It was great to be back on the road again (and escaping the growing Texas summer heat) and we kicked off our trip with a visit to Palo Duro Canyon State Park, near Amarillo. Known as the “Grand Canyon of Texas”, it is 120 miles long and as wide as 20 miles across in some places. We hiked the 6-mile Lighthouse Trail, climbing from the desert like park road up to the rim of the canyon. It was described as easy, and started out on a nice wide flat trail taking you around the first 3500-foot-high hill, but then we started to climb. I must have been out of hiking shape because it did not seem all that easy to me, lots of climbing and although we went before 9am it soon got as hot as you would expect for Texas in July. The views were pretty awesome from the top and we were able to climb up onto a nearby outcrop to get some good scenic photos (as well as a few shots of millipedes, lizards and a tarantula).
From Amarillo, we headed to Santa Fe, New Mexico where we were scheduled to spend a week. On the highway, we saw signs advising travelers that a 14-day quarantine was required for all visitors to New Mexico. WTF? (I had previously checked when making the plans for our summer but I failed to recheck before we left and with the virus worsening, so did the response in some states). We called the RV park and they confirmed the requirement but then they told us no one was actually enforcing the policy (the guy we talked to had an out of state license plate and said he’d never been stopped or questioned). Boy Scout Bill decided to shorten our stay to just one night and head someplace where we wouldn’t be ‘breaking the law’.
Our next planned destination was Colorado and given it had no quarantine requirements, we added a few stops to the plan. First up was Pagosa Springs, a cute tourist town near the Rio Grande and San Juan National Forests. The town has a small river running through the middle, with lots of people playing in the brown water. We mapped out several 5 to 6 hour motorcycle rides, with The Million Dollar Highway at the far end of the longest one. The weather was unpredictable with a storm blowing in every afternoon accompanied with high winds (not pleasant motorcycle weather).
We left early for each ride to try to avoid the afternoon storm but each time we got wet (they were good rides but maybe we should have gotten the message??). Twice we even got hailed on and Bill’s new bike does not have a windscreen so he was getting a full-frontal attack, including strikes to his most sensitive spots (I’m not sure what was more painful, getting hit by the hail or listening to Dessa laugh about it). I got several small bruises on my hands and arms, and Bill was freezing since he had no chaps, or rain liner for his jacket. We never did get all the way to the Million Dollar Highway (the expected highlight of all our Colorado riding). While we were headed that way, the rain came up early. We decided to push through but after riding in the cold rain for about 30 minutes, we gave up and turned around. Unfortunately, the rain still didn’t let up and in fact the storm followed us most of the 2-hour ride back home. Not fun!! After this freezing ride, we went back into town that evening (after the rain had finally stopped) to soak in one of the outdoor hot spring tubs over-looking the town (that was bliss).
Crossing the Rocky Mountains, we headed west to use up the rest of our New Mexico time by going to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. The town was very small and touristy, but we had some great food at The Gunnisack and I bought my first ever pair of hiking shoes at a sidewalk sale. In spite of the fact that we stayed in Gunnison, the National Park was still an hour away. Most of the lookout points along the park road required a bit of a hike to get the view, plus a trailhead for a longer hike. We stopped at most of the lookouts and did a few of the hikes and there were some really dramatic views. The canyon walls are extremely steep and the name Black Canyon comes from the fact that the bottom of the gorge only receives 33 minutes of sunlight a day, leaving the walls in black shade most of the time. According to a book on US canyons “none combines the depth, sheerness, narrowness, darkness, and dread of the Black Canyon”. The walls show evidence of the 2 million years it took the Gunnison river to carve the gorge, with very distinct colored bands of changing rock. The river drops an aggressive 240 feet per mile, and can be seen as a very thin ribbon at the bottom far, far away. Hiking to the bottom, climbing the walls, and kayaking the river are possible for experienced adventurers (which we are not).
Driving back east across the Rockies to Alamosa, Colorado, allowed us to visit Great Sand Dunes National Park. As you approach the park entrance, you can see the sun shining on the rippling dunes spread along the dark base of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains. It is believed that the sand was carried by the wind from a huge dry lake that once covered the San Luis Valley floor. We planned to rent sleds (which turned out to be flat pieces of waxed plywood) so we could slide down the dunes, but when we got to the rental place just outside the park, there was a really long line. We decided to skip sledding in favor of getting to the park before it got hot enough for the sand to burn skin (apparently on some days the sand can reach 150 degrees). It was still fun watching others try to sled and sand-board down the hills. It was apparently not as easy as you might imagine (definitely not as easy as sledding on snow with an actual toboggan). We climbed about 2/3 of the way up the highest dune, then decided there was not much point going the rest of the way (at least that was what we told ourselves, it may have been that hiking up a sand dune was harder than we wanted to work). We stopped to eat our picnic lunch and then hiked the Mosca Pass trail for some nice views from above of the dunes.
After a quick (and unremarkable) stop in Pueblo, we moved on to Colorado Springs, where Alex, Ashlee, and the boys were coming to visit us for the weekend. We packed a lunch and went to North Cheyenne Cañon to hike the Seven Bridges Trail. Somehow, we ended up on the wrong trail as there were no bridges on our hike, but we still enjoyed the day and the views of the valley. The boys, four and six, did really well on the over four-mile hike, with no (little) complaining. The grown men on the other hand whined about having to carry the small, soft sided, cooler containing our lunch (whined is a strong word, we commented that it might have been more effective to pack the lunch in a backpack to make it easier to carry).
I managed to fall while crossing a tiny creek when I stepped on a rock that slid out from under my foot, and earned myself a huge black bruise on my leg just below my hip. Fortunately, it did not hinder my ability to hike the rest of the way back. The next day we went to The Garden of the Gods, where we got caught in a downpour (looks like this is going to be our summer of getting caught in the rain). We were all soaking wet and only had one hour before we were scheduled to tour the Cave of the Winds. This sent us rushing to Walmart for dry clothes for all six of us, since the cave is 55 degrees and we were not allowed to reschedule our pre-paid tour. As caves go, this one was just mediocre and Bill kept banging his head on the low ceiling (to the laughs of all. Maybe this will actually be the summer of laughing at Bill when he gets hurt) but the boys enjoyed it. After our visitors left, we rode up Pikes Peak on the motorcycles (and didn’t get rained on although we did ride up through a cloud), and spent a day riding to Buena Vista, Colorado to have lunch with a friend of Bill’s from his Nortel days.
Leaving Colorado behind we spent a couple of days in Cheyenne Wyoming where you definitely get a “Wild West” impression. On our tour around town, we took photos of the giant cowboy boots they have scattered around the city, checked out the capital building, and shopped at Boot Town, where I got an awesome new pair of boots (while Dessa did need a new pair of motorcycle boots and they look good on her I didn’t realize that they were a skinny boot and that with the purchase I got the new job of Boot Bitch – helping her take them off). Cheyenne also had a lovely free botanic garden, that I enjoyed.
Back in April, we had canceled our plan to attend the Sturgis Rally to avoid being in the middle of several hundred thousand potential Covid-19 cases. We still wanted to ride the Black Hills so we headed to South Dakota the week before the rally. When we got out on the road, we discovered there were already lots of riders in the area (great minds …). The little towns were lined with bikes, and no surprise…none of them felt the need to wear a mask or social distance. Even the hostess and servers in the restaurants had no masks (the governor of South Dakota’s policy to manage the pandemic was that each person should do what they thought was right for them – very enlightened). We were the odd balls and avoided the crowds after one surreal restaurant experience. We still got to ride the great roads, saw lots of bison, prong horns, and did some hiking in Custer State Park. One herd of bison were invading an RV park and the prong horns blocked the road and would not move even when we honked at them. Wind Cave National Park was nearby and was an expected stop, but since the cave itself was closed due to COVID and a broken elevator, we decided to save it for another visit.
Badlands National Park looked like it could have been where they filmed the old Star Trek series. It was all rocky, and while some of it had lots of colored bands, other areas were basically just bleached white, giving it an other-world feel. Our hike included a rope ladder that was probably 50 feet long, and was almost vertical. The park road ended about ten miles from Wall Drug, a famous roadside stop on I90.
The Enchanted Highway was along our route to our next stop – Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Inspired by the movie Field of Dreams, Gary Greff created massive scrap metal sculptures along the road leading to Regent, North Dakota. Each installation has a phone number you can call for descriptions of the sculpture, as well as a pullout and picnic tables (great for us as just pulling onto the shoulder of a country road isn’t really an option when we are towing the trailer). Each tableau represents a different facet of life in North Dakota. There was a family, fish, pheasants, deer, geese and even crickets. Geese in Flight stands at the exit from I90 that leads to the Enchanted Highway and is certified by Guinness as the World’s Largest Outdoor Sculpture.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park lies in western North Dakota, where the Great Plains meet the rugged Badlands and contains a cabin where President Roosevelt once lived. We saw plenty of bison, one herd was even blocking the road (not great when you’re on a motorcycle – no protection if they decide to get frisky). There were tons of prairie dogs sitting on their little mounds and making a noise that sounds like a cross between a bark and a scream and even a few wild horses. The park road was a pretty nice ride but overall the park was pretty disappointing with none of the impressive beauty found in a lot of other national parks. An extra day allowed us to book a horse-back riding tour, and we also discovered a great Dakota dessert called Kuchen. Its origin is German and consists of a pie crust, a cake like center, and a custard like top (delicious).
Our original trip included three weeks in Canada (to visit my family and my niece’s wedding), but it became clear that we were not going to be allowed into the country (the border was closed on March 21st and re-opening was getting delayed 1 month at a time). While there was a shot it would reopen in late August, we figured they would institute a 2-week quarantine and be serious about maintaining zero contact. Again, we had to re-plan our route and now Bill was much more diligent in avoiding states with any visitor restrictions. (Given some state restrictions as well as other closing and event cancellations, we decided to focus the rest of the trip around more motorcycle rides. As such, I planned a route to the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky mountains)
Our next four destinations turned out to be pretty boring cities, in spite of the fact that two of them are the capital of their states. Bismarck, Fargo, Sioux Falls, and Omaha had very little of interest to see (that was open). After these, we were glad to get to Kansas City, even though we had been here before. As it turned out, we did all the touristy things we were interested in the first time, so other than dinner with a friend of Bill’s, it too was a week of normal activities, like going to the gym, golf and some riding.
I guess I should have been more grateful for the lack of excitement, because half way to our next stop, St. Louis, things changed. As we were passing through Columbia, Missouri we heard a loud bang that sounded like a gun shot. Assuming it was a blow out, we exited the freeway to check and discovered a broken leaf spring on the trailer. Not surprising given the horrible condition of the interstate freeways in the past few states. You might not notice it much in a luxury vehicle, but in our tightly sprung truck it is really bad. I have to wear two sports bras when we are towing and we often find things broken in the trailer when we arrive. We actually got super lucky that there was a Camping World just across the freeway and they referred us to a transport trailer repair shop a few miles away (since they didn’t have a spring that would fit our trailer and weren’t sure when they could get one). On the way, there, we discovered there was something wrong with the truck, it felt jerky and could not maintain speed on the slightest incline (turns out the bang we heard was the failure of the cold side intercooler tube on the turbo charger). We made it to the repair shop and had the trailer fixed in an hour. If we had broken down outside of town we would still have been sitting on the side of the road, so we were very happy with such a quick fix. We now obviously needed to get the truck checked out, so I found us an RV park three miles away, and we limped our way to it.
Our ‘luck’ continued since Columbia is large enough to have a Ford dealer, so the next morning Bill had the truck towed to their service department but this is where our luck ended. The replacement CAC tube was on national backorder (and had been for the past 6 weeks). They managed to patch it up and double clamp it, but gave us no assurance that it would hold, especially when towing twenty thousand pounds. Bill called a dozen dealers within a few hundred miles and found a dealer with 1 but it was already promised to another customer. Things were not looking good since we can’t exactly rent a truck big enough to pull the RV and we definitely had no desire to spend weeks to months in Columbia Missouri (I even started looking at trading in our truck on a new one). One of the dealers suggested after market performance parts so Bill started a new search. He managed to find several on-line and only discovered they were also on back order when he went to buy them. Several hours later he finally succeeded in finding one in stock that they could overnight to us. Even though it was going to cost more than 3x the stock replacement part, we were very happy. Our little adventure added three days to what was supposed to be a 4-hour drive to St Louis (and of course some more re-planning of the rest of our trip).
Gateway Arch, in St Louis, was proclaimed a National Park in 2018 and by no stretch of the imagination should this have happened. The park is 91 acres, by comparison Central Park in NYC is 842 acres. Other that the arch, there is nothing of interest in the park. I thought that national parks were for the protection and preservation of the most beautiful and unique areas of our country. Apparently, this is no longer true, since it’s in the middle of a large city and the focal point is a man-made object, very disappointing (apparently, it was approved as a national park solely to drive up tourist revenues in St Louis).
The arch itself was built as a memorial to St Louis’ role in the westward expansion of the US and is an impressive structure, at 630 feet tall and wide. We toured the museum, very well done, and rode up to the top in what they called a tram. An engineering marvel, they combined the function of an escalator, elevator, and a ferris wheel to pull the little pod cars up and around the curve to the top of the arch. Once at the top we were allowed about three minutes to peer out the small slit windows before being hustled back into our pod for the ride down. At least it was a reasonable $13 each, rather than the exorbitant prices most tall buildings charge for the privilege of riding to the top in their ordinary elevators. The Laumeier Sculpture Park downtown was interesting, although Bill was annoyed by the ridiculous descriptions of some of the pieces, and the Soulard Farmers Market provided some excellent pastries at great prices, including a St. Louis specialty called Gooey Butter Cake. It is a cake base with a chess pie top, created by accident when a local baker mixed up the measurements of the ingredients while making a cake. We also discovered a chain called Sause on the Side that makes excellent calzones. While a fun stop, my overall impression of St. Louis was not great; it was a bit on the grungy side.
Our last, fill in the gap, city was Indianapolis. We had dreary, gray weather, except for one afternoon when we went downtown to Monument Circle to see the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Surrounded by a brick paved traffic circle, it is really impressive and beautiful. At 284 feet tall, it took thirteen years, 1888-1901, to construct, and was the first monument in the US dedicated to the common solider. It sits on a raised platform, with fountains on two sides and is really cool from all angles. Even the lamp posts were interesting. I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite like it. Indianapolis is also the capital of Indiana, so we walked to the capital building and the along the Canal Walk. We were short on time to get to a movie we had tickets for, or I would have spent more time looking at and photographing the monument.
Leaving Indianapolis, we headed to the top of the Blue Ridge Parkway for the start of our 3 weeks of motorcycling. Our first stop was at a crappy RV park in Grafton, WV. First there was no office at the campground for check in. We called and were given two choices for places to park. The first one we tried was so out of level, that our RV actually slid off the pads we put under the feet. In case you are not familiar with how fifth-wheel RV’s work, when parked there are six “feet” or hydraulic jacks that come down to sit on the ground and level the trailer. We put plastic square pads under the feet to stabilize and flatten the surface for the feet. It freaked us out when it started to slide over. Bill thought it might have actually bent one of the legs. We hooked back up to the truck and were about to try the other spot when a super drunk guy arrived on a tractor, to “help” us. The second parking spot was down a steep hill and at a bad angle for backing into. Inch by inch, we got the trailer turned around and finally got it parked. Then we discovered a four-inch flap of tread hanging off one of the trailer tires and inside the microwave door had apparently bounced open while we were driving and the glass turn table flew out breaking into several pieces. Remember my complaints about the bumpy roads? Now you see I was not exaggerating. We had to crawl around on the floor with flashlights till we found all the pieces before we could put the slides out so we didn’t jam the slide on the glass shards. Bill made arrangements to stop on the way to our next destination and get four new trailer tires, and changed the one with the flapping tread himself. At least our motorcycle ride (the only reason we had come here) was great.
There is pretty much nothing but good motorcycle roads in this part of the country, although West Virginia is also a very depressed area, where many homes look like they should be condemned and much of the sparse population is poor. It makes me grateful to be from such a thriving part of the country, in spite of the irritation of traffic everywhere. Here it is all forest and twisting roads, lovely for riding, but not so great for pulling the trailer. Our adventure at this RV park was not over, when we were ready to leave, we discovered we could not get back up the hill out of the park without dragging the bottom of the trailer. It took forty minutes of trying different approaches, failing, backing up, and trying again, till finally we gave up and just dragged it over the hump. Luckily, we did not rip anything off the bottom of the trailer (we didn’t rip it off but we broke the bracket holding our furnace exhaust pipe and damaged the sewer cover), and were on our way. When we got to Discount Tire in Waynesboro, VA, we discovered the bed cover on the truck was torn up on both sides and one side the bed was now slightly bowed out. We can only assume that happened when we were dragging the trailer up and down that damn hill while required to make sharp jack knifing turns onto the exit road. Hopefully this will be the end of our “adventures” for this trip.
After Grafton we headed just south of Lexington, VA for more riding on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Again, the roads were wonderful with lots of curves, very little traffic and in good shape. It was pretty cold and gray for most of the rides, but at least it did not rain on us, and it was cool to ride the ridge where we were often riding through clouds, and we could see the valley below, on both sides of the road at the same time, in some places. The Blue Ridge Mountains run from Pennsylvania all the way to Georgia, and are part of the Appalachian range. You can easily see why it is called the “Blue” ridge since the mountains seem to be smothered in a blue haze, apparently this is a result of trees releasing isoprene into the atmosphere, causing the haze on the mountains and their color. We didn’t bother stopping for pictures since the gray weather and the blue haze are not conducive to good photography. We finished off four days of riding the Blue Ridge Parkway with a stop in Asheville, NC. It was nice to be in a larger city where we could enjoy the riding and still visit a gym and an AMC theater.
Our last stop for riding was Townsend, TN in the Great Smoky Mountains. We were back here to ride the Tail of the Dragon (#1 motorcycle route in the US) again, as well as the Cherohala Skyway. After two days of rain we finally had clear skies and we got super lucky on the Dragon when we had our side of the road all to ourselves, with no one in front of us slowing us down or pressuring us from behind for the whole 318 curves. Amazing considering there were a couple hundred bikes parked at the Hub, at one end. The roads were a bit wet, but mostly clear of traffic and we were enjoying riding through fog banks on the Cherahala Skyway when Bill got a flat on his front tire. We were deep in forest with no cell service at all and 30 minutes from the nearest so called town. Bill rode my bike the half hour to a gas station to start the process of arranging a tow truck, which is not simple when you are in No Man’s Land. I stayed with his bike and sat on a rock for about an hour and a half till he got back. While he waited for the tow truck, I rode the almost two hours back to the trailer so I could get the truck and come back for him. Since it was a Saturday afternoon we knew repair shops would be closed Sunday, and all motorcycle shops typically also close on Mondays. Very lucky for us, the tow truck driver tried and managed to fix Bill’s tire, so he was able to ride it home. We rode back and forth through The Great Smoky Mountain National Park the next day. It was Sunday, so way too many cars on the road, but they forced us to slow down and enjoy the views. The trees are tall and straight and form a canopy way overhead. The river that runs along one side of the road has white water cascading over rocks, and on the other side were glimpses of mountains, where there were breaks in the trees. Just beautiful!
With forecasted rain at our next stop, we decided to start the three day drive home. On day two, we suffered another breakdown. This time we had to overnight in a repair shop parking lot, and Bill had to drive five hours to get the part we needed. Maybe it is time to buy a new trailer? We can’t wait to get home to see the family and enjoy what is usually very nice October weather in Dallas. Hopefully we will make it the rest of the way without any further vehicular issues.
…Bill and Dessa
You can find our photos and videos here.
