It’s a long and lonely road when the wind is up in your grill like you owe it money.
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (MDM) — It seems as though I always see at least one tourist while motoring to and from Interbike.
This poor sod was fighting a wicked head wind that took my miles per gallon down from Subaru Forester to GMC Yukon range. He had just struggled out of the rest area east of Flagstaff, and I didn’t see him until it was almost too late to snap a “quick” pic (goddamn the iPhone and its secret-password bullshit anyway).
It probably didn’t help that I was listening to a collection of old “National Lampoon Radio Hour” classics and giggling like a stoner. Some of the bits hold up mighty well, like “Stand Up,” “Light Your Faith” and “Frank Rizzo and the Philadelphia Police League for Retarded Children.” Yeah, I know, not exactly politically correct but funnier than shit.
Meanwhile, keeping watch over Elly Mae’s critters has apparently ruined me for sleeping in. I was up long before sunrise and they don’t even break out the java in this dump until 6:30.
Next stop:Sin City.
The Big Yellow Ball has company in the sky today. A little rain would definitely lubricate the final push through the desert.
The weather wasn’t all that welcoming, despite the sign.
Rather than chance being mistaken for Helen Collins and Doug Bruce, Herself and I decided we (meaning Your Humble Narrator) should dash up to Colorado to check on our vast real-estate holdings, make sure they hadn’t been turned into meth labs, crack houses or empty, boarded-up, Collins-Bruce-style blights on the community.
The back deck needed a few new boards.
This I did, earlier this week, and I’m happy to report that the only boards involved were the three replaced in Chez Dog’s winter-ravaged back deck by Senior Executive Dude With Tools and Skills Dennis “Heavy D” Collard, who had a few uncommitted moments in his busy schedule that I was happy to fill for him, knowing from experience that idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
The weather did a number on the back sidewalk, too, so I asked a local concrete merchant to estimate the cost of repairs. I checked in with our friend and tenant Judy, comfortably ensconced in The House Back East®, and chatted up a couple other members in good standing of the Patty Jewett Yacht & Cricket Club.
And finally, I did a quick inspection tour of the interior of Chez Dog, the operative word being “quick,” as a certain somebody had rented the joint out from under me and the paying customers would be checking in the next day.
Chez Dog is still standing … and, thanks to Herself, still earning.
I had planned a rather leisurely stay in The Old Home Place®, catching up with friends and neighbors while performing my slumlordly duties, then fetching a few more bikes home to Duke City.
But when money comes a-knockin’, Herself is always right there at the door to greet it. So instead of chillaxin’ in the ‘hood for a spell, I blew 40,000 Hilton points on two days at the Homewood Suites.
The Hilton it ain’t. Shit, it ain’t even Chez Dog. Feeble coffee, punk grub, and I was reminded once again why we don’t pay for television. The bed was comfy, though.
After two days of that I was burning up the road back to Rancho Pendejo, with a short stop in Taos to take on sustenance at Orlando’s New Mexican Cafe. Their Los Colores platter is a marvelous restorative.
It was 4:20 p.m. (smoke ’em if you got ’em) when I fired up the Forester for the latest six-hour drive from Bibleburg to Duke City.
Herself and I had been in the old hometown to prepare Chez Dog and The House Back East® for new tenants, a project I’d hoped would take only a couple of long, hard days, but I got there on Friday and didn’t get gone until Tuesday afternoon. Herself beat it on Monday, having one of them obnoxious “job” thingies that requires regular attendance.
So there I was, once again piloting a heavily laden Japanese automobile solo through the starry American night. It reminded me of the good old days, when all I needed for a cross-country jaunt was a bridge burned at one newspaper, a job offer at another, and a battered old rice-grinder that was nearly as full of shit as I was.
“What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” — Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”
I used to love those long nights behind the wheel, in part because I generally enjoyed some sort of illicit chemical assist, having studied at the feet of Jack Kerouac, Ed Abbey and the redoubtable Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Once a friend and I even took a page from the Good Doktor’s book — to be specific, a page from “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas” — and ate some acid before stalking into the old MGM Grand to see what we could see, which proved to be much more than was actually there.
In short, it was a bad idea, like so many of the Good Doktor’s, and we quickly jumped back into our auto and drove straight through the inky darkness of the Intermountain West to Alamosa, Colorado, for a steaming plate of enchiladas and beans served up by my companion’s mom, who either didn’t notice or didn’t care that we were horribly twisted on LSD and Budweiser.
After a few hundred thousand miles of that sort of thing, coupled with deteriorating night vision, a bad back and a considerably diminished drug intake (I’m pretty much down to a cup and a half of coffee in the morning these days), I lost interest in snorting that long white line through the windshield and sleeping it off under the camper shell in some rest area or unpatrolled parking lot. When the sunlight started fading, so did I. A motel bed sounded a lot better than drumming on the steering wheel with ZZ Top, Bob Seger or the Allman Brothers cranked up to 11.
But I got a little of the old love back Tuesday night. As I motored southwest with the cruise control set at a safe and sane 75 mph a banana moon hung brightly in the sky dead ahead, the highway stripes rising up as if to meet it on the hills. Where to go? Mexico? San Francisco? Albuquerque, as it turned out. I left the stereo off and listened to the music in my head.
BIBLEBURG, Colo. (MDM) — I have a wealth of bad habits, and one of them is taking pix while I drive. It’s probably at least as wrong-headed as texting, but nobody has outlawed it yet (as far as I know), so I keep on doing it out of mileage-induced boredom. And thus we have this small pile from my just-completed 2,138-mile round trip from Bibleburg to Sin City and back via Albuquerque. I redeemed myself somewhat by getting out of the car to snap the shot of the linear park. What the hell, The Boo had to pee.
It was raining on the way out, and how.
Moon over New Mexico.
A “linear park” near Chez Dog South-Duke City, a.k.a. Rancho Pendejo.
A bridge too far? Nope. Not close enough. Miles to go before I slept.
This poor sod was fighting a wicked head wind that took my miles per gallon down from Subaru Forester to GMC Yukon range. He had just struggled out of the rest area east of Flagstaff, and I didn’t see him until it was almost too late to snap a “quick” pic (goddamn the iPhone and its secret-password bullshit anyway).
