Day 9
May 23rd 2004
This was one of "Those" days. I woke up after my restful sleep and turned on the TV. They were talking about part of the roof at the Charles De Gaulles airport in Paris falling and killing some people. They said that this happened fairly early in the morning and that would be about the time that Hélène would be there getting picked up by her sister. I went on the internet to see if she had sent me an e-mail to say that everything was fine, but nothing. I wrote her an e-mail asking her to give me some news as soon as she could. The rational part of my brain was thinking "Come on, what are the odds" but the naggy part of my brain was thinking otherwise.
While I was on the internet, I decided to check out hotel prices in Las Vegas, for my resting day. I wanted to rest in style and checked out Hotels.com to see who had good deals. Usually the weekend prices are expensive but rooms during the week are really cheap. There must be some big Pow Wow over there now, because most hotels were either all booked up or very expensive. The Luxor (where we stayed last year) was going for $ 240 US per night. for Sunday and Monday. On Thursday, the price would be $ 75. No good. I didn't want to go to Las Vegas and stay in some cruddy hotel room for my day of rest. Major change of plans to come...
I looked at the other possibilities, and my main concern would be where do I go today, and then from there I could rethink the "big picture". Nothing enticing sprang to mind, so I settled for Ridgecrest, the nearest city to Death Valley National Park. I would do the Death Valley thing tomorrow instead of resting. This gave me a very small day on the road today, only 700 km or so. This would give me plenty of time to rethink my strategy for the rest of the trip.
On the road I go ! (about 45 minutes later than expected)
It was one of those "Hot days from the Get-Go" kind of days. When I was putting gas in the bike, I was already sweating under the desert sun. The mountains around here were rockier, with large boulders everywhere. The leaning you see in the picture is not because of the curve in the road, it's the side-wind.
Nice blue sky (for now). Things would change pretty soon.
I got off the interstate as soon as I could and chose a little route that follows along the Mexican border. It was fairly technical with elevation changes and some decreasing-radius curves thrown in once in a while to make sure you're staying alert. Unfortunately, the sky turned quite cloudy beyond the first mountain range and the thermometer dipped to 10 degrees or so
I started out with the heated handgrips, but after half an hour of this realized that it wasn't enough. I had to go and dig out the electric vest and plug it in. Much better. Impressive temperature changes at altitude.
The roads were nice, but because I was near some large cities (San Diego and Los Angeles) and it was Sunday morning, this meant that about 1000 sportbike riders had come to enjoy these roads as well. I gathered that this is the road people around here come out to have fun on. The road was pretty congested with bicycle, motorcycle and car traffic. I still had the Charles de Gaulles airport thing in my mind too, so I wasn't really in the right frame of mind to enjoy the roads.
The other thing is that today everything I touched turned to crap. I sprayed gas all over myself twice while trying to refuel with those stupid pumps that they have here with the splash guard that you have to manually hold back if you're fueling a bike. My minidisc player was behaving funny, cutting out in the middle of songs sometimes for as long as 5 minutes before resuming. At first I thought it was the battery, but I changed it and it kept doing it. This lasted all morning, then in the afternoon everything was okay again. Let's see what else went wrong... Oh yeah, I forgot to reset my trip meter after fueling, so I wasn't sure how far I was getting on this tank. When I stopped at a rest area to change the battery in my minidisc, there was one suspicious-looking fellow just staring at me and grinning. After a while, a Jehova's Witness comes up to me wanting me to take some literature on how we should be making the world a better place.
I finally made it to San Ysidro around 11:00 AM for the second checkpoint. This was a confusing place and I just wanted to get out of there. There seems to be crime waiting to happen everywhere here. security guards at the door of fast-food outlets etc...
As you can probably tell, I'm not a big-city kind of guy. I didn't do this tour to visit some congested places, rather to see the stuff in between. It's too bad that the actual corners are in densely populated areas, especially Madawaska Maine I guess... :-)
Anyways, got the picture, got the gas receipt (pay at the pump doesn't work for me in California, after you put your card in, it asks you for your 5-digit zip code), got the "mystery" phone number, signed my form and put it in the mail. Then got the heck out of there. Garmin worked very well in getting me where I wanted to go today. We didn't have any differences in opinion like we've had in days past.
More congestion all along the way to Ridgecrest. Even that highway 395 just before Ridgecrest was full of trucks in both directions. Scenery was nice though
I went a little ways off the road for this one. From the road I could see a spot that I thought would make a nice picture. I didn't realize that the desert sand here is a LOT less compacted than what I'd seen previously. The front wheel was plowing in and the back wheel was spinning. It took all I had to keep momentum going until I reached a firmer surface. I almost dumped it as well. That would have been a nice finishing touch for the day... I decided not to try to reach the area that looked cool and took this picture instead. It'll have to do.
Got to the hotel fairly early, around 3:00 PM I think. First priority was to check my email, and sure enough, everything was fine. She had not even realized that part of the roof had just crashed down. She said it was mayhem in there, but not worse than usual. With that relief came time to look at the big picture...
With Las Vegas out of the future, I'm now 2 days ahead of schedule. I had been thinking of another side loop to do with this trip but didn't have the time for it, but now it seems possible. I'm thinking Alaska. If I trim a few things here and there, I should have time to do it comfortably. There are things I certainly don't want to trim off. I really want to do something called "Beartooth Pass" near Yellowstone NP in Wyoming and I also want to see Devil's Tower, you know, the one in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Geez, I must be a UFO fan after all...
I spent probably 2 hours playing with Streets & Trips and I think it's do-able. If all goes according to plan, I'll still have a 'flex-day' wherever I need one. I will need a new rear tire, but it can easily wait for Vancouver, as I still have 3.5 mm of tread remaining on the rear tire after 10 000 km. I've put in an e-mail to the BMW shop in Vancouver to see if they can accommodate me. If this works, I think I have a go for Alaska. By the way, I'm considering Hyder, Alaska, the lowest city in the panhandle, just far enough to say that I set foot in Alaska. The motivation for this is that I really don't think I'll have the opportunity to go to Alaska by bike anytime soon, so might as well do it when I can.
Well, there you have it, that was day # 9. A pretty weird one really...
Day Stats:
Total Distance: 718 km (Yuma, Az to Ridgecrest, Ca)
Total Time: 7 h 29 minutes
Overall Average: 92 km / h