I am single and free. Yet how often do I take advantage of this fact to blow off the world for a couple of days and Do What I Want?
Noli recently alluded to a recurring necessity I seem to have, to "go find a big sky and find myself under it" and while big skies do not exist in California (too many mountains), perhaps a long road will do, similarly.
And I am so sick of work and my neighborhood. Why don't I just go away?
Why not indeed. In about three seconds I had it all mapped out: get on the bike and ride. Don't care where, don't care how, don't care what it costs. Just haul ass till ass hauls me.
I have only one style of cross-country travel: decide whether or not I need to get somewhere today; if in the affirmative, find a freeway and pin it, if in the negative, find a deserted, twisty country road where there are speed limits, and creatively pin it. I stop to take pictures when I see pictures. And for gas. And maybe for lunch. But for the most part I don't take a lot of joy in contemplating local treasures, since I am alone and it would seem strange for a helmeted alien to be standing in front of an antique shop talking to himself. I don't take pictures of people, they might get offended and their faces are none of my business anyway. I take pictures of things.
It isn't about the places, after all - it's about passing through the places, feeling their feel and smelling their airs and seeing their church steeples and moving on, always moving on to the next place. It's about experiencing nature's own special effects studio. But mostly it's about moving. Places move, they move past me, because motion is relative and MY place happens to be moving. And a happy place it is indeed. The uttermost limit of what is contained is a now-broken-in-finally piece of foam, a windshield and too-wide handlebars with too-narrow grips. Could be better, in other words, but hey I'm not complaining. Except when I knocked in that lady's mirror, lanesplitting in San Francisco; but that was just a reminder that I shouldn't lanesplit with such a pig of a motorcycle. ("pig" being a technical not derogatory term applied to dual-sports that are too heavy to be really maneuverable) Anyway, not to ramble.
Any travel story is useless without pics, so here we go.
Weekend stats:
Approx 1200 miles
20 hours, of which 17 were spent in one riding day
40 mpg average on the freeway (doh!)
New speed record set from Livermore to Santa Paula: 6.5 hours
2 Monsters
1 cigarette
5 Advil
No comments:
Post a Comment