Tuesday, November 8 to Sunday, November 13: six days and three states, about 1,700 miles, and lots of fun.
My riding companions were my Tucson friend Dave on a BMW RT1200 and my son Gregory on an Indian Chief.
Dave and I rode to Las Vegas to hook up with my son, who lives there. We went out to dinner, then retired to our hotel rooms for what we foolishly thought would be a fun night watching Hillary kick Donald’s ass from one end of the country to the other. Greg joined us at the hotel Wednesday morning and we pointed the bikes west to Chino, 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles.
In Chino we visited the Planes of Fame Museum (photoblogged in my previous post), then hunkered down for a somber night of election postmortems on TV. Thursday we rode north to Lone Pine on Highway 395. The low point of Thursday’s ride was a miles-long backup on I-15 east of Chino, caused by a range fire next to the freeway; the high point was two side trips after we checked into our hotel in Lone Pine: one to the 14,000′ level of Mt. Whitney, then a short ride north to the WWII Japanese internment camp at Manzanar. My friend and motorcycle maintenance guru Ed will be proud of me, though … I bravely led the three of us between lanes of stopped traffic on I-15.
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Dave had to be home Friday night, so he left us early that morning, riding home through Death Valley and the road south to Needles and Blythe before cutting back east to southern Arizona. Greg and I had breakfast at the hotel, then rode down into Death Valley, stopping for photo ops here and there, and finally back to Vegas through Pahrump. I took a day off Saturday, since Greg and my daughter in law Beth were celebrating my grandson Quentin’s 14th birthday that day, and rode home solo to Tucson on Sunday.
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The ride photos are from my iPhone along with still captures from GoPro videos I took riding up and down Mt. Whitney and later through Death Valley. It’ll be another day or two before I edit the videos and put them up, but the Death Valley ones are toast: there’s a dead bug smack in the middle of the lens, upstaging all the pretty scenery. Fortunately, the Mt. Whitney videos are fine.
I love my cross-country Gypsy tours, and am already thinking about the next one. Don’t know yet where I’ll go, but I am going, probably in the spring.
Click on any of these images to see the full sized originals on Flickr. There are even more photos in my Gypsy Tour Nov 2016 album on Flickr.
*Yes, I wear gloves. I took them off to fish the iPhone out of my pocket so Donna could take that photo. ATGATT: all the gear all the time, baby!