We were going to Bullhead for Aly's high school graduation with a stop At Dee's for visits with friends and family. We left on the 12th, driving first to Cheyenne, WY, then heading west on I-80. The wind was strong, blowing against us with gusts to 45 mph in WY and 50 in UT. We were buffeted all over the road. It dropped our normal 48 mpg consumption rate to 40! Approaching Wendover we hit a near white-out condition just downwind of the Bonneville Salt Flats raceway due to the salt dust being carried across the road. Fran was driving at the time and said she was losing sight of the dashed lane line at times.
We drove to Reno the next day arriving late in the afternoon. The winds were still strong, but not as bad as the previous day. We had no trouble getting a room at the El Dorado casino though we had no reservation. The clerk asked us if we were there for the bowling. We didn't know what she was talking about. We strolled along Virginia St. to the river, then back along Center St. to 4th returning along Virginia. Fran wanted to check out which of the older casinos had disappeared. The big shock to her was Fitzgerald's. That's her favorite spot in Black Hawk, where it's still going strong. The Cal-Neva looked closed, but we found out later that it's open only in the evening. As we were approaching the El Dorado we though we'd find out what the building with the ball like structure on the top was, on Center across from the hotel. It turns out it's the Bowling Center, jointly owned by the El Dorado, The Silver Legacy and Circus Circus. It was hosting the Ladies National Championship. Fifty of the sixty lanes on the mezzanine level were in use. Fran's league here finished up in late April after a too long season and here we were watching other people play. We must have been out of our minds. Returning to the hotel Fran played a couple games on the casino floor. She was hot, winning on five of seven machines she tried. The winnings would later find a home in Laughlin.
We got to Dee's house mid-afternoon the next day. The renovation project(s) were evident in nearly every room. Baseboards were taped off from the floor in the hallway; old storage cabinets had been removed from the bedrooms; the front bedroom had a new coat of paint (two colors); bits of locks and other stuff were on the mantle in the front room; a toolbox was taking up space in the kitchen. What has been completed looks very good. A lot of work has been put into the bathroom and kitchen and it shows. Only two rooms are left before the house can be called done. Dinner that night was Fran's choice -- Round Table Pizza. I don't know what it is about their pepperoni, but it outshines the flavor of anything we can get in CO. It's a must-have on any CA visit, as is true sourdough bread, purchased these days from the Semifreddi Bakery (we got nine loaves to distribute amongst friends and family).
Friday is lost to my memory outside of a tri-tip roast Kent cooked on his grill. Saturday we had a lunch date with Sandy B., one of my friends from high school. On the way we stopped in Stanford to see if we could find my grandfather's house. No luck there. Where it once stood is now a batch of new student housing, a bit sad but understandable given its age. The last time I saw it in the late '60s it was the library for some esoteric subject. Before leaving home I'd written directions on how to get from the house to my grandparent's cemetery using views from Google Earth. It lies about two miles south of the house. Things were going swimmingly until we turned on to a street with a sign reading "No Exit". That's something unrenderable in GE. I decided to make our way back to El Camino and find the road the blockaded street would have taken us to. Finally back on track, we found the Alta Mesa Cenetery without further problems. Getting to the cemetery office was another experience. Work was in progress on the direct route; the detour to it gave us a scenic tour of the grounds. The lady in the office had the directions to my grandparents in our hands in under five minutes. All we had to do was walk across a drive to Mausoleum #1 and take a few steps to the left after entering. I did make the point to ask if John and Margaret were buried together and was assured this was the case. Upon finding the niche we found that only my grandfather's name had been etched in the cover plate. I guess that's Dad's doing. I suppose I should get in touch with the office to see what it will cost to get grandmother's name etched, just to make things right.
Sandy and I had been missing each other with e-mails. Her cell number was in an old phone I lost. I had no other way to contact her. Luckily, she had mine and had called just as we were leaving Stanford. The instructions seemed easy enough, but with a less than ideal connection I missed her saying "pass". I ended up driving the length of a street from Bayshore Freeway to Foothills Parkway looking for a cross street that didn't exist. A return call to her got us straightened out. We were to meet at a place called the Tide House in Mountain View. Wouldn't you know her directions led us unexpectedly into Mountain View's annual main street fair. I worked around that and got on the street the Tide House was on. Owing to Sandy's poor distance estimate I turned the wrong way again, going a couple miles before figuring things out. Heading back we found the place only a block and a half from the street fair. Parking? There was none within three stone throws of the fair. I did find a place about two blocks from the place, behind the police station. Meeting Sandy next to her car (she found a closer parking spot) we all went in and had a pleasant lunch. One interesting thing that came out during our talk: Sandy's grandparents are also buried in Alta Mesa. Coincidences...
Sunday was a fun, interesting day. Temperatures were in the 80s, hot for San Francisco. Kent was participating in the Bay To Breakers race for the tenth time, never as a runner. He's a member of a group of thirty or so guys who dress up as Elvis and pull a float with a boom box playing Elvis songs, and drink beer from the keg hidden inside along the way. We (Fran, Dee and I) caught up with them just before they entered the mass of people heading out to Golden Gate Park at Third and Howard. I think there were around 48,000 official entrants and a couple hundred thousand who just join in for the fun of it.
There were several new rules for this year's event after the mass of litter and arrests last year. No bottles. No nakedness. No kegs. The Elvises were stopping at every intersection and chanting "Elvis" over and over and hoisting red party cups bringing smiles to the faces of the onlookers and cops keeping an eye on things. They were having a good time until a couple blocks from the top of the Hayes Street hill, where they were stopped by the cops and were going to be ticketed for the keg and have the keg confiscated! How unfair! A fireman at the intersection tipped one of the Elvises to offer up the tap so they could at least keep the keg and get the deposit back. The Elvis negotiating with the cops sold them on the idea and the group progressed up the hill without the tap and without a ticket. Kent said the keg was empty by the point of the incident -- a good thing as Hayes Hill is steep. They were able to get a fresh keg and new tap not far from the top of the hill and weren't bothered again, making it all the way to and through Golden Gate Park.
Fran, Dee and I walked much further than we'd planned. We made it to the top of Hayes before the Elvises and missed their incident with the cops. (I figure we walked just under half the race route.)We saw several houses with sound systems set up in windows, on the roofs and on porches. At one point two houses across the street from each other seemed to be having a competition involving who could deafen the race participants first, best and longest. Beer cans were everywhere, quickly picked up by the homeless for recycling fees. One float we saw trying to enter the course on Hayes, around Fillmore. A cop car with flashing lights was directly behind it. It was obviously carrying a keg. We spotted it later on a side street offering up a cup to anyone wanting one. Nekkid people did participate, apparently without incident. A report I heard the next day said only five event-related arrests were made, for public intoxication. After seeing a good chunk of the event, I'd have to say if you're in the area, don't miss the people-watching opportunity.
Besides the Elvises, who we were near till the Hayes St. hill, we saw a group of guys dressed as pink flamingos (seen in the video), a group wearing red dunce caps, another in bacon costumes, a mixed group of Pamplona bull-runners (several boarded out BART ride, one with torn pants and shirt and blood smears here and there), people protesting the "plumping" of chickens, prom dresses, superheroes, ladies '80s style exercise gear, a group of whoopie cushions (with "Make Whoop" on their backs), and spawning salmon (they were going against the flow and at some point would mill around spawning, then lie down on the street, spent, dead). Unmentioned are the thousands of everyday people just out for a nice walk.
After Sunday, Monday was much calmer. We saw Fran's brother Leon and his wife Joan for lunch. We had a good time catching up with them.
Tuesday we left for AZ. We'd originally considered driving down the coast from Carmel to San Simeon. The day turned out to be foggy along the coast, and given that it would take rather more time to make the drive (it's a two lane road), we opted to drive down Highway 101 instead. Shortly after leaving the San Jose area we noticed the old El Camino Real way-markers standing along the roadside about every mile or so. These are bells on a metal pole with a curve at the top so the bell is centered over the pole. They used to be along El Camino in the peninsula communities but I haven't seen them along there in years, perhaps due to theft or vandalism. One thing I saw in the coverage of the Tour of California bike race determined part of our route for the day -- the James Dean Memorial at Cholame, on Highway 46. Cholame turned out to be little more than a restaurant; the memorial is under a large tree in the dirt parking lot. It's about a mile west of where he actually died, the intersection of Highways 41 and 46. After a short stop for photos we drove on and overnighted in Bakersfield as we did last year.
The remainder of the drive to Laughlin was uneventful outside of some road construction south of Searchlight. After settling into the Colorado Belle we drove over to Bullhead and met Aly's birth father, Toby, for the second time. His appearance has changed, of course, but he is the same easy to like guy we met 19 years ago. Aly made contact with him a few months back and invited him to her graduation. At dinner that evening we met his mom, Betty, a pleasant, down-to-earth Southern gal.
Thursday morning was spent saving the Bay To Breakers videos on Mike's computer and clearing the camera in anticipation of the ceremony. People's schedules were pretty higgley-piggley so we were pretty much unable to get everyone together in one place during the day. Dee and Kent joined us for a bite in the Belle's brewery before heading down for the graduation ceremony. We ordered nachos and got something completely different prepared by the Monty Python staff. The chips, cheese, onions, tomatoes and meat were there as expected. The big surprise was the spaghetti sauce! I guess someone in the shorthanded kitchen thought it an acceptable substitute for refried beans. It wasn't, really. Still edible, but quite unusual.
The ceremony was held in the Avi Resort Event Center, a building designed to hold rodeos. Half the floor was blocked off for the podium, graduates and limited family members. Each graduate got four identifying wrist bands to hand out for floor seating. Mike, Toby, Fran and I sat there. People without the wrist bands sat in the grandstands. After the music, marching in and speachifying people rushed into the aisles to get pictures of their precious ones getting their certificates. They blocked the view of the more genteel, considerate in the crowd. Event center staff came down to send the majority back to their seats, allowing a small number to kneel at the aisle's end before popping up to take their pictures and return to their seats, an effective solution to the problem. This was the first ceremony I recall where the graduates were not called alphabetically. I could determine no order at all. Still, things went off smoothly. Especially touching was that Heather presented Aly her certificate. After the ceremony and an interminable wait for the parking lot to mostly clear, the whole family met at the Avi for a late dinner.
Friday had me back at Heather's to download the graduation videos to Mike's computer. Toby took Aly out to get her a cell phone as a graduation present. He put her on his family plan, and as a result she has an Atlanta prefix code. This coming weekend it will be right at home, briefly. Mike, Heather and Aly are going to the Atlanta area for his dad's wedding. Toby treated the lot of us to dinner at the Outback restaurant in his resort. Sadly, Mike couldn't attend -- he was called in to assist in a surgery at 6:30. It lasted until after 10. Following dinner and saying goodbye to Toby and Betty, we all headed back to the Belle for some gaming. I simply watched, Aly went to our room to play computer games. Heather and Kent were the winners that evening.
Saturday we got an early start for Albuquerque, where I did not negotiate the proverbial left turn. We stayed in a motel Heather uses on her trips to Denver. There we tried to find the location of a nearby Catholic church. A young lady in the lobby gave us directions to one. We drove over to check on the times mass was offered. We found the church and nothing else; no mass times, no name and no phone number could be found. We got back to the room and went through the phone book. There we found a church in an ad with all the information we needed, except a map. I got extremely lucky and drive directly to it Sunday morning. A quick breakfast after mass and we were off for home. As mentioned earlier, there was no left turn at ABQ this day. I drove east on I-40 to Highway 84 before turning left. My thought was the route would be nearly equal distance to going up I-25 as far as Las Vegas. I was wrong once again; it was 30 miles longer. Still I'd consider taking it again. It's quite pretty.
Along I-40 we hit a rest stop for a stretch and driver swap. A truck near one picnic spot had a flashing blue light on top. Two workers in green reflective vests were standing nearby. Several travellers were standing around with cameras trained on a tree near the picnic table. A branch fell out to the tree. Suddenly one of the workers began shouting that everyone should immediately get back inside their cars. One guy passing me asked if I'd seen the bear. Uh, no. Fran spotted it before me, about 12 feet up sitting on a branch looking around. I chatted with one of the workers after it looked like the bear was content to stay put. This guy was easily a twin in looks and speech to Mike, one of the rangers in Cherry Creek State Park. He said Fish and Game had been called to handle the bear, which apparently had an ear tag. If that's the case, FnG will take care of the bear, permanently. The surprise was that the rest stop was 20 miles from any mountain with sparsely treed grass plains in between.
We had lunch and gassed up in Trinidad. The rain we'd pretty much missed in NM caught up with us shortly after leaving. We had a group of eight motorcyclists several cars in front of us. When the downpour hit we completely lost sight of them. We found them a little ways up the road where there was a layer of water all the way across the roadway, stopped on the side. I've ridden in rain before and know just how little fun it can be, but I've never encountered conditions where the bike might actually hydroplane. I'm sure that's what sidelined this group of riders. Rain was heavy for about ten miles, then very spotty thereafter when Fran picked up the driving chores. I took over again in Monument and again ran into very heavy rain, this time at Lone Tree. Speeds dropped below 40 due to both the rain and the splashback. We walked into the house a little after 5pm, very glad to be back.
Pictures are up on Shutterfly, videos on YouTube.
We drove to Reno the next day arriving late in the afternoon. The winds were still strong, but not as bad as the previous day. We had no trouble getting a room at the El Dorado casino though we had no reservation. The clerk asked us if we were there for the bowling. We didn't know what she was talking about. We strolled along Virginia St. to the river, then back along Center St. to 4th returning along Virginia. Fran wanted to check out which of the older casinos had disappeared. The big shock to her was Fitzgerald's. That's her favorite spot in Black Hawk, where it's still going strong. The Cal-Neva looked closed, but we found out later that it's open only in the evening. As we were approaching the El Dorado we though we'd find out what the building with the ball like structure on the top was, on Center across from the hotel. It turns out it's the Bowling Center, jointly owned by the El Dorado, The Silver Legacy and Circus Circus. It was hosting the Ladies National Championship. Fifty of the sixty lanes on the mezzanine level were in use. Fran's league here finished up in late April after a too long season and here we were watching other people play. We must have been out of our minds. Returning to the hotel Fran played a couple games on the casino floor. She was hot, winning on five of seven machines she tried. The winnings would later find a home in Laughlin.
We got to Dee's house mid-afternoon the next day. The renovation project(s) were evident in nearly every room. Baseboards were taped off from the floor in the hallway; old storage cabinets had been removed from the bedrooms; the front bedroom had a new coat of paint (two colors); bits of locks and other stuff were on the mantle in the front room; a toolbox was taking up space in the kitchen. What has been completed looks very good. A lot of work has been put into the bathroom and kitchen and it shows. Only two rooms are left before the house can be called done. Dinner that night was Fran's choice -- Round Table Pizza. I don't know what it is about their pepperoni, but it outshines the flavor of anything we can get in CO. It's a must-have on any CA visit, as is true sourdough bread, purchased these days from the Semifreddi Bakery (we got nine loaves to distribute amongst friends and family).
Friday is lost to my memory outside of a tri-tip roast Kent cooked on his grill. Saturday we had a lunch date with Sandy B., one of my friends from high school. On the way we stopped in Stanford to see if we could find my grandfather's house. No luck there. Where it once stood is now a batch of new student housing, a bit sad but understandable given its age. The last time I saw it in the late '60s it was the library for some esoteric subject. Before leaving home I'd written directions on how to get from the house to my grandparent's cemetery using views from Google Earth. It lies about two miles south of the house. Things were going swimmingly until we turned on to a street with a sign reading "No Exit". That's something unrenderable in GE. I decided to make our way back to El Camino and find the road the blockaded street would have taken us to. Finally back on track, we found the Alta Mesa Cenetery without further problems. Getting to the cemetery office was another experience. Work was in progress on the direct route; the detour to it gave us a scenic tour of the grounds. The lady in the office had the directions to my grandparents in our hands in under five minutes. All we had to do was walk across a drive to Mausoleum #1 and take a few steps to the left after entering. I did make the point to ask if John and Margaret were buried together and was assured this was the case. Upon finding the niche we found that only my grandfather's name had been etched in the cover plate. I guess that's Dad's doing. I suppose I should get in touch with the office to see what it will cost to get grandmother's name etched, just to make things right.
Sandy and I had been missing each other with e-mails. Her cell number was in an old phone I lost. I had no other way to contact her. Luckily, she had mine and had called just as we were leaving Stanford. The instructions seemed easy enough, but with a less than ideal connection I missed her saying "pass". I ended up driving the length of a street from Bayshore Freeway to Foothills Parkway looking for a cross street that didn't exist. A return call to her got us straightened out. We were to meet at a place called the Tide House in Mountain View. Wouldn't you know her directions led us unexpectedly into Mountain View's annual main street fair. I worked around that and got on the street the Tide House was on. Owing to Sandy's poor distance estimate I turned the wrong way again, going a couple miles before figuring things out. Heading back we found the place only a block and a half from the street fair. Parking? There was none within three stone throws of the fair. I did find a place about two blocks from the place, behind the police station. Meeting Sandy next to her car (she found a closer parking spot) we all went in and had a pleasant lunch. One interesting thing that came out during our talk: Sandy's grandparents are also buried in Alta Mesa. Coincidences...
Sunday was a fun, interesting day. Temperatures were in the 80s, hot for San Francisco. Kent was participating in the Bay To Breakers race for the tenth time, never as a runner. He's a member of a group of thirty or so guys who dress up as Elvis and pull a float with a boom box playing Elvis songs, and drink beer from the keg hidden inside along the way. We (Fran, Dee and I) caught up with them just before they entered the mass of people heading out to Golden Gate Park at Third and Howard. I think there were around 48,000 official entrants and a couple hundred thousand who just join in for the fun of it.
There were several new rules for this year's event after the mass of litter and arrests last year. No bottles. No nakedness. No kegs. The Elvises were stopping at every intersection and chanting "Elvis" over and over and hoisting red party cups bringing smiles to the faces of the onlookers and cops keeping an eye on things. They were having a good time until a couple blocks from the top of the Hayes Street hill, where they were stopped by the cops and were going to be ticketed for the keg and have the keg confiscated! How unfair! A fireman at the intersection tipped one of the Elvises to offer up the tap so they could at least keep the keg and get the deposit back. The Elvis negotiating with the cops sold them on the idea and the group progressed up the hill without the tap and without a ticket. Kent said the keg was empty by the point of the incident -- a good thing as Hayes Hill is steep. They were able to get a fresh keg and new tap not far from the top of the hill and weren't bothered again, making it all the way to and through Golden Gate Park.
Fran, Dee and I walked much further than we'd planned. We made it to the top of Hayes before the Elvises and missed their incident with the cops. (I figure we walked just under half the race route.)We saw several houses with sound systems set up in windows, on the roofs and on porches. At one point two houses across the street from each other seemed to be having a competition involving who could deafen the race participants first, best and longest. Beer cans were everywhere, quickly picked up by the homeless for recycling fees. One float we saw trying to enter the course on Hayes, around Fillmore. A cop car with flashing lights was directly behind it. It was obviously carrying a keg. We spotted it later on a side street offering up a cup to anyone wanting one. Nekkid people did participate, apparently without incident. A report I heard the next day said only five event-related arrests were made, for public intoxication. After seeing a good chunk of the event, I'd have to say if you're in the area, don't miss the people-watching opportunity.
Besides the Elvises, who we were near till the Hayes St. hill, we saw a group of guys dressed as pink flamingos (seen in the video), a group wearing red dunce caps, another in bacon costumes, a mixed group of Pamplona bull-runners (several boarded out BART ride, one with torn pants and shirt and blood smears here and there), people protesting the "plumping" of chickens, prom dresses, superheroes, ladies '80s style exercise gear, a group of whoopie cushions (with "Make Whoop" on their backs), and spawning salmon (they were going against the flow and at some point would mill around spawning, then lie down on the street, spent, dead). Unmentioned are the thousands of everyday people just out for a nice walk.
After Sunday, Monday was much calmer. We saw Fran's brother Leon and his wife Joan for lunch. We had a good time catching up with them.
Tuesday we left for AZ. We'd originally considered driving down the coast from Carmel to San Simeon. The day turned out to be foggy along the coast, and given that it would take rather more time to make the drive (it's a two lane road), we opted to drive down Highway 101 instead. Shortly after leaving the San Jose area we noticed the old El Camino Real way-markers standing along the roadside about every mile or so. These are bells on a metal pole with a curve at the top so the bell is centered over the pole. They used to be along El Camino in the peninsula communities but I haven't seen them along there in years, perhaps due to theft or vandalism. One thing I saw in the coverage of the Tour of California bike race determined part of our route for the day -- the James Dean Memorial at Cholame, on Highway 46. Cholame turned out to be little more than a restaurant; the memorial is under a large tree in the dirt parking lot. It's about a mile west of where he actually died, the intersection of Highways 41 and 46. After a short stop for photos we drove on and overnighted in Bakersfield as we did last year.
The remainder of the drive to Laughlin was uneventful outside of some road construction south of Searchlight. After settling into the Colorado Belle we drove over to Bullhead and met Aly's birth father, Toby, for the second time. His appearance has changed, of course, but he is the same easy to like guy we met 19 years ago. Aly made contact with him a few months back and invited him to her graduation. At dinner that evening we met his mom, Betty, a pleasant, down-to-earth Southern gal.
Thursday morning was spent saving the Bay To Breakers videos on Mike's computer and clearing the camera in anticipation of the ceremony. People's schedules were pretty higgley-piggley so we were pretty much unable to get everyone together in one place during the day. Dee and Kent joined us for a bite in the Belle's brewery before heading down for the graduation ceremony. We ordered nachos and got something completely different prepared by the Monty Python staff. The chips, cheese, onions, tomatoes and meat were there as expected. The big surprise was the spaghetti sauce! I guess someone in the shorthanded kitchen thought it an acceptable substitute for refried beans. It wasn't, really. Still edible, but quite unusual.
The ceremony was held in the Avi Resort Event Center, a building designed to hold rodeos. Half the floor was blocked off for the podium, graduates and limited family members. Each graduate got four identifying wrist bands to hand out for floor seating. Mike, Toby, Fran and I sat there. People without the wrist bands sat in the grandstands. After the music, marching in and speachifying people rushed into the aisles to get pictures of their precious ones getting their certificates. They blocked the view of the more genteel, considerate in the crowd. Event center staff came down to send the majority back to their seats, allowing a small number to kneel at the aisle's end before popping up to take their pictures and return to their seats, an effective solution to the problem. This was the first ceremony I recall where the graduates were not called alphabetically. I could determine no order at all. Still, things went off smoothly. Especially touching was that Heather presented Aly her certificate. After the ceremony and an interminable wait for the parking lot to mostly clear, the whole family met at the Avi for a late dinner.
Friday had me back at Heather's to download the graduation videos to Mike's computer. Toby took Aly out to get her a cell phone as a graduation present. He put her on his family plan, and as a result she has an Atlanta prefix code. This coming weekend it will be right at home, briefly. Mike, Heather and Aly are going to the Atlanta area for his dad's wedding. Toby treated the lot of us to dinner at the Outback restaurant in his resort. Sadly, Mike couldn't attend -- he was called in to assist in a surgery at 6:30. It lasted until after 10. Following dinner and saying goodbye to Toby and Betty, we all headed back to the Belle for some gaming. I simply watched, Aly went to our room to play computer games. Heather and Kent were the winners that evening.
Saturday we got an early start for Albuquerque, where I did not negotiate the proverbial left turn. We stayed in a motel Heather uses on her trips to Denver. There we tried to find the location of a nearby Catholic church. A young lady in the lobby gave us directions to one. We drove over to check on the times mass was offered. We found the church and nothing else; no mass times, no name and no phone number could be found. We got back to the room and went through the phone book. There we found a church in an ad with all the information we needed, except a map. I got extremely lucky and drive directly to it Sunday morning. A quick breakfast after mass and we were off for home. As mentioned earlier, there was no left turn at ABQ this day. I drove east on I-40 to Highway 84 before turning left. My thought was the route would be nearly equal distance to going up I-25 as far as Las Vegas. I was wrong once again; it was 30 miles longer. Still I'd consider taking it again. It's quite pretty.
Along I-40 we hit a rest stop for a stretch and driver swap. A truck near one picnic spot had a flashing blue light on top. Two workers in green reflective vests were standing nearby. Several travellers were standing around with cameras trained on a tree near the picnic table. A branch fell out to the tree. Suddenly one of the workers began shouting that everyone should immediately get back inside their cars. One guy passing me asked if I'd seen the bear. Uh, no. Fran spotted it before me, about 12 feet up sitting on a branch looking around. I chatted with one of the workers after it looked like the bear was content to stay put. This guy was easily a twin in looks and speech to Mike, one of the rangers in Cherry Creek State Park. He said Fish and Game had been called to handle the bear, which apparently had an ear tag. If that's the case, FnG will take care of the bear, permanently. The surprise was that the rest stop was 20 miles from any mountain with sparsely treed grass plains in between.
We had lunch and gassed up in Trinidad. The rain we'd pretty much missed in NM caught up with us shortly after leaving. We had a group of eight motorcyclists several cars in front of us. When the downpour hit we completely lost sight of them. We found them a little ways up the road where there was a layer of water all the way across the roadway, stopped on the side. I've ridden in rain before and know just how little fun it can be, but I've never encountered conditions where the bike might actually hydroplane. I'm sure that's what sidelined this group of riders. Rain was heavy for about ten miles, then very spotty thereafter when Fran picked up the driving chores. I took over again in Monument and again ran into very heavy rain, this time at Lone Tree. Speeds dropped below 40 due to both the rain and the splashback. We walked into the house a little after 5pm, very glad to be back.
Pictures are up on Shutterfly, videos on YouTube.
3 comments:
just saw your posting! I'm not sure why the delay in the feed. Hmmm.
It's a miracle that the house was in as good a condition it was by the time you showed up. It was a complete disaster less than 24 hours before.
Glad you had a fun trip! It is nice getting back to routine, though.
Be sure to post about Tish's big move!
BTW, is shutterfly accessible by the public? I couldn't get through the link.
AHA!! the links have typos.
link to:
http://dbcoover.shutterfly.com
http://www.youtube.com/dabrco
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