MadGravity

Trip to Tucson Arizona! On Saturday morning I did my stretches, packed a bunch of stuff, loaded it on the Harley and headed out to Arizona at around 10am. I took Hwy 62 to Hwy177 which is a long and lonely ride just by itself; once you leave Twentynine Palms there are no gas stations until you hit Blythe on the Interstate10 and that is a long ways away. I filled up in Blythe and drove on down to the Phoenix bypass Hwy 85 to Gila Bend where I filled up again but not before I had to switch to reserve. The problem was that I’m new to Harleys and instead of going to reserve I switched it the wrong way to off. Oops! The bike came to a stop and I thought I was totally out of gas. I even put a call in to AAA to bring me gas and making a fool of myself trying to flag down cars. It took me a little time to figure out; I must have been thinking of my old Honda, but the Harley goes the opposite way; I canceled my call to AAA. After filling up with gas I then took I-8 to the I-10 and on to Tucson. I-8 is another long stretch of isolated road that I had pretty much to myself. I was hypnotized by the beauty of the desert as it flashed passed and wasn’t paying close attention to how fast I was going until I looked down at the speedometer and saw 105 MPH, YIKES, and I still had more throttle! The bike handles very nicely and seems to want to cruse at 85 MPH; my old Honda 750 you’d be holding on for dear life at 75 MPH. With the Harley that’s not a problem because it is very stable at those speeds and I felt comfortable doing them, but I did bring my speed back down to 85. I arrived in Tucson around sunset (423 miles), stopped to get gas and found out about another problem; the loud pipes. I was almost deaf and it felt like I was in a fish aquarium with all those bubbles. I fixed that later with earplugs I got from John and Audrey when I visited them. Sunday evening when Paula and Mark showed up we had fried chicken for dinner that me and Kevin picked up when he did his shopping. It was good to see all the folks and Mark and Crystal’s new baby and see how big Athena is getting; we got a picture of her on my bike with her daddy holding her. Anyways I stayed up late talking to the folks and went to bed around 1am only to awake Monday at 6:30, pack everything up on the bike and head back home at 7am; I wanted to leave early because I didn’t want the Sun in my face riding west in the evening. I took the same route back, only ate two bananas the whole trip, and arrived home at 3:15: what a first ride! I took a shower to wash off the road, made myself a big dinner, and watched a new episode of “Fringe”.
I did my stretches, practiced my guitar, wrote to my journal, posted it to the web, and called it a night. I think I’ll just kick back tomorrow and relax :)