one day on the road

Most days out here are good. Some better, some worse, all a mix of everything from spectacular to terrible that, when distilled down usually amounts to "good". Today was only an exception in that it was perhaps a little better than most.

Here's how that looks to me.

7:03 AM - Wake up. Sore everywhere from yesterday's ride and the terrible bed at this fleabag motel. Stomach angry from crappy Indian food last night. Unhappy about the motel, but I couldn't find a campground (Saturday nights tend to be full at the obvious places, and with that being my first night in California, I don't have a camping map yet). Contemplate all of that.

7:11 AM - Finally accept the inevitable. Roll out of bed. Shower.

7:18 AM - Check for breakfast places in Fortuna, the next town down the road.

7:20 AM - Start mapping potential routes. On a tip from a friend (thanks, Rabbit Fighter) I want to hit State Route 36 from Fortuna to Red Bluff. Finally settle on two probable routes, one traversing that road once and taking the slab down to San Francisco, the other taking it out and back, returning to the 101, then following the coast to a state park I'd picked out. Which I took depended on whether 36 was really any good.

7:52 AM - Wash clothing in the sink.

8:04 AM - Finish blog post from last night and put it online.

8:27 AM - Discover that I washed the wrong shirt.

8:28 AM - Realize it's almost 8:30. Dammit. Long day ahead. Pack.

8:35 AM - Load bike and check out.

From here, times get hazy.

9 - Get breakfast at the Redwood Diner. Excellent diner of the classic style. Good enough biscuits and gravy washed down with plenty of orange juice and water. (Stomach still isn't up to the classic orange juice and coffee routine.) A local gives me his card. He's a motorcycle repairman. "Just in case." He also gives me a warning to stick to. the. speed limit. through town. This is good advice.

9.5 - Hit the road again.

9.7 - Miss my turn due to construction. Execute an illegal U-turn across a freeway median through a construction zone. Continue through small towns and busy road.

10 - Finally hit open road. Good road at that. Everything from tight, forest twisties (hemmed in by redwoods on both sides, their trunks only inches from tarmac); to big sweepers; to unlined, gravel-filled switchbacked mountain hell. Bridgeport did not have fuel. Dinsmore did.

11 - Refuel in Dinsmore. The ZRX has about a 150 mile comfortable range, including some chunk of reserve. I try to respect that. Being 80 miles in and not knowing when the next gas stop is, a refuel was due.

11.1 - Drop the bike in the parking lot. No damage to it, save a scraped-up mirror. No damage to me save a bruised ego. Now I have to name it. (If you're going to lay something down, you should probably know its name, no?) Dammit. I'm thinking "Anneke". Discover that the oil can I've been carrying has started leaking. Procure a gas can to replace it. Drink a ton of water and Gatorade.

11.3 - Get back on the road. Very good road this time. Aside from a deer running in front of me, excellent road, in fact. Good, tight hairpins and long, 60 mph sweepers. Best part being the 55 mph speed limit, which is at times more a goal than a limit. And it just goes. For miles and miles and miles.

A brief lecture about highway design as it pertains to motorcycles (cages too, I suppose). There are two basic types of road: straight and not straight. Straight road isn't worth considering, so we'll deal with the latter. Not straight road can be divided up in any number of ways by the nature of the curves, etc., but there are really only two distinctions that matter: uphill or downhill, and inside or outside. This assumes that your not-straight road is built on the side of a mountain. Most are.

It is easier to ride fast uphill than downhill, because it allows you to stay on the throttle through the turns. Do that going downhill and, unless every turn is an increasing radius turn, you either end up really slow in the entrance or too fast to make the exit. Uphill, it's cake.

It is easier to ride fast on the outside lane (the lane with a dropoff to its right) than the inside lane (the lane with a mountain to its right), because you can see around all the turns. On the inside, you can't see around your right turns, because the mountain is in the way. This is greatly exacerbated by the gravel and rocks that tend to collect near the exits of those inside right turns. Your choice is to either dive into the corner with abandon and hope that you can find a clear exit or take the slower, more-cautious line toward the outside of the turn (hoping nobody oncoming cuts the apex), which makes it really hard to get into a good rhythm, which means making progress takes forever. On the outside, none of this is an issue. Just take the corner at your chosen speed and let the bike do the rest.

Point being, as long as the pavement isn't totally thrashed, a super-twisty road that puts you uphill on the outside lets you feel like a superhero. Deals Gap ("The Dragon")? Uphill, outside. 421 ("The Snake")? Uphill, outside (at least for a lot of it). Route 36? More of the same.

Unplug brain. Let body and bike get to work.

12.3 - Crest 4000 feet.

12.5 - After a few "holy-shit-it's-beautiful-here" stops, I realize it's 100 degrees out, the road has straightened out, and there's no way I'm taking the slab. About 40 miles from Red Bluff, I stop to reconsider my route and get rid of all the water and Gatorade. In Red Bluff, there's a sign I really want to take a picture of. It's the "twisty road" sign, with "NEXT 140 MILES" underneath it. The road isn't that twisty between here and there. It's 100 degrees out. I'm not burning an hour and a half to take a picture of a sign. Re-route planned.

12.6 - I check my chain. The second clip-link clip has jumped off. Dammit. Replace it with the third, which I tie in place with some copper wire (more wishful thinking than anything).

12.7 - Backtracking. Put pegs down. Take rubber off the sides of my boots. The ZRX is doing admirably in full dress.

1 - Top up my tank, head for the sticks to skip a chunk of road I didn't like.

1.3 - Gravel. Really? WTF?

1.5 - Okay, back to narrow pavement. That's fine, even if going is slow.

2 - Back to the big road. Need to go left. Head right to find more curves. This time things get sketchy. Lots of tar seal.

2.2 - Road finally gets better.

2.5 - Hook a tire in a plow scar while fully leaned over through a hairpin. Bike caught the groove and pulled in like it was on rails. I didn't even know that was possible. Cool.

3.1 - Followthrough into a decreasing-radius left. Overcook it. Tightening fast, and I'm too near the pegs. My skill letting me down, not the bike. Stand up, brake down with plenty of room to spare. Out of 350 miles of hard cornering today, this is the one turn I botch. Not too bad. Could be better. At the exit, I notice a cross with a name, some dates, and an H-D shield. Looks like I'm not the only one it's caught out.

3.7 - Back to Dinsmore, deep into reserve. Put more gas in than I ever have before. Meet Tim and his KLR there. Tim asks how long I'm out. "As long as it takes." Tim seems impressed, shakes my hand, and tells me that since he's been out, I'm the first person to get the answer to that question right. I ask how long he's been out. Sixteen months. We swap info about the road to come.

3.9 - Some locals get in a fight in front of the store and apparently arrange to shoot each other in front of one of their houses. Meth country, for sure.

4.1 - It's finally time to leave Dinsmore and Tim. Point ZRX at 101. Pull trigger. BLAM!

?? - It's cool here. Back to liners and wool. Stow the clothes I've had hanging from the luggage straps all day to dry.

?? - Break off onto the Avenue of the Giants through Humboldt Redwoods State Park. More beautiful, huge trees. More slow cages. Unlike the ones on 36, these don't slow down to let me by. Boo. Get back to the 101.

?? - Finally find the junction with 1 South. Another pile of twisty road between me and the coast.

?? - Hit the coast. It's socked-in, but completely beautiful. Back to mid-50s, too.

At a turn-out, unable to ride because I can' t stop looking at the ocean, I have a conversation with a cute blonde girl in a truck.

CBGiT: It's beautiful here.
Me: It really is.
(It really was.)

...

M: How's the road that way?
C: Foggy.
M: *nods head*

...

C: How's the road that way?
M: Twisty.
C: *nods head*

...

C: Will you take my picture?
M: Sure.
(So I do.)
C: Want me to take yours?
M: That'd be cool.
(So she does.)

We thank each other and go our separate ways.

For all of the complicated human interaction life requires at times, a simple exchange like that, especially when carried out in an almost-alien landscape at the edge of the continent, makes me so appreciative for what interesting creatures we can be.

(Typing this, I realize that you probably had to be there for that to make any sense.)

7:30 - She wasn't kidding about foggy. It's mind-shatteringly beautiful here though. Actually having trouble coping with it after the long day's ride.

7: 50 - Duck into a weirdly tropical scene for a corner. Tall bamboo. No fog. Everything's green. Surfers loading their boards into a beat station wagon. After the corner, I'm back in northern California.

8:05 - Pull in to Fort Bragg to gas up (deep into reserve again) and find some dinner.

8:15 - Park at the North Coast Brewery. Meet a guy from NJ who's out here for a BMW rally next weekend. Lots of Beemers around. That explains that.

8:25 - Beer in hand, fish and chips on order. This makes up for the two Clif bar and Gatorade lunch. Tell the internet where I am. Find out who won the World Cup. Answer email. Etc.

9:20 - Lazy barkeep keeps me an extra twenty minutes by repeatedly forgetting to close my tab after being distracted by other patrons. One beer, one food item. Shouldn't be that hard.

9:30 - Not going to make Salt Point tonight, which is where I'd intended to camp. Not going to make anywhere to camp, actually, and it's getting dark. My choice is to find a fleabag motel in Fort Bragg or take a chance on a fleabag motel further down the coast. I opt for the latter.

9:40 - Fog rolls in.

9:55 - Stop in Mendocino. Nothing but bed & breakfasts here. Looks like Point Arena- about 45 miles down the road- is my next best bet. Put on my warm gloves.

The fog gets bad. It's more like drizzling rain than fog. I have to wipe my visor every 30 seconds or so. Running my high beams to pick up the cat eyes in the road leaves me unable to see much of the road itself. Top speed is extremely limited.

Then the deer start showing up. Three dart across the road before it's over, inevitably right in front of me. Multiple others hide in the brush, barely visible.

This is rough.

11:30 - (Yes. 11:30. Do that math. It was bad.) Point Arena. Find fleabag motel. Burn more dollars on a room, but at this point I don't care.

11:36 - Bags hit floor. Head hits pillow. Out.



---------------------------------



It's now the next morning. Woke up at 6:50, showered, and wrote this. Feeling a lot better than yesterday morning. San Francisco today, so I should be able to find a place to post this. In the mean time, I need to suit up, check out, and find some food. It's time for another day.

As always, more later.