Trip Summary

Road travel       - 2388 miles
Total                 - 2572 miles

Moving average    - 62 mph
Maximum             - 91 mph  (Oops, must have been when I passed that Roadrunner)

Hours moving - 41.4

Best Mileage    36.5 mpg
Worst mileage  27.6 mpg
 Average           33.1 mpg

Note:  Headwinds, especially in west Texas, really dropped the gas mileage.


Upon returning home I received in the mail a Show Low, AZ Certificate of Appreciation commemorating my visit and asking for donations to their favorite local charity: Show Low, AZ.

While somewhat ticked off at the $263 donation required, and recognizing the increased amount associated with such "free-form, high technology" revenue-enhancement, I was rather impressed with how comfortable I look while riding.

As can be seen, they do tell you about it.  Of course, the speed limit drops from 65 mph to 45 mph rather abruptly.

And then, of course they take your picture.

 

This is a better picture of the terrain requiring a 45 mph speed limit.
There can only be one logical reason for a 45 mph speed limit in such an area: Revenue.  Can you say "Speed Trap?"

Day 6 - Spring, TX

 Sweetwater, TX to Spring, TX  - 410 miles

(Click any picture to enlarge)

Pulled out of Sweetwater (A) about 8:00am heading for Abilene.  After a short visit with WT and Becky (B) I headed down SR36 until I reached the US283 turn off toward Coleman (D).  I then basically rejoined the route I came out on last Thursday.  The only "new" road was the short section between Denton (C) and Coleman (D).  That's not very desirable, however Mr. Garmin sort of decided it for me, with a couple of small adjustments on my part.  (Perhaps I've mentioned in the past that Mr. Garmin and I don't get along all that well.  I'm pretty computer literate, but he is pretty logically stupid at times.  I programmed him?  Well, yeah.  Don't go there.)

Some of the beautiful Texas flora on the way home.  Texas is like France when it comes to flowers...they just seem to grow prettier in those two places.

Day 5 - Sweetwater, TX

Socorro, NM to Sweetwater, TX - 434 Miles

(Click any picture to enlarge)

Woke up the rooster, as usual, and was on the road by 7:00am (MDST).  It was a very uneventful and sort of boring ride, as rides go.  A short jog down I-25 catching US380 at San Antonio, NM, heading east to Post, TX, a smooth 352 miles on one highway.  Excepting big interstate slab rides, I don't usually get to do that many miles on one road very often.  In Post I turned south-east on US84 stopping in Sweetwater for the night.  I was thinking I would head on into Abilene and visit WT and the Crider gang, but I was bushed and didn't think it prudent to push on the additional 50 miles.  Plus, in the back of my head there was my mother saying, "Don't wear out your welcome."  She's usually right in such things, so I didn't.

I don't know the name of the plant, but these "tufty" little things were blooming on the side of the road for most of the trip in New Mexico.
The "flower"-looking things are really fine individual "hair-like" growths clumped together.  Pretty in clumps along the roadway.

Lot of little yellow and red flowers along the way.  This scene is on the roadway in New Mexico.

And they call Montana the "Big Sky" country.  It doesn't get much bigger than this.









Found a motel in Sweetwater about 6:30pm, dead on my feet.  The clerk was very helpful getting me a room on the ground floor where I could park Betsy right outside.  Can't say I was awfully impressed as I listened to the guy on the floor above me walking across his room for what seemed like most of the night.

I found a restaurant a short distance down the road named 'Skeeter's Grill,' I think.  I'm not sure because it, like its food, is definitely not to be remembered.  At least not favorably.   I was thinking it would be sort of an upscale grill with a bar and nice accoutrements.  When your idea of "southern-fried" fish is cod dredged in corn meal you don't understand "southern-fried" anything.  It deteriorated from there.  But, I didn't die.  You run into the good, bad, and ugly eating on these trips.

Day 4 - Socorro, NM

Tucson, AZ to Socorro, NM - 381 Miles

(Click any picture to enlarge)

Up bright and early...and I mean bright and early; our friends in Arizona do not ascribe to daylight savings time so instead of 6:30am it was 5:30am.  Fortunately, the sun was up though the promised continental breakfast was, evidently, still on continental time (must have been Australia).  No matter, I take off heading up beautiful Oracle highway, SR77.  It's named Oracle because that town is on this highway, it is not a tribute to Larry Ellison's company.

Shortly after turning onto SR77 from W. Ina Road, I spied a "CAFE" sign so stopped for breakfast.  I should have known better than to stay after seeing the "Cafe and Gallery" sign.  Yep, it was one of the pretentious places where they have to make the food "artsy" too.  Unfortunately they evidently didn't know how to spell artsy, in fact placing an "f" in front of it, experience-wise, as far as the food was concerned.  I mean, how in the hell can you make homemade corned beef hash with absolutely zero taste?  Must be an art to it.  And, of course, it was overpriced, too, since it was...well, you know, "artsy."  Spare me!  Just fix the friggin' food!  I knew I was in trouble when I tasted the first sip of coffee.  Artsy-fartsy restaurants are incapable of making decent coffee.

The ride made up for the breakfast.  Started out with the to-be-expected desert.  But the addition of Saguaro cactus has a tendency to add some spice to any desert scenery.  And then there's the point that it is starting to be quite hilly and rising in elevation over the standard desert floor in southern Arizona.

Saguaro live to be over 200 years old and can grow as high as 75 feet.  In this area they are commonly 40 feet or above.
Speaking of late blooming, they normally start blooming at around 55 years of age and 8 foot tall.  Guess you gotta have some patience if you're going to play in this game.
(Let's see...I'm old enough but I'll never reach 8 foot tall.)

Betsy checking out a mere youngster Saguaro cactus.










A little further up the road we start seeing nice green sections surrounded by the common dry-brown of the desert.

The green flora indicate where there is water.  This is the Gila River.  I don't know which came first, the river, or the lizard.

In a short time we enter the White Mountain Apache Reservation.  Constantly rising we leave the desert and enter cedar forests, including shared national forests.  In the process of getting there we see some pretty spectacular vistas

I believe this is called The Salt River Canyon.

Betsy was here.

Not as deep, but reminiscent of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado.

Very interesting notch in this mountain bluff.  I have no idea what created it.

I stopped in Show Low (AZ) for a short break then turned east toward New Mexico.  It didn't take too long for the scenery to change totally.

This is pure prairie here.
(Not to be confused with The Pure Prarie League, an American band of the mid-60s.  Their song 'Amie' is a real favorite of mine.)

I expected Charlton Heston to ride up any minute (with his cold dead hands empty).

Well...he didn't.  But he did play the best cowboy I've ever seen in a movie.  (Will Penny 1968)









Interestingly, out here with all this sunlight, and after the heat of Tombstone, the air temperature at this height (~6400 feet) is cool and makes for wonderful riding.


A short time later another desert surprise.  Listening in to the universe.

Radio telescopes searching space.

"Hello...Uh, just a minute...anyone here named ET?  Yeah?  It's for you."















Pulled into Socorro, NM a short time later.

I really like this sort of central New Mexico country.  It's dry plains, but very pretty.  And the people are New Mexico friendly.  That's always a good thing.

Day 3 - Tucson AZ

El Paso, TX to Tucson, AZ via Tombstone - 375 Miles

(Click any picture to enlarge)

Set the alarm for 7:00am but, as usual woke the roosters up at dawn.  By 7:00am I was ready to go and unwilling to wait on the hotel "continental" breakfast.  I've been to the "continent" and it's nothing like that.  Besides, I like to ride for an hour or so then stop for a leisurely breakfast.  Don't know why, just do.

I may, or may not have mentioned in the past, but I think New Mexico is one of the best kept secrets in America.  It's a beautiful state (up north, frankly), and filled with some of the nicest people in the U.S.  I rank them right up there with Tennessee folks, and that's high ranking for this old boy.

I can't say the southern route through New Mexico is all that pretty or exciting.  It was mostly sand and heat with a few dust devils thrown in for good measure.  Fortunately, I didn't encountered some of the "white" out dust storm which are so well prophesied via signs about every five or so miles.

You can't see it very clearly, but enlarged (click the picture) you should see the remains of a "dust devil" toward the right side of this picture.  Saw several of these during my trip through southern New Mexico.




About 1:00pm I turned south on SR80 at Benson, AZ.  Tombstone is about 20 miles south.

I don't care much for the commercialization that goes on in these places.  I just like to visit the country and see the vistas people in history saw.  Consequently, I was in Tombstone a very short while, but I got the flavor of the place.

In actuality, the argument between the Earps and Doc Holliday, and the Clantons and McLaurys had a lot more to do with rival gangs than it did law enforcement and justice.  The "Cowboys" were hooked up with county sheriff Behan and that's where the real power lay.  Behan was the tax collector and got his cut off the top.  The Earps were tied into the "city" folks and there was really little "opportunity" there.

After all the fictionalization of the Wyatt Earp legend we'll never know what he was really like.  But enough is known about his habits and events surrounding his life to make a couple of statements about him.  He was evidently fearless, and kept his head about him in scrape after scrape. He never drank whiskey, favoring coffee while others impaired their abilities.  He did stand up and walk across the creek firing at the hidden, ambushing cowboys.  But he never got a scratch.  In fact, he was never wounded during his career.  Several others weren't that lucky though.

Big Nose Kate was, of course, Doc Holliday's companion.  While frequenting saloons she never, to my knowledge owned one, or, until the modern commercial era, had one named after her.

Street scene bearing probably little resemblance to how it looked back in the early 1880s.

 The Oriental Saloon, one of the few authentic places and buildings in Tombstone today.
Wasn't this the saloon Wyatt threw the badass faro dealer out of in 'Tombstone?'
BTW - the 1993 Tombstone with Kurt Russell as Wyatt and Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday has it all over the 1994 'Wyatt Earp' of Kevin Costner (Wyatt) and Dennis Quaid (Doc).  Just no contest here at all.

And now a clothing emporium

Another authentic edifice.  The famous Bird Cage Theatre.

Supposedly the building in which Morgan Earp was murdered.













I was struck by how hot it was in Tombstone in mid-May.  Yeah, I know, it's a dry heat, but I was really feeling it while there.  It made me think how uncomfortable it must have been for the folks there in 1882 when there was no such thing as air conditioning.  I should know how it was...I grew up in humid central Florida without air conditioning at all.  We just had a couple of electric fans to move the hot air around, and, believe me, it got hot there.  We survived it, so these folks could have as well.
But I gotta believe it got a little tense downwind of some of those miners and gamblers in the saloons.  One wonders how much irritation created by the heat may have contributed to some of those brawls and shootings that happened in the old west.

Pulled out of Tombstone about 3:00pm heading up I-10 to Tucson.  Once again determined that trying to sleep in the heat of a tent just didn't cut it so got a room and am (happily) holed up awaiting tomorrow's adventure.

Day 2 - El Paso, Texas

Abilene to El Paso - 495 Miles

(Click any picture to enlarge)

After a great breakfast with the Crider bunch (sounds like sort of a west Texas outlaw group, doesn't it?), I hit the road about 7:30am.  At Becky's suggestion I decided to to US277 down through San Angelo.  She promised it was a prettier ride than the usual US83/67 route.  I was a nice, hilly ride for the first half...and pretty as predicted.

Not too far down US277 this notched butte.
Lots, and I mean lots, of windmill farms out here.  And it wasn't hard to see why...the wind was gusting to about 30-35 mph for most of the trip today.

 

Lovely, west Texas traffic jam on US277 South

Ran into this historical marker near San Angelo.  Reading this you get a picture, and a lot of respect, of the indomitable spirit of the folks who settled this wild land.  Note section, "Crew and passengers wore guns to reduce danger of Indian attacks..."




















I turned southwest out of San Angelo on US67 through Big Lake (didn't see one) and McCamey, avoiding the big slab as long as I could.    Unfortunately, I couldn't avoid it long and joined I-10 just before Fort Stockton leading to a long, long, and boring, boring ride down the interstate.  Of course, there ain't a heck of a lot out here all that interesting.  After getting on the interstate I could really feel the heat coming up off that thing, so made the comfort or security decision in favor of the former, shedding the armored jacket for the Underarmor long sleeved shirt.

West Texas scenery near Van Horn, TX.

Closer look at the bigger hill (?).

Teepee table covers at rest stop.  You'll note no Indians out here in the Teepees.  Smart folks those Indians.  It's hotter 'n hell out here and it isn't even July-August yet.






A long a boring ride later and I made El Paso.  My camping out theory went down before the west Texas sun so I stopped and found a nice, air conditioned hotel room with WiFi connection.  Man, this roughing it is really hard on a feller.

Day 1 - Abilene, TX

Home to Abilene, TX -  378 Miles  - May 17, 2012

I had promised on my visit to my friends WT and Becky to return and take the girls for a motorcycle ride (Life At The Margin blog - Who's George Hamilton IV?).  So this give me an excuse to make a short visit again, plus, the opportunity to make the first day shorter than usual.  I find it takes me a day or so to retrain the "biker butt" needed for these rides.

So, about 8:30am I start out.  I restarted about 9:15am after returning home to get my forgotten wallet.  These gas stations are kinda picky about getting paid.

(Click any picture to enlarge)

I left home traveling up US290 as far as Elgin (B), taking SR95 north to SR79 in Taylor (C), then taking TR130 to US190 through Kileen (D), merging with US183 near Lampasas and through to Goldthwait.and Brownwood, connecting to US84 near Santa Anna (hey, wasn't he the Mexican general at the Alamo?) and on to SR36 and then  onto the Crider place.

I chose this route because it meant some new road for me through central Texas.  Having made the usual SR36 trip several times I always opt for new road wherever I can find it.

Managed to collect yet another county courthouse at Goldthwaite.
Completed in 1913 after the original (1890) burned down.

The tribute to Mills County fallen during the Civil War.















Arrived at the Criders about 5:45pm after a nice ride through Texas.   WT did his usual masterful work on a great brisket.  The secret is simple: not too hot and about 12 hours.  You can cut it with a fork.  Gave the girls rides on Betsy after dinner and all enjoyed it.  May have created a monster.  Becky allowed as how she like riding a motorcycle pretty good.  Had a great visit, as always, celebrating Emma's (6th) birthday a day early.  She's a hoot!