the dark visors. We hadn't been on the road that long so I figured the three cups of coffee he drank were talking to him. The rest stop had shaded individual picnic nooks.

Peter said that he needed to shut his eyes for a few minutes. After we made our pit stops, he put his jacket on the ground, lay down, and fell asleep before I could finish my question about whether or not he was alright. "Okay, it's nap time." I said to the tall evergreens that surrounded us. I put my jacket down next to his feet, and rested my head on my jacket. We slept for about an hour like sardines in a can. When we awoke I felt so much better. I had not been aware that I had been feeling bad. I realize now that we had ascended several thousand feet in a short period of time and were feeling the effects of Flagstaff's 7,000 foot altitude. We drank one of the taurine-laced energy drinks and were on our way. This emergency nap occurred at the beginning of the trip.

On the westward leg, just out of New York, I became aware of a cloying, sickeningly sweet odor which I assumed was coming from one of the trucks in front of me. I figured that we would just pass the trucks eventually and the problem would go away. But the trucks were moving at a darn good clip, and we were on our best behavior, so I inhaled a good fifteen minutes of that god-awful smell. I began to get sleepy. To keep myself awake I started reciting Jabberwocky and other poems and chants that have become integrated into my memory, but they did no good, I was starting to fade in and out at 75 mph on an Interstate highway. I pulled up next to Peter and gave him an emphatic version of the pit stop hand signal. He cocked his head, "Are you sure?" I responded with staccato tank slaps, "Yes, I'm damn sure."

We exited at the next opportunity and pulled into a gas station which fortunately had a store and a grass-landscaped rest area. I parked my bike next to the rest area, tore my helmet and jacket off, and wilted to the ground while mumbling that I was nauseous from the fumes, that I needed to be sleep right now, this very instant. I was out for a twenty-minute count. Still in bad shape when I awoke, I washed a couple of aspirin down my throat with the cold grapefruit juice drink that Peter had waiting for me. We waited another twenty minutes for the nausea to completely subside before getting back on the road. I have no idea what the fume was. Peter admitted that the solvent smell bothered him, but he wasn't afflicted by it.

These experiences remind me of the famous teaching parable of Joshu and the bowl:

A new monk came up to the master Joshu. "I have just entered the brotherhood and I am anxious to learn the first principle of Zen," he said. "Will you please teach it to me?"

Joshu said, "Have you eaten your supper?"

The novice answered, "I have eaten."

Joshu said, "Now wash your bowl."

 
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