July 12, 2008 - Saturday - Day 12
USA/MEXICO/CANADA
DOUBLE CROSS COUNTRY
& THE TRANSCANADA HIGHWAY
-- OR BUST - SUMMER 2008
Miles Today - 365 - Total Miles - 3329
Average Daily Miles (of travel days) - 302.6
Winter Park,TX- to Plainview, TX (just north of Lubbock)
(-staying at a Best Western-)
(TX)
- SANDSTORM! - A NEW FRIEND - RIDING INTO NIGHT!
The heck with Leno, check out this amazing news report:
http://www.news3online.com/index.php?code=8iat2r15K9ENH792Dt17
“There's nothing in your life that can go so wrong that a little bit of windshield time can't sort it out.” - Koy Carson
For anyone who loves to ride a motorcycle, this day would have a star beside it! It was like a dream - Mostly warm. A ton of blue sky stuffed with cottonball clouds. Flat, clean, reasonably wonderful roadway. Hardly any traffic. A few challenges. Just a delight!
Had my first 100 miles in at just about the hour and fifteen minute mark.
At a few points it was very windy. The bike and I handled it well. I remembered coming out of Soccoro,NM a number of years ago on my bicycle, and the wind had me at a 45º for much of the ride that day. It was nothing like that this day, but I sure had to keep both hands on the handlebars. No lollygagging, right hand on the throttle, left hand by my side, feet up easily on the highway pegs for parts of today - at times it took all my strength to keep the bike from swaying in the wind - especially in the passing truck eddies.
One of the reasons that the day was so successful was that I stayed hydrated well. I used the little Camelbak bladder often, sucking from the tube and getting the refreshing cool liquid often into my body. Occasionally I would try to spit the water back onto my palm so as to direct the water onto my chest for a cooling effect. However, it would usually just splurt back up into my face. It's a technique I will have to refine a little…
Stopped about midway for another shop at Wal-mart, and especially for the Subway that was in there. I occasionally get criticized for not trying more of the local foods. But I find on a trip like this that it's much better to eat the same foods all the time so that I don't have to worry much about stomach problems or digestion difficulties when on the road. I hear about a lot of people who have trips sidelined for them because of food problems. So I keep it simple, and over the years it has worked well for me.
While sitting munching in the Subway from about 1pm to 2pm I enjoyed very much catching up on emails. Some folks wrote that they were actually trying to contact the Jay Leno show on my behalf. That after reading my little piece yesterday - so who knows what may become of it?
In the store I treated myself to a new pair of binoculars and some razor blades. I people-watched and chatted with a few, too.
Near Sweetwater, someone with a sense of humor must have been in charge of naming the roads. It brought a smile to my face as I passed Noodle Dome Road. And just as I was chuckling about that I came upon Stink Creek Road! There was no awful smell there. But I sure wondered about how those two roads came upon their names…
So I only had about 20 miles to go to Lubbock. And for the most part the sky was clear, the air was warm, and far in the distance there were some dark clouds. I lingered with the friendly woman behind the counter of the gas place, and we chatted about things in general. I asked her about the weather, and if I need to worry about policemen on the road north. She says not to worry about the police at all. My grinning reply was, “Ok, if I'm stopped, I'll tell the officer YOU said it was okay.” We laughed and then she said that would be fine as her uncle was a highly ranked officer on the force.
Eventually I headed out onto the roadway, and what happened next will not soon be forgotten.
A hot breath of air licked me - hotter than I've felt on the trip so far, and then it moderated. Seemed like nothing but scrub and prairie on both sides, no buildings that's for sure. I could have gone about five or ten miles or so, and then up ahead I saw a storm cloud, one much lower than I'd ever seen before. There were some lightning strikes to the right and left and then a huge bold trident strike straight ahead. Not much unusual so far, but what WAS unusual was the color of the lower part of the cloud as it reached toward the ground!
I saw oranges and reds and pinks. I had never seen anything like that before, and it was VERY odd. My heartbeat went up a couple notches in intensity as I tooled along. It became dark, and then a few drops bounced off me, and then the torrent began as the cascading rains pummeled the Nomad and me. During a brief lull, I stopped to put a plastic bag over my tank bag and then rode on as the intensity and the lightning and thunder of the storm increased. But still no clue as to why the odd color… until….
I reached a part in the road where it became very clear to me the reason for the oddly hued atmosphere. It was a rain and SAND storm. I immediately pulled my helmet's face shield down tight and continued through as I could see whirlpools of sand being swirled around me. Vision in front of me decreased markedly. There weren't many other cars on the road, but I was very careful to watch ahead and behind.
At one point as I was making my way the wind caught under the blue bag I had wrapped around my tank bag, and that wind stretched the blue plastic up like an ever expanding balloon. I kept trying to mash it down because my big fear was that it would balloon up and block my view of the road. It would have been a comical scene had the implications not been so grave.
After about fifteen minutes the storm began to abate, but I watched in it my rearview mirror - as it totally covered the rearview mirror's reflection.
I've been thinking about people's reactions to my Day 10 dust-in-the-eye blinding experience story and that big storm… And I'm thinking how I took it in much better stride than most folks who read about it. And I came to the conclusion as to why that is… Of all the exciting motorcycling experiences I've had on this and other trips, there are few or none that can compare to the excitement, perhaps danger, and surely uncertainty that I've had on my 24,000(!) or so miles of bicycling around the country.
I rumbled into Lubbock following Koy's good directions, but then must have missed a turn. After following the GPS punched-in directions I found the street with no problem.
I shortly saw Koy standing in the middle of the block waving both arms up at me. I rolled up and met him and his Pomeranian little black dog, who was yapping at me to beat the band. I hopped off the bike and told him about what I had just went through, the storm and all, and he stood there getting a good big hearty Texan laugh about it… He allowed that maybe he should have warned me about the sandstorms…
It was good seeing Koy's handsome Shadow Sabre in the driveway. Like my Shadow Spirit it is an 1100cc and it has several cool accessories. The key goes in the side on the Honda not on the top of the tank as on the Kawasaki. But I told Koy how I STILL instinctively in the morning go to put the key in on the side. It's surely a habit ground in after the three-year ago trip of 40-days, 11,000 miles, and a route covering all the lower 48 states.
Shortly Koy invited me in and we sat for a bit in the comfy bachelor pad type little home.
We chatted in the living room with a huge TV paused in the middle of a show and talked. We talked about motorcycles, and places, and livelihoods and growing up times. Re technology, Koy noted that sometimes the further we go ahead, we sometimes seem to be going backwards as well. That, for instance, despite there being more cell phones and so on, the less he finds that people actually listen.
We went into the computer room, and Koy brought up one of my recent posts - the one with the huge storm clouds. He seemed a bit taken aback by the cloud after he looked at it more closely, and stated with some kind of awe in his voice, “That's a WALL cloud.” Never having heard the term before I asked what that was… He said that here in tornado alley that's the kind of cloud that spawns tornados. That took me a bit aback. But I said, “Well, this isn't the time of year for them, is it?” Which prompted him to say, “It's EXACTLY that time of year!” But he went on to say that I'd be moving out of the area in my next day's ride.
We went out to the garage and there was Koy's casting shop. It's where he makes his living making jewelry. He also has a store in town. On the right, looking like a big washtub was his centrifugal casting machine. There was a burnout furnace next to that, and on the left was the vacuum station, which sucks stuff out of the casting so one doesn't get bubbles in the pieces of jewelry.
There's a temperature controller on the wall on the left. One's got to take the temperature to over 1400 degrees over twelve hours and then bring it down slowly. And the temperature controller helps in that process. I could tell that with the knowledge and pride and care that he took, that Koy was a master craftsman. I told him this, but he laughed it off…
He used to call himself a “jeweler”, but now he calls himself a 'Professional Artist.” The reason for that is that people want their “jeweler” to be all dressed up in suit and tie and be all clean cut and formal, but that's just not him, Koy said. A “Professional Artist”, on the other hand, can “be like me” he said, “have tattoos and ride motorcycles.”
I was very appreciative of Koy testing my tires and then putting a few pounds of air into my front tire. He gave me a scare when he noted that although my tread was good, I had some cracking on the sidewalls. However, I was relieved when he saw that was just dirt there…. Whew!
I had pulled into Koy's driveway and there was a little dip at the end of it and I had some trouble duckwaddling backwards with the big bike, and in fact couldn't quite get it out onto the street that way. In the end I had to zip down part of the sidewalk and go out a different driveway. With characteristic deadpan, and a friendly little jab infused in the wonderful southern accent, Koy noted, “No reverse on that big Kawasaki???” I chuckled about that a LOT, and I'm sure to be doing so for the next number of weeks as I hear it echoing in my thoughts.
As we pulled up to the Mediterranean Café and Koy zipped into the parking spot, he stood watching me as I slowly maneuvered the bike into the spot next to him. He noted while dryly smiling, and with a good amount of understatement that my Nomad didn't really “have a very dynamic turning radius.” I liked his phrasing and the way he put that, and said, “Exactly!”
I learned about the Texas Blue Laws. There are a quarter of a million folks here in this county but it's a dry county - because of the strong Bible Belt influence here one just cannot get a drink on Sunday.
After we chatted about Koy's dogs, I told him that I had had a number of cats. But he said I had that all wrong. “You might think you had cats,” he said wisely, “but you don't really. Because they really have YOU.” And as I thought about that, I decided he was right. To his credit, Koy has been involved in saving animals, especially dogs, for quite a number of years.
Koy showed me his huge tattoo on the upper part of his right arm. He's had a tattoo since he was 11 when he tattooed himself - a small Capricorn symbol on one of his fingers. He said he regretted that one at least occasionally, but not the others. The one on his arm has a number of inside meanings. For instance, there's a hook there that represents his ex-wife, and then the fire stands for an 'out of the fireman and into the fire type deal.'
Koy has owned a motorcycle every day since he was six years old. His dad was one of the best flat track racers in this area in the early days, the 1950's and 1960's. His brother has a roomful of Motocross and Enduro trophies - but he doesn't ride anymore because he lives in the Dallas area - and all the driving around there is just plain crazy.
I learned that Lubbock has the largest wind research base in the nation. Lubbock is also arguably the best planned out city in America according to Koy. All the streets one way that intersect are alphabetical, and they are criss-crossed by streets numerical.
Lubbock's big claim to fame, said Koy, is that Buddy Holly hails from here. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Holly) We stopped at the museum dedicated to Holly on the way out of town. It was closed, so we just got some photos out by a huge sculpture of Holly's trademark spectacles.
Koy and I were standing by the Buddy Holly Center and chatting about things, and then he came out with some wonderful motorcycling philosophy. He told me about the time he had a big life decision to make - he just didn't know what to do, a lot of complex business decisions and the such. He got on his bike rode, rode to Copper Canyon from Lubbock which was about 150 miles or so, and by the time he had gotten back, he had it all sorted out. And it was then he said, “There's nothing in your life that can go so wrong that a little bit of windshield time can't sort it out.”
Koy said he thought there were a bunch of motels 20 or so miles up the road a bit. We parted with a handshake, and with the hope that we'd see each other the next morning, when we'd breakfast, and bike north for a bit.
It turned out that the next motel was more than 50(!) miles. I was riding into the evening now, and on a Saturday night, when motel rooms are generally harder to find, it was making me a bit nervous. But it was a nervousness born with the excitement and fun of the trip. I mean this is what the trip is all about - it wouldn't be my first choice, but I could have ridden in the darkness for hours! And the best part? Surely one of the top parts of the trip so far was the sweet cool evening air. I purposely gulped it in. I swallowed it with happiness and joy and enthusiasm as the sun lowered toward the horizon and the clouds became darker and darker in the evening sky.
The towns are farther apart in this part of world. That added to the nervousness part, but finally Plainview came into site, and there were a few accommodations here including the last room at the Best Western. It was about 9pm already, and so I took it.
I quickly got gear into the room, the bike covered, and began all the evening chores.
Skyped with a pal from home, video guy Jim. It was sure good seeing him when he popped up on the screen. We had a nice conversation.
After uploading the day's photos, and Skyping with Ellie, it wasn't hard to fall into a pleasant and deep slumbering.
Note:
To view many of the photos from today and the whole trip, you can check out
http://www.photostockplus.com/home.php?tmpl=45&user_id=42473&event=196141. Some folks have reported trouble with this link, but most find that it works. Sometimes it takes two tries… Also, you can check out the past day journal entries by going to joelperlish.com, and clicking on the appropriate trip down at the bottom on the left hand corner.)
