Rocky Mountain High

Hello,

We've been having a really good time with our son Marc and his wife Jess. We changed the oil and filter on three of the bikes, Jeannine's Suzuki Boulevard C50, my Kawasaki Vulcan 900 and Marc's Suzuki M109R.. Which one has the easiest oil and filter change?? Not the Vulcan or the Boulevard. It's the uber-sophisticated 109R !! Marc also adjusted (stiffened up) the suspension on Jeannine's bike after he took it for a test ride and said it was way too soft. Jeannine really likes it better now.

We had a wine tasting at Marc's house which was really nice. Everyone at the wine tasting salutes "Lost Wheels Motorcycle Club"...

Yesterday we rode the highest paved road in North America.... It was the most amazing 200 mile bike ride yet. What's it like to ride up to 14,000+ feet???

Wow!!
Yikes!!
Cold!!
Snow!!!
Awesome!!
Incredible views!!
OMG!!!!
Got oxygen???
Glad you got fuel injection???


The highest road in North America is to the observatory on the summit of Mount Evans, Colorado... How can you get there from the Hudson Valley, NY?? Take the Bear Mountain Bridge and follow route 6 west to Idaho Springs, Colorado and take a left onto Colorado route 103 toward Mount Evans. Just hop on your bike and go!! You could also take I-84 to I-81 etc. and finally get on I-70, drive through Denver, and take the exit for the visitor center in Idaho Springs, but it would be a more boring ride. Anyway, when you get to the restaurant and the entrance to the auto road up the mountain, the fun begins.. There is a sign that says "Speed Limit 30 MPH", but I think that is an observed fact, not a restriction. It is a steep 14 miles and 6000 vertical feet to the summit, with no guard rails... The switchbacks are really steep, and I shifted down to first gear on nearly every turn. It is pretty breathtaking to come up to a switchback and see nothing but air in front of you!! It really motivates you to make a proper turn!! At the summit there was a lonely mountain goat licking the handrails on the stairs. Apparently he is the subject of several post cards sold at the restaurant at the base.. What views... Every cloud that went by left a little snow shower.

The trip down the mountain was great, and actually less dramatic than the trip up. mostly because we were on the "inside" of the really scary corners.

Yesterday was Another Sunny Day... I'm really liking Colorado weather!! We went to the Thunder Mountain Harley Dealership near Longmont, Co.... Its a great excuse for a great ride. Jess is a computer consultant, and manager, but when she's not wearing the required three piece ladies suit she is a dyed in the wool Harley Chick !! The prices on some of the Harleys have come down, but not on their prestige models like the Softail Classic. I think the real deals at Thunder Mountain are the custom choppers. They make some really nice choppers, but if you need to maintain them, you can go to your Harley dealership. The running gear and wiring are 100% Harley!! We also had some chicken wings at the Hooters Restaurant directly across the street before we left... We just had to stop at a restaurant renowned for being simple and unpretentious, and whatever.....That Hooters restaurant gets quite a lot of business!!

Jeannine got to ride Marc's M109R. She really liked it... She said the low speed handling was fairly easy, in spite of the big 230mm rear tire. Marc said that's because he got a much better rear tire when he put on new tires. She said you have to be careful when you twist the throttle. Marc's bike has JDM ignition and other "invisible" options that make it quite a performer.. What a motorcycle!!!

Today we might head out to Rocky Mountain National Park... Not a cloud in the sky...

Harris and Jeannine

from Sante Fe, New Mexico to Longmont, Colorado

Hello,

We spent the last couple of days riding from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Longmont, Colorado.... I am now sitting in the living room of my son's house enjoying a coffee and checking my mail... A subtitle of this part of our trip might be "long live fuel injection".. It was nice having my motorcycle purr like a kitten at 8000 feet. . On Tuesday we left Santa Fe for Taos to get up into the mountains and to see the Taos pueblo. This is an ancient pueblo, still inhabited by a small group of Indians.. most of the pueblo is treated as a museum. Non-Pueblo Indians get to pay $10 to tour. There is no electricity or water in the Pueblo, so gas lanterns are used and water comes from the stream. Some rather scraggly dogs roam around the dirt streets. The chapel and the short guided tour are worth taking.

From Taos we headed east down Kit Carson Road into the mountains toward Cimarron and then on to Raton, NM.. We were going to experience really exciting roads and weather that day. You can go to Google maps and Get Directions from Taos to Cimarron, and then click on "terrain" above the map to get an idea of the road. We started going up steeply into winding switchbacks after we left Taos averaging about 30 mph... We also seemed to be heading into some very ugly looking clouds. This was a bit interesting because on the east coast we usually see bad weather rolling in from the south and west. In the Rockies I guess it rolls in from anywhere. The roads were getting damp as we crossed over the pass and the switchbacks started downhill, with a dry weather speed limit of 25mph. With light gravel in some of the corners, second gear and no throttle were the way to do this...We finally got down onto a beautiful valley and plains where we could pick up a little speed, but also see that the clouds were looking a little nasty. Jeannine said on the radio "Let's put on our rain gear before we get really wet." Good idea. We rode through the town of Eagle's Nest, then into the mountains again, except now it started to rain and the temperature dipped into the 40's We were up around 8000 ft. The going was even slower and trickier with beautiful canyon walls. Finally we descended into Cimarron. As a teenager I went to Philmont Scout Ranch and it is a definite highlight in my memory. I always imagined Cimarron as being a Boy Scout Mecca, with that BIG SIGN "Philmont 4 miles". In reality, Cimarron is a crossroads, with one gas station, a general store, a few tired houses and a rather small sign "Philmont 4 miles" ... We got gas and headed out onto the plains on the Santa Fe Trail towards Raton. Except for the rain, this was a nice ride. We hopped onto I-25 and rode to Trinidad, Co.

Our son Marc said he would meet us for lunch at Manitou Springs for lunch the next day and go back with us to his house. Manitou Springs is a touristy little town west of Colorado Springs. We woke up the next day to clear skies and 40 degree weather, but warming right up. By serendipity we pulled into the gas station in Manitou Springs at the same time!! Lunch was at Charlie's Barbecue Pit..and then off into the Rockies for a scenic trip north. I wanted to stop in South Park, near the town of Fairplay, but it was too far out of the way. We made it to Longmont for a late dinner....


This morning Marc looked at our bikes and said "Yipes.. you need to wash your bike." Hmmm.. these bikes are dirty... we've put on 3000 miles already. Today we are going to change the oil and filters and check everything over, and I guess we'll have to wash them too.

Harris and Jeannine

from Trinidad.... Colorado.....

Hello,

It's Tuesday, the day after Memorial Day and our Dartmouth 65th birthday party is over. Santa Fe was an interesting place. It has four colleges, the state capital, and tourists.. This means that there is a lot of discretionary money around......and the local merchants know it. Santa Fe is not cheap. I was also told that the street layout of downtown Santa Fe was not modeled after Boston as previously reported. Santa Fe is older than Boston. Santa Fe used sheep and goat paths for their planning, whereas Boston used the more modern cattle paths .. We stayed just a few blocks from the center of town and the end of both the Santa Fe trail from Independence, Mo and the El Camino Real trail from Mexico City.. At the end of these trails is a monument dedicated to fallen Civil War soldiers.. For lawyer types, all surveys and real estate locations in New Mexico are referenced to this monument.. Around Santa Fe are lots of Pueblo Indian Casinos...


The color of the landscape is khaki. I think this is why Indian costumes, clothes, and jewelry is so colorful...

Sunday of Memorial Day weekend we had the first trip of our vacation in a non-motorcycle vehicle.. It was a tour bus to Bandelier National Monumment and Los Alamos National Laboratories... Bandelier is a pre-historic pueblo, not named after the Indians but named after a Swiss archeologist who discovered and excavated the Pueblo cliff dwellings there. For geology buffs, this cliff was part of a huge volcaninc eruption about a million years ago that left thousands of feet of volcanic dust even finer than pumice. This dust compacted into hundreds of feet of a sediment called "Tuff" which is like a very fine and frittable sandstone. Erosion from a stream exposed this layer on the sides of canyons and the Anasazi and later the Pueblo literally carved homes into the tuff in the sides of these cliffs. To give you an examble of how soft this stone is, in the 1930's the CCC workers cut up blocks of tuff using carpenter's saws to make bricks for their pueblo style buildings. While we were there we met two Pueblo Indians, a father and son, who were making Indian drums as a demo. The son was going to UNM studying environmental science. The "old man" was a really interesting character. He also graduated from UNM "years and years and years ago" majoring in psychology.He "lucked out" in the '60's and got a job at the New York world fair. !! He was telling me all this while he was carving out the inside of a log with a chisel and wooden mallet to make a drum. He got employed by the park service because he went to a meeting years ago between the park service and the Pueblo Indians who wanted some say in how Bandelier would be run and and not have their sacred places desecrated. He said they have a very excellent relationship. Anyway, the park service "expert" was showing a lot of Pueblo relic tools and asking how they worked etc. The other Indians were like bumps on a log, but he chirped up on what they were for... The guy asked how did he know all this and he said" Well, I grew up in that house over there and my mother and dad used a lot of these tools.. The park supervisor hired him... I think that crafty Indian learned something from his psychology classes.......

Los Alamos Museum and how the city of Los Alamos started was also very interesting.. During WWII the city of Los Alamos officially did not exist!! It was more secret than area 54 of 1960's fame.. It was identified only as P.O. box 1580, Sante Fe, NM. Even birth certificates of babies born in Los Alamos said "Born in: Box 1580, Sante Fe, New Mexico." There are also replicas of the two WWII bombs in the museum and also of some modern atomic bombs.. It is surprising how small these bombs are, especially considering the explosive power they have.

Yesterday afternoon (Memorial Day) we met with some friends and took a ride in their rental car to the north of Sante Fe to explore some Pueblos. We saw a sign for a pueblo and turned down the dirt road. We arrived at a real live pueblo, complete with the dirt streets, sagebrush "lawns", real Indian people, derelict cars, a lonely school bus, a "tobacco free" school and a very simple but very beautiful Roman Catholic Chapel. Now we know: Pueblo means "town", not "ancient Indian ruins".

In the spirit of things we decided to explore a little further down one of these dirt roads in the rental car.. The road followed a small river with beautiful vistas and scenery... But, the road got smaller, and bumpier, then so bumpy we had to get out of the car so it would clear the rocks... Well, our Garmin did say the road should come out at a small town just around the corner (it turns out correct, except for the lack of a bridge across the river)... We drove about four more miles with the road getting smaller and bumpier., Jeannine thought this was quite the adventure, but Cindy was of quite the opposite opinion. The driver Wally, who is a lawyer and also Cindy's husband, was having a grand time, and riding shotgun so was I, until we hit bottom pretty darned hard and there was this new and strange noise,.. So, Cindy pulled her trump card and it was decided to turn the car around. But how do you turn a Chrysler 300M around on a narrow dirt road with huge boulders all around ?? Well, finally we did it, and made it back out. When we got back to civilization we ran the car through a car wash because it was really, really covered in dust and dirt and mud. It was a little incriminating that we didn't stay on paved roads as the rental agreement required.. The evidence was erased... After dinner we decided this was truly a fun day to remember.

Harris and Jeannine.

Sante Fe

We're in Santa Fe, NM, on the Pecos River (river??) quite different from the scenery we have seen so far.


We spent our extra day in Amarillo riding in Palo Dura Canyon. It was really interesting, both from history and the geology. It is the second largest canyon next to the Grand Canyon.

We headed west on I-40, and saw another wind farm.. These Texans aren't putting all their eggs in the oil basket!! Even though the wind was brisk, these huge blades turn very slowly. From one angle they looked like giant white storks, with their beaks dipping slowly toward the ground. To think the Dutch were using windmills over 400 years ago...


We got onto old 66 in Tucamcari NM.. This was such a sad 50's ghost town, with block after block of abandoned motels and diners. Everything had moved up to the intersections on I-40. We decided we were going to have a snack at a period correct diner on Route 66, and we finally found one, Rubee's with all kinds of "Bee's". We headed to Las Vegas, New Mexico on what might be an pre-1937 route of 66, now highway 104. We also got a warning to gas up, with no gas stations for over 100 miles....


We met a group of geology students and professors from the U of Texas mapping a formation on the side of the road.. I talked to the professor and he pointed out some dinosaur tracks in the huge wall. It was not what I expected, but he said, " In a few years that evidence will be gone. Erosion is a powerful force." He also asked me not to say anything to the students. He wanted them to discover it and try to figure it out. All in all this land was barren and poor. The little town of Trujillo was just a couple of worn out houses.



We arrived in Las Vegas, filled up our tanks, and there were signs for the Sante Fe Trail and "pre-1937" Route 66. Forget he interstate. Where do these roads go?













We headed south, weaving between the Pecos River and I-25. At one point we could see pueblo ruins so we went toward them and arrived at the Pecos National Park. This is also the site of the Civil War "Battle of Glorieta" March 26-28, 1862 which is considered "The Gettysburg of the West".. at least by the people around Glorieta. It seems us easterners don't give the battles west of the Mississippi enough credit... at least according to the people around Glorieta.....

Santa Fe is a new landscape. Wow.. The downtown seems to be designed using the same logic used in Boston...


Last night we went to a small pizzaria called "TheUpper Crust".. and there was a guitarist in the corner playing Renaissance and Baroque music . He played a couple of Spanish Pavanes for us...

Harris and Jeannine

Statistical Physics?? Chaos Theory?? Oklahoma?? Texas

Hello,

We're in Amarillo, Texas. Ever since St. Louis we've had bright clear skies and 80 degrees. We've ridden old route 66 in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. The speed limit is 70 to 75. We zip right along..

We had a nice leisurely lunch with Jeannine's sister in Springfield, Mo..Going through Joplin Missouri and into Oklahoma was really interesting as we went through the various Indian Reservations, the Miami, Cherokee, Sac and Fox etc.. Lots of cattle out here, I saw a huge herd of Charolais.. They are nice big white cattle that look a lot like Angus except much bigger. Another interest were the bugs. As my windshield got splattered I started to think about the statistics of the splats on my windshield.. and realized the bugs were obeying someting more like chaos theory .. These Oklahoma bugs are really well fed, let me tell you!!! We decided to stop in Tulsa, OK. for the night. Tulsa is another big city..

We went to Oklahoma City, which is 100 miles down the road. I typed IPRA (International Pro Rodeo Association) into my garmin, but it led us to their office, and not a museum or whatever. Anyway, it was right next to the stockyards, which is very definitely a blue collar section of town. Lots of cowboys!! It was passed lunchtime and right across the road was the "Cattlemen Cafe".. It was a definite hole in the wall. type place. It started in the 20's, serving cowboys "back room beverages" with meals during prohibition.
Inside was definitely older, but it turned out to be quite a large place, and packed!! I had the lunch steak with salad and baked potato for $7.99 and Jeannine had the BBQ flank steak with salad and veggies for $6.99.. They were REALLY good. The owner stopped by the table and told us that "Diner's, Drive-Ins and Dives" just finished filming a program on their cafe.. He said it woud be aired in the fall. We went across the road again to an Indian jewelry shop. They made jewelry right there. Oklahoma City is worth another visit sometime. Our next stop was Elk City on old route 66.. Its a really nice town with route 66 going through it just like in the 50's.., .

In Texas we went through McLean on old route 66. This town was sad with about every third home abandonded and only one small store that served as gas station, deli, and local teen hangout. McLean had the first "Phillips 66" gas station on route 66 back in 1922..



We've decided to spend a day in Amarillo and see the town.. The Texas panhandle is really interesting.. Another bright and sunny day!!

More later,
Harris and Jeannine

We're in St. Louis

Just as background.. This trip started as a 65th birthday party for my college class in Santa Fe , then somehow turned into a motorcycle trip. After the three day birthday party thing in Santa Fe we are heading up to Colorado to see Marc for a week and go riding in the Rockies with Marc and Jess. Then we’re heading down to Las Cruces , NM to New Mexico State University for a one week music camp for adults… We are going to head back east with stops in Fort Worth , and Dallas Texas for some rodeo… We’ll probably swoop over to Louisiana and up to Fort Smith , Arkansas to check out “hangin’ judge” Parker’s place and then up to Branson , Mo. . We plan on spending some time at the farm in Branson where Jeannine grew up and doing some local riding, then head off toward Lexington , Ky to a wedding of one of Jeannine’s cousins, then back home.....

Our first day was wet.. We got partway across Pennsylvania when there was a short rainstorm. We could see a light at the end of the tunnel, so we drove right through it. Not bad.. Then we did it again... A little worse.

Then we could see there was a BIG thunderstorm guarding the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio. We pulled under an overpass (sound familiar?) and I checked my Garmin... a Best Western in less than two miles in Hubbbard Ohio... We Can Do It. So off we went.. Boy did we get soaked in two miles, and as we pulled up, six more cyclists pulled in, just as wet as us..... (all New York Blue Knights, including a state trooper and a judge!!)

Yesterday morning we woke up to 44 degrees and windy.. Brr.. but we had a good day's ride. 600 miles.

Today we hope to have lunch with Jeannine's sister in Springfield Mo, and head to Tulsa.

Well, breakfast beckons.. More later.

Harris and Jeannine

We're off!

Hello Everyone,

Last night we had a great orchestra concert. Standing Ovation!!

Today we are off for New Mexico on our motorcycles. Our first day plan is to go to Columbus, Ohio, but there is a line of thunderstorms between here and there, so we may not get that far.

We're starting to pack the gear on the motorcycles right now and we should be off shortly.



Vroom, vroom

Harris and Jeannine

Welcome!

Welcome to the trip record of Harris and Jeannine's motorcycle ride across the US. They left New York with Harris on a Kawasaki Vulcan 900 and Jeannine on a Suzuki Boulevard C50 on May 16. When will they make it home?