Just the same, I'd never ridden more than about 400 miles from home, and had no idea how long it would take to cross the country or how I and the bike would hold up along the way. Probably I'd be sore and extremely tired at some point. Certainly the bike would need maintenance. These were serious considerations, but the most important consideration of all was that I'm not getting any younger and needed to quit being such a wimpy worry-wart. I kept telling people I was going to ride cross country, and it reached the point where backing out would have been very poor form.
There were, of course, a few days of building up gumption. I have the summers off, so there was no pressing schedule or anything to get me out of bed on any particular day and start this. As is so often the case, I created a schedule item by asking an old friend in the Phoenix area if she'd like to get together and visit on Sunday afternoon June 11th, and that became the impetus to get going. Well sir, that morning--for the first time in months--it was raining in San Diego. I'd planned to get an early start, but rolled over in bed and wondered WTF this trip was going to be like if it were to start out like this.
As it was, the rain was just an extra substantial manifestation of San Diego's famed "June Gloom." It cleared up, and the streets were dry enough that I no longer had any excuse not to get started. I loaded up the large backpack and smaller day pack with the stuff I'd been idly thinking about packing for several days. After all, I'd traveled enough over the years to have a pretty good idea of what I needed to take for a month or so out of town. I'd just never had to carry it all on a motorcycle, and--honestly speaking--never tried until that very morning to mount it on the bike or even thought much about how it should be laid out.
With three heavy duty bungee cords, I devised the configuration you see in the photos, and it worked well in that format for the duration of the trip. A neighbor came out as I was loading up, and there was that odd moment when he realized he was talking to me at the very beginning of a very momentous event. I told him I'd be back in the middle of July, God willing, and the journey of several thousand miles began with that single step of firing up the engine and riding up the residential street half a mile to the Seven-Eleven to top off the tank and hit the road.
Following the easterly route I take to school during the academic year, I turned off on Campo Road and took the slower Highway 94 rather than I-8. I carried in my head a list of places to see along the way, with the vague plan of following the I-40 east and the I-10 back west. Didn't expect to see every one of them, or even to ride all the way to Miami Beach necessarily... yet I ended up doing everything I said I'd do. Every damned thing!
The first stop was Campo, where the Camp Lockett display was open only on weekends. It seemed rather strange to be stopping for sightseeing less than 40 miles into a 7,000 mile journey, but I don't get out that way much and it was a chance to convince myself that I was actually underway and doing this. Then I buzzed along at a fair clip to the end of 94, where it meets I-8 and the road drops into the Imperial Valley. This stretch of road is very familiar, so I recall nothing extraordinary about it.
It was mid afternoon by the time I got to Yuma, and pulled up in front of my rental house for a look. My friend had called and left a voicemail, wondering when I was going to get there. I told her things were getting off to a slow start, and we agreed to meet up at dinner time at her place in Buckeye.
This provided an incentive to cover some miles on the first day. She'd lived in a dozen or so places since we'd met the fall after I graduated from high school and came to live in Phoenix for a year, mainly to be somewhere besides the place where I'd grown up. Now she had a nice home in a retirement community, and after telling me several times in our occasional phone conversations that she was all through with sharing things with her previous husbands and various men in her life, I was introduced to her new husband. He seemed a nice enough fellow, and I hope it works out better than the previous ones... but her apparent blind spot in romance, despite being an otherwise intelligent person, is part of why I was never much attracted to her as anything other than a friend.
We had a nice dinner of Pollo Loco at her house, and visited for a couple of hours. Then I was on my way up Grand Avenue to Wickenberg for the first night of the trip.
Got to Prescott early Monday morning, with the intention of staying about three days to work on my rental property there. Well... riding out to the property for the first time, my Honda Shadow--a model renowned for its dependability--died at the side of the road. The management company for the property went above and beyond the call of duty to send out their maintenance man with a truck to help me haul the bike to a shop, where he happened to know the owner. Prescott is a small town, and such things are common.
It was a salvation for my self esteem to find that the problem was fairly complex, and not something I should have been able to repair at the side of the road. The Honda Shadow has an electric fuel pump that works like a fuel injection system... though the engine is carburated. We were able to get it running, but the contact points were worn down so badly that setting out on a long trip without a new fuel pump would be asking for trouble. Getting one took a week.
There was work to do in Prescott, but not a week's worth. Lying around in the Navajo Lodge during this time, I began to lose my gumption. If things were getting off to such a rough start, could it be a sign that maybe I shouldn't continue? Well, I'm a stubborn guy once I set my mind to something, and after working more leisurely on the property than I'd planned to and doing a little research on filming locations for "Billy Jack" (filmed in Prescott in the fall of 1969 but not released until 1971), I decided to get an early start the morning of Wednesday June 21st.
The route through Jerome to Sedona and through Oak Creek Canyon to Flagstaff was also familiar, but I'd never done it on a motorcycle before. It was a winding and scenic ride, but hardly one to inspire confidence that I'd reach the East Coast in any reasonable amount of time. I turned it into one of the longest riding days of the trip, catching the I-40 in Flag and following it along many of the places mentioned in "Route 66" and other songs--Winona, Winslow, Gallup New Mexico--where I finally decided to call it a day. It was a comfortable if not cheap motel, and I think it was here that I resigned myself to spending great sums of money on places to lay my head each night.
The next day was Gallup to Vega Texas, on the outskirts of Amarillo. This was also a substantial day of travel, and the point where I realized that the only times I really felt stressed while riding was passing through large urban areas, in this case Albuquerque. Vega is a pud-in-the-mud town, but I was looking for filming locations from "Hud," the Paul Newman movie from 1962, and could have sworn the water tank shown at the introduction of the movie read "Vega." There was an outdoor concert in the town square area, and I went to it even though it wasn't particularly interesting... which was probably the opinion of most of the locals.
Friday the 23rd was a relatively shorter day of travel, with several stops to look around. I got an early start, but still encountered the most fierce crosswinds of the trip around and within the city of Amarillo. At one point I had to get off the I-10 and move along at about 40 MPH on a frontage road, simply because I couldn't ride in a straight line otherwise. On another occasion, I was actually blown off the road by a semi passing me on the left; the air blast was like an explosion.
Outside of Claude, site of most of the filming of "Hud," I got to talking with several bikers from Houston at a gas stop. It was the first time I noticed that my bike was the smallest of any I saw doing long-distance touring. A 750 cc motorcycle was rather large back in the day, but not anymore. One fellow on a Gold Wing complained that he was getting only 25 MPG in the windy conditions. I got a steady 50 MPG throughout the trip. He wasn't aware that the movie had been filmed in Claude, but expressed his liking for it in surprising detail.
Stopping at the county courthouse in Claude, I got directions to the city museum, where an older lady showed me the movie theater that appeared in "Hud." Brandon DeWilde and Melvin Douglas sang "Clementine" in the scene. She also pointed out the bus stop where Patricia O'Neal left town, and told me where the house was in Goodknight, about ten miles up the road. I had a look there, and found that it was a major area for raising buffalo and bringing them back from near extinction.
Before too late, I decided to call it a day on the outskirts of Witchita Falls. There, as throughout the trip, I noticed that the majority of motels between Texas and Florida seem to be run by Indians (from India). By and large, I found them a grim and humorless bunch, often with any number of extended family members living in the vacant rooms and casting unpleasant looks at the guests if they acknowledged our existence at all. Just the same, I was happy to get out of the heat and relax a little longer than I had since leaving Prescott.
It was Saturday morning, and Dallas/Ft. Worth was my objective. It wasn't far away, but the weather was rainy again, not soaking but enough to make my clothes damp and the road slick. I asked around Witchita Falls whether the Red River was nearby, but apparently it was too far out of the way to make a side trip. I was aware that Lee Oswald's brother, Robert, still lived there, and admired him in a way for never changing his name and living as normal a life as possible since that one moment in time had changed everything.
There was a moderately well known vegetable stand/store along the 287/81. I stopped for awhile and played with a small kitten that the owners had just adopted. They said it wanted to ride away with everyone who stopped there. Coming into the area, I followed signs for Dallas along a busy highway, stopping once for gas and asking the fellow at the next pump if I could get to Irving on it. Luckily the freeways weren't crowded as I passed through the area around Dallas International Airport. I turned off when I saw a sign for Love Field.
Fairly early in the afternoon, I found a hotel that provided easy access to Irvine, Parkland Hospital, Love Field, and Dealey Plaza. Having just missed the last weekend tour of the Ruth Paine Museum, I just rode out to Irving anyway to see it. Many of the locals think the tours, conducted in a van with a portrait of JFK on the side, are in bad taste. Dealey Plaza though, was easy to find and though there are always tourists looking at "the spot," it's rather low key. They seem to be a pains to explain that the plaza was an important landmark before the Kennedy assassination.
During the visit, I saw the site of Jack Ruby's Carousel Club--of which nothing remains--and the old police headquarters building where Oswald was shot. I also ran across the large neon "flying red horse" that once dominated the Dallas skyline in front of a downtown hotel. A taxi driver about my age saw me near the site of Ruby's old club and talked for awhile about his own conspiracy theory of the assassination, which included LBJ. I didn't bother to tell him that the LBJ Library was one of the places I planned to visit on the way home.
By Sunday morning I was headed east, leaving town unexpectedly on the road where the assassination occurred. The bikers in Claude had advised me that Houston was a lousy place to try to navigate on a bike if you didn't know your way around, so after a short consultaton with a map I decided to continue on I-40 through Shreveport and as far as Jackson, where I could catch Highways 49 then 98 south to Mobile. I crossed Louisiana in a single day, and on reaching the Mississippi River at Vicksburg realized that I was actually up for proceeding all the way to Southern Florida! I stayed at the Super 8 in Clinton, outside Jackson, and my "southern experience" consisted of buying some Popeye's Fried Chicken for dinner.
Monday the 26th brought me into the panhandle of Florida, but I realized that over a fifth of the total distance would be within that state, with its very long coastline. Got lost on a traffic-jammed highway in Mobile while trying to take a coastal route for fun. I got back on the I-40 for awhile, and found the interstate's causeways plenty scenic. It was a long day of riding that extended until after dark. A little before Panama City, I was pulled over by a state trooper who told me my headlight wasn't working. I ride so seldom at night that I hadn't noticed. The high beam was working, and he let me go with a warning.
Looking at a phone book and online, I found a Honda dealer in Panama City and took the bike in for 36,000 mile maintenance and a new headlight bulb. It was quite expensive, even though the maintenance wasn't that involved. I got new front brake pads as well, and was advised that the chain and sprockets were in very bad shape. Rather than wait several days for parts, I decided to move on.
By Tuesday night, after a late start while waiting on the maintenance, I got to Crystal River, "Manatee Capital of the World." I hadn't covered a lot of miles, but was traveling along the gulf coast and taking in a lot of scenery. Eventually, I'd ride most of the gulf coast from Naples Florida to Galveston Texas. My dad's cousin first texted me then, and we agreed I'd visit them in Brandon, outside Tampa.
Rode across the bay bridge in Tampa and found my way to Brandon, which happened to have a large Honda dealer. I ordered the chain and sprockets there, and was able to have them installed the next day. Meanwhile, I checked in to a Motel 6 then went over to visit my distant cousin, whom I hadn't seen since 1981. Her husband wasn't doing well health-wise, and I didn't probe deeply as to what was wrong. His sister was visiting there, helping to take care of him. The next day, Thursday, was his birthday and I was invited to a big family party and to stay over afterwards. Her kids were now in their forties; I hadn't seen them since they were 10 and 8.
Friday June 30th came, and my cousin and her sister-in-law bade me farewell. I was heading down the I-75 and across the peninsula, planning to reach my goal by late afternoon. There was some sort of awful traffic jam, and I did my first lane splitting of the trip. As usual--there's one in every crowd--someone started honking loudly at me and demanding that I sit there in the traffic jam like everybody else. I proceeded slowly and carefully for several miles until the traffic flow opened up again.
In Naples, the I-75 becomes a toll road. I stopped at a Dollar Tree before getting on it. As in San Diego, it's the only place that sells Minute Maid frozen juice cups. It was also a good place to pick up a new toothbrush and tube of toothpaste. This was it! I was actually going to make it to my condo in Miami Beach! Then, outside Fort Lauderdale, I turned off on Highway 27 where it indicated Miami.
The Miami/Fort Lauderdale area is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Everglades. It's about 30 miles wide, and much longer north to south. As you approach from the west, it hardly looks like the outskirts of a major metropolis. I noticed a sign for Pines Blvd., and stopped to look at a map. It indicated that I was on the outskirts of Pembroke Pines, and could get to downtown Hollywood by following it directly west.
As I was putting away the map, in a state of disbelief and almost spiritual bliss, an older fellow in a white SUV stopped and asked me if I was lost. He confirmed that I was exactly where I thought I was. I rode along in the heat and traffic of south Broward and north Miami Dade Counties, the blissful feeling dissipating a bit. Then I was on the A1A coastal highway, in places I'd ridden by bicycle from my condo before! I passed the Trump Hotel in Sunny Isles, which caused me to have bizarre dreams about introducing him at a rally in my dirty clothes. The magical feeling returned as I finished the last mile, past the power substation, and turned right on 85th Street.
A neighbor friend was standing in front of the complex as I pulled up. I parked the bike and looked at it, sitting in front of my condo in Miami Beach just like it had at my condo in San Diego a few weeks before. The lady he was talking to took a picture of us with it. There was still half the journey to go--the return trip--but for the next five days (the stay shortened by the delays in Prescott) I'd get some rest and enjoy what I'd accomplished.
CONTINUED IN THE CONSECUTIVE ENTRY
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| Early in the trip, along the I-40. |
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| Here I realized I actually was gonna do this! |
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| The Miami Beach condo. Made it! |
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