This is a work in progress, being assembled as I travel.


Portland to Las Vegas and return, 2005

Once again, it's time to head for Las Vegas for the National Association of Broadcasters convention.  Since I have these cool two-wheeled motor vehicles, and since there are some great roads between home and Sin City, it makes a great excuse to take a few vacation days and make a trip of it.

This was to have been my first "real" trip on the new Ducati ST3.  But, alas, just two and a half weeks prior to departure, I got rear-ended by a young lady on Easter Sunday.  The Ducati is in the hospital now.  Luckily, I am not.  So, the venerable ol' V-Rod get pressed in to service one last time as a long distance touring bike ... and I remember why I bought the ST3

As I write this, I'm on the road.  Right now, it's Thursday the 14th of April and I'm in a little motel in Fort Bragg, California.  It's been a good couple of days so far.

DAY ONE - April 13.

Today is my first vacation day in nearly a year.  Not because I didn't HAVE them, but rather because I was stupid enough not to TAKE them.  Ain't gonna happen this year.  So, because I haven't had any time off in a long while, I'm wound a little too tight.  I stress over everything including the prep for this trip.  As such, I don't get on the road until 10:30 in the morning.

The first day of many trips for me is a "get there" kind of day.  I have a hard time relaxing in the first 24-48 hours on the road and I tend to just ride from pit stop to pit stop.  Today was no exception - I hit the road and barely stopped long enough for fuel all day long.

The day was chilly and gray.  After a weird warm winter in western Oregon, we're now having a weird cold wet spring.  Snow levels are low and I'm travelling through sun / overcast / sun / partly cloudy / rain shower / sun .... and on and on.

Somehow today it took less time for me to snap out of my funk.  It was around 2:00 in the afternoon when I came out the other side of a rain shower and up over a hill that overlooked a little valley that was surrounded by cloud topped hills.  The smell of balsam and spruce hung heavy in the air and 3 1/2 hours of riding had just gone by with barely a thought.  Suddenly I realized how lucky I was to be able to be doing this.  It was very nice and I relaxed and actually began to enjoy the day.  This is definitely a record for me for the amount of time it took to get in to vaction mode.

The ride was largely uneventful.  It was all slab down I-5.  About 30 miles north of Grants Pass, Oregon, however, the uneventful day suddenly turned very eventful.  All day long I had been riding in and out of little rain showers.  The longest I had been in any of them was, maybe, 45 seconds.  They were widely scattered and of varying intensties.  Then, north of Grants Pass, the "scattered" part ended and the sky opened up like someone just flipped a switch.  It rained.  It sleeted.  It hailed.  It snowed.  It snowed some more.  As I topped Sexton Summit, it snowed a LOT.  The snow was accumulating on my visor and the windscreen.  I was feeling my rear wheel skip out every so often as I twisted the throttle.  I was getting very cold.  My thermometer read 34 degrees.  It had been a little over 40 just five miles back.

For the next 30 miles, I limped along through this winter/spring mix and tried hard not to get run over by the semi's I was passing.  Then as suddenly as it all started, it ended.  By the time I got off I-5 and on to US199 at Grants Pass, I had had enough.  It was getting colder and I was shivering all over even with wind protection and heated grips.  A nice Best Western in Grants Pass is home for the night.


DAY TWO - April 14

Today was going to turn out to be better than yesterday.  A freind from Sport-Touring.net had made contact with me last night and today we were going to meet for lunch.  I called him from the gas station in Grants Pass and we made plans to meet in Crescent City, California.  He lives in Eureka and was looking for a coast ride.

The skies were still clearing when I left:


Highway 199 was in good shape today, although a bit wet in the dark corners.

At the Collier Tunnel rest stop, there was still snow on the ground:


A few miles past the tunnel, I managed to pass one semi but not a second before the BEST and TWISTIEST part of 199.  I was somewhat perturbed as I crawled through these fantastic curves at 25 MPH with no place to pull over, and no place to pass.

I pulled in to Crescent City a little after 11:30 and proceeded to look for my friend.  I found him and we had a bite of lunch at a little fish shack by the water.  It hit the spot quite nicely.

Gil seemed not to have a problem being seen with a V-Rod.

We headed south to Eureka, where I was invited to Gil's house for a coffee and after swapping stories for a bit, I hit the road again.  I headed off US101 for a bit and followed The Avenue of the Giants in the Humboldt State Forest



It was a perfect day and the redwood forest smelled wonderful.  The road was nearly empty and I was free to explore all I wanted.

The Avenue of the Giants ends a few miles north of Leggett where California 1 breaks off and heads for the beach.  I followed it and enjoyed my first nice twisty ride of the trip for 20 miles or so.  Just north of Rockport, I stopped to take a stretch break:


I continue down the PCH until I'm nearly out of gas and roll in to the first gas station in Fort Bragg.  Next stop was a motel, then the grocery store for supper.

Today was a really nice day.  Very relaxing, fun riding, not too cold most of the time, not too much traffic.  Just about perfect.


DAY THREE - April 15

Tonight, I'm in beautiful downtown Fresno, California.

Loooooonnnnng day.  On the road at 8:00 AM, done for the day at 7:30 PM.  I may not have picked the best route for a four day sojourn, but it's been gorgeous and the riding has been perfect.

The route from Fort Bragg was California 1 all the way to Marin, then across the Golden Gate Bridge, a stop at The Exploratorium in San Francisco and then over the Bay Bridge to Oakland and over to California 99 and south to Fresno.

Breakfast:


The first stop today was the Point Arena lighthouse:


The sky was virtually cloudless:


Riding California 1 is very hard sometimes.  Not the corners, but rather the VIEW from the corners.  Over and over you're in the middle of an amazing set of very tight linked curves when you get hit smack in the face with this:

But today, the road was perfect.  Little traffic, unlimited visibility, dry.  The last time I had come this way, it was cold, windy and foggy.  Not today.  A lot of bikes coming northbound on highway 1, virtually none going southbound.  I have a feeling that a lot of folks created three day weekends and got out of the city.

By the time I got to San Francisco, it was warming up nicely.  So nicely that it was definately time to change to lighter gloves and open up the vents on the jacket.  I've been wanting to go visit The Exploratorium for years.  Every time I've been in San Fransisco before, I'd had too much to do on business or the museum was closed.  I'm glad I stopped by.  The place is the grandaddy of most modern hands-on science museums.

San Francisco ended the coastal part of the trip this time around.  After the museum visit, it was time to head inland and begin making miles toward Las Vegas.  My dawdling today will cost me a bit tomorrow, for I face a nearly 400 mile day to make Vegas.  It'll be an early start.


DAY FOUR - April 16

Wow.  Reading last night's installment and I see now how tired and out of it I was!  I try hard, on the road, not to think of the last fifty miles of the day as the Bataan Death March, but some days it's harder than usual.

Well, I'm here:


As I sit here writing this, that's the view out my hotel room window.  That's right, I'm not on The Strip, I'm way out on Boulder Highway at the Boulder Station hotel.  Just my kind of place - it's good ol' Vegas without being VEGAS!!!.  I tire of this town quickly, as you may notice.

I was on the road from Fresno at about 6:30 this morning after sleeping like the dead all night.  I woke up to no hot water (well, not "NO" not water, but not enough to make the shower comfy) and took a nice tepid shower to wake myself up.  I checked out and informed the desk clerk that between the bad A/C in the room, high speed internet access that didn't work and no hot water for the shower, my stay was less than ideal.  I don't care, the bed was comfy.

Today was all slab all day all the way.  99 from Fresno to Bakersfield, 58 to Barstow, I-15 to Las Vegas.

Even though the day was spent amongst the semi-trucks, the central valley in California is really kind of pretty around sunrise, in an industrial gigantic mega-agri-business sort of way. The sun was coming up over the Sierra all red and highlighting the snow covering every single peak.  Even as far south as Tehachapie, it was only 45 degrees at the summit and there was ample snow cover on the surrounding hills.  This is why I came this way, of course.  Spring snows in the Sierra Nevada Mountains pushed me on to a route to Las Vegas that avoided all of the more northerly passes.  I just didn't want to take the risk of the time loss if I should get stuck or turned back.

I stopped for fuel and breakfast in Bakersfield, wanting to put as many miles between me anf Fresno as possible.  No offense to any Fresno-ites reading this, but I now understand why so many people I've met that come from there say they'll never go back.

From Bakersfield to Mojave, I ran in to a hail of flies.  My helmet was squeeky clean in Bakersfield - by Mojave, it looked like this:


I scrubbed it off again and once again it looked pretty much the same by Barstow!

Once on 58, I stopped for a stretch near Edwards Air Force Base.  If you look really, really, really hard in this picture, you can almost make out the rocket test stands up on the hills:


The oblilgatory bike-in-front-of-scenery shot:


Today, my sitting muscles finally started to complain.  It's been, after all, a year since I've done distance on this bike.  Ever since I got the Ducati, it's been the bike I've been prepping for these trips, so pressing Ol' Quicksilver back in to service again reminds me why I bought the Duc.  This bike just ain't made for the long road.

On the other hand, the weather is perfect and the road is open, so who can complain?




What's this picture doing in here?  I can't help it.  I'm a broadcast engineer and I know what it's like to have to service sites like this one located about 50 miles east of Barstow in the middle of nowhere.  It's there, of course, so your cell phone will keep working on the way to Vegas.

So, I'm here.  I've got to clean the bike up a bit, so after I get done posting this and getting a bite to eat, it's off to Wally World to get some supplies and some rags.  Tomorrow morning, I'm due at my first work meeting for the week and work continues all day and in to the evenings all week long.  I leaved again next Friday.

The trip has been fun so far.  Perfect weather (well, after Wednesday, that is), perfect roads, bike running well, no issues of any kind.  This has been an interesting experiment, this "posting from the road" thing.  The only hitch this time around was no high speed connection at the motel in Fresno.  I had to do dial-up, so it took a little longer.  It's also clear that when I'm tired, I don't write very well, nor tell a very good story.  That's part of why I was doing this - to learn the limitations of the equipment, the services and me.  Even though I took more pictures than I normally do, I still didn't stop to take enough.  Part of that comes from the need to push to destination each day.  Curing that requires better trip planning.

I hope you've enjoyed this report so far.  Now, it's off to do errands and get ready for tomorrow and the week.  I'll post here again when I leave for Portland on Friday.

Oh, and some folks have been curious about the setup on the road:


It's a Dell Inspiron 600m Celeron laptop with built-in wireless adapter.   The SanDisk adapter allow me to slip my camear CF cards directly in to the PCMCIA slot on the computer.  On the machine, I have Mozilla composer to build the web pages, WS FTP-Pro and PhotoShop Elements 3.0 - in short everything I need to edit photos and post to the web.


Off the road, at the show

Yeah, this section has absolutely nothing to do with motorcycles, but I thought I'd post a little about what I'm doing on this trip in between the southbound and northbound rides at the convention


Not much to look at from the outside, these are the big 45 foot trailers that are used for NFL and other large remote TV productions


At the Bell Helicopter booth.  A Bell 407 TV helicopter


A very large extendable camera crane


At the Patriot Antenna Company booth


The Panasonic HD-3D theater.  HD with 3D glasses on a 30 foot screen - pretty neat.


A satellite Hummer built for Univision


A broadcaster's convention "Show Car" - A Chevy SSR outfitted with a full mobile digital electronic news gathering microwave transmission system in the bed.

It's been a good show so far, although like always, my feet are killing me.  The big issue this year is the pending relocation of the entire broadcasting industry's most used microwave radio systems to a new band to make way for Nextel to move in to those frequencies, thus vacating a large swath of public service bandwidth in which Nextel's services have been causing interference.  Nextel is replacing the entire US broadcasting industry's microwave news gathering infrastructure - a project estimated to cost them something like $500 million.

It's always fun to learn about the new toys and technology in my industry.  This is the one time each year that we get to confab with the biggest and best people and companies in our business.  Conversations with the new FCC Chairman have been interesting as have industry discussions about the final transition to digital television and High Definition.  All of that said, this show is huge and the days tend to be long with meetings and appointments from morning 'till dusk, then schmoozing and other meetings after hours.

Two more days of walking the acres of exhibit floors during the day and playing in the casinos at night.  It'll be a day or so before I start really looking forward to going home, but it'll happen.  It always does.


BACK ON THE ROAD - DAY FIVE

Las Vegas to Reno via US 95 was today's route.  Las Vegas at 6:30 AM, Reno at 4:30 PM.

Today was a wierd day.  I can't explain it, but the eyes looking back at me on the inside of my face shield were vacant, distant, empty, tired.  There were times when I'd go 50 miles without paying any attention to what was going by except the road and the other vehicles around me.  50 miles at a time with hardly a though in my head.  50 miles at a time without emotion, without feeling, disconnected and far, far away from the motorcycle.

Maybe it's just that I'm tired from the week at the convention.  Maybe it's the post-convention decompression. 

Maybe it's the week and half away from home.  Maybe it's the carpal tunnel surgery I have scheduled for Monday noon.

I honestly don't know what it is and I'm hoping that a good night's sleep here in Reno will cure it.

At least I got some decent pictures in the desert today.


It was quite gray in the morning and later toward dusk.  On US95, there were several places approaching Tonopah that were quite cold.  It was hard to believe the thermometer as it read 55 degrees.


The heat of summer is still a ways off yet.  The small desert flowers are in full bloom in the Amorgosa Valley in Southern Nevada.


Your humble author on a stretch break in the Amorgosa Valley.


This picture pretty much sums up the day, actually.  US 95 is a very scenic, if monotonous, road.  Out in the middle of the desert, nobody can here you scream.

The riding was good today.  No real traffic until commuter hour in Reno.  It was uncomfortably cold in several places in the south early this morning, but I rode out of the cold patches pretty quickly.  Around noon, the breee began to pick up pretty good and for several hours, I fought a hard, gusty desert wind blowing in from the west.  This, of course, fortold the clouds that now surround me here in Reno and the forecast of rain and thundershowers for tomorrow.

Reno to Portland is certainly doable in a day, and at this point, I'm thinking that I may do that tomorrow.  However, I have two days left and even if I stop just two or three hours short of Portland tomorrow night, that may be a better idea than pushing and having another weird day...


DAY SIX

Reno to Roseburg through the mountains

Today's ride was up US395 out of Reno to CA139 outside Susanville to OR39 at Hatfield to OR140 in Klamath Falls to Medford and I-5.  I sit, this evening, in a Best Western in Roseburg, the sky having opened in a big way about 30 miles out of Medford.

I don't think I ever really did get warm today.  It was about 40 when I left Reno and although it flirted with 50 and even 60 in a couple of spots, 40 was pretty much it all day long.  In the hills of the Modoc National Forest, there was still snow in the shadowed areas.  The roads were clear and mostly dry all day, however, and the trip went on without incident.

After breakfast in Reno, I stopped to take a look at the hills tht I was headed for


The snow level wasnt all that far above where I was going to be all day.  This late winter this year is a little weird.  US 395 from Reno to Susanville is pretty much like US95 from Vegas to Reno - nice scenery, monotonous road.

North of Susanville, however, I moved on to CA139 and began to climb in to the hills and some fun roads

Finally!  A little bit of asphalt nirvana.  For the next 45 miles or so, I had to pay attention to what I was doing.

The valley in the area of Susanville

Eagle Lake south of Adin, California.  Looks like it would be a lot of fun in warmer weather.  It was about here that I started looking forward to a stretch break / bathroom break / fuel stop in Adin.  A few miles later I found that Adin is a pretty small place.  At least there was a gas station.

This is where I have to let you in on a small "TMI" thing about myself today.  I'm not sure what I ate yesterday that my gut didn't like, but around 3:00 am today, I began visiting the bathroom often and with, um, "explosive" results in many case.  Luckily, the majority of the issue had subsided by the time I left, but today, bathrooms were somewhat important - terribly important at times.  The gas station in Adin was so small that it only had one unisex bathroom and that was occupied, when I arrived, by a guy who was pretty much bathing and getting ready for his day .... 20 minutes later, I had fueled the bike, cleaned my helmet and done a little dancing in the parking lot outside the restroom door.


Approching Tulelake, California, it was once again time for a short stretch break.  Geez, look at that "freeway flat" starting to develop on the rear tire!

I stopped for lunch in Klamath Falls and tried to warm up a little bit.  Pressing on to Medford, the sun was out, but I could see omimous black clouds on the horizon to the north.  I entered I-5 in sunshine, but I wasn't 5 miles north of Grants Pass when they turned on the water vavles upstairs.  Gee, could I tell I was back in the Willamette Valley?  It actually began as just a mist, but within 15 minutes, I was down to 60 MPH and feeling the raindrops pelt my legs like buckshot.  The spray being thrown up by the trucks was severe at times and water was beginning to come in to my helmet via the vents.  There was really no place to stop before reaching Roseburg, so I decided to press on for the remaining 35-40 minutes it would take to get there.  It was a little before 5:00 pm when I pulled in to this Best Western and walked dripping in to the office to get a room for the night.

Tomorrow is a fairly quick 4 hour jaunt home to Portland, a number of errands once there, and prep for the upcoming week.  This is all I'm going to write on this trip for now.  Tomorrow's ride will be all slab and more like a commute than anything else - not very interesting, in other words.

This has been a good trip.  A good convention in Las Vegas, meals and conversation with old friends and colleauges, and lots of learning.  The ride south was nicer than the ride home, I think, but maybe that's just because the adventure is almost over and I'm not looking forward to getting home.  After all, at noon Monday, I go in for carpal tunnel surgery on my left hand.  That means that I'll be off any bike (evdn my bicycle) for about six weeks while my hand heals.  It also means learning how to do everything one-handed for a while until I can begin doing light things with that hand.  So tying shoes, typing, driving, doing dishes, cooking, etc. are all going to have to be re-learned.  Why I'm dwellng on all that, I'm not sure.

Thanks for reading.  Thus ends my first experiement in on-the-road posting.

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