Gurock
Well-known member
I've taken a leave from posting which was in part due to illness. In November after a weekend ride to Missouri I managed to catch Pneumonia and was sick for about a month. During the miserable sickness I didn't manage to get much of anything done. When I got well enough to go back to work there was a backlog and I wasn't close to clear until Christmas Eve.
So, on Christmas Eve with disapproval from my business partners and everyone in my life, I packed my bags, attached them my FJR and took off from Chicago for San Diego, I'd carefully looked over the weather forecasts and thought that I could avoid snow and ice but there's always more risk leaving Chicago on Christmas Eve.
On the night of the 23rd I didn't finish work until midnight and looked at the weather one more time. The forecast had been changed to include the possibility of sleet between Chicago and St Louis in the afternoon so instead of cancelling I decided to take a two hour nap, pack and go. Still with the packing and all it was about 4:00 AM when I pulled out of the garage.
Life was good, it was near 40 degrees, I had my heated jacket, insulated pants and boots, heated grips with warm gloves and was off for an adventure. That day when I got near to St Louis I pulled off and re-checked weather. Now they'd downgraded the forecast for Missouri along I 44 to say that there could be sleet or snow down from Rolla, MO towards Springfield, MO. So I made a change in plans and decided to take I 55 to Memphis and then cut over on I 40 towards Little Rock, AR. I hated the change as I was hoping for time in southwest Missouri and Arkansas riding some of the Ozark roads. On the other hand I didn't want to dance with snow or ice. Because I was operating on two hours sleep I’d taken more rest stops then I normally would and a nap in a subway restaurant near Memphis, that got me thrown out of the restaurant for sleeping. So, when I hit Little Rock it was after ten at night. The weather was still good near forty degrees and I had a second wind, so I figured I could make Texarkana that night, which I did. In Texarkana I got a Holiday Inn through Hotwire for $48.00. As a footnote if I’d certified my ride with IBA I’d have done over 900 miles that day and would have done one more hour for a sanctioned award.
The next day I headed off across the vastness of Texas. I took I 30 to I 20 and crossed the Dallas/Ft Worth metroplex. I stayed with I 20 that day all the way to I 10 with my goal being El Paso, TX. As these days go I take longer breaks and eat meals on the road, so I didn’t get to Pecos, TX until near midnight which was making El Paso a hard goal as it’s the better part of three hours past Pecos. None the less I got back on the bike and headed on, partly because that part of Texas has few and expensive hotel rooms due to the oil fields.
Every trip has a moment that can change your plans and this is when the moment to change my plans hit me. A little west of Pecos I 20 west ends at I 10 and I got onto I 10 to go up into the mountains and on to El Paso getting towards one in the morning. That stretch is very lonely, under-populated and not traveled late at night. So I was the only vehicle on the road most of the time. I was coming up the mountain towards Van Horn, TX at near 100 MPH as nobody was out there and the speed limit is 80. All of a sudden I see this tan colored animal running at my bike. I’m very freaked out in that second, but it looked too small to be a deer. At something like 97 there’s not much you can do to change the direction or even the speed of the bike that won’t risk going down, and the animal had miscalculated my speed so that he wasn’t going to get hit by the front of the bike but rather he was going right into my side. At that last second I realized that he was a Coyote and he realized that he was going to hit the side of the bike. He started to turn sideways and I took my left foot off the highway peg and ended up kicking him in the ribs at 97 MPH. I don’t know what happened to the Coyote because the bike stayed on it’s wheels and I didn’t go back or stop. I do know that my foot hit him in the ribs because I could feel the ribs. I also knew that my left foot felt like someone dropped a hundred pound weight on it. Now I saw the advantages to steel toe boots.
A little up the road, maybe ten or fifteen miles there was a parking for trucks lot on the road and I pulled off to check out my damages. The bike was fine, the Coyote never touched it, but my foot was feeling rather shattered. The other good thing was that when you get off a motorcycle there’s the instant when all your weight goes on your left foot as you pull your right foot over the bike and my foot held up my weight even if very painfully. So I took three Naproxen Sodiums for the pain and climbed back on to stay in Van Horn, TX about another 45 minutes up the road at a Days Inn ending a 700 mile day. I hobbled on in and went to sleep with the face of the Coyote indelibly etched on my brain.
I’d had plans of mountain touring in West Texas, New Mexico or Arizona, but a bum foot kind of ended some of those thoughts and the next day I headed west on I 10. Around seven that evening I came down the mountains from Lordsburg, NM into the Arizona desert and hit the outskirts of Tucson, AZ. It was Friday night, I’d ridden hard the first two days, had a bum foot, and San Diego was still over 400 miles away. So Hotwire had a Sheraton across from the main Tucson hospital for $50.00 and that seemed good to me. Also Tucson was having it’s coldest night in a year and it was down in the twenties at 7:30 in the evening.
The next day was also uneventful as I rode on to San Diego. Knowing I only had a little over 400 miles and being tired I let sleep have it’s way and didn’t leave Tucson until near eleven in the morning. Between Tucson and San Diego even on the I 8 there are some nice mountains and the part of the trip in California has some level of challenge. Either way I was in El Centro, CA at about 6:30 that evening and called to arrange going to dinner with my brothers in San Diego at 8:00 which I did.
I spent the next few days in San Diego hanging with my brothers and doing less riding then I wanted, also with San Diego having the coldest weather they’d had in the last ten years. San Diego’s coldest weather was fifties in the days and thirties at night, so for me it wasn’t that bad. Now I began to think about going home, but the cold front was all across America and Chicago was having zero degree weather for the foreseeable future. So I kept looking at the weather and putting off the day to leave for Chicago on account of weather. Finally they were predicting that Chicago would be in the low thirties without snow for the weekend of January 10th so I decided to leave San Diego on the morning of the 7th and figured that there was a window of opportunity to ride the last leg on that weekend.
One of my days in San Diego I spent the day shopping with my brother and his girl friend. They took me to used record shops for Raymond, arts and crafts shops for his girl friend and a motorcycle dealer for me. I ended up buying a Sena SMH 20S as my splurge for the trip.
For my ride home with the cold across America I decided that I’d do more miles, but stay with I 10 across Texas through to Baton Rogue and then take I 55 back from Baton Rouge to Chicago. At 7:00 that morning in front of my brother’s garage I was putting the finishing touches on packing when a guy came over telling me I had a nice bike, I looked up a few minutes later and he pulled a 2014 red FJR out of his garage, now that’s a nice bike.
That day I made it to Lordsburg, NM which is about 600 miles with my goal being El Paso. At Lordsburg it was late in the evening and over 4,000 ft. in altitude, but it was still in the high thirties. My problem became that the New Mexico mountain winds kicked up to numbers like 40+ MPH. I began to really worry about getting blown into a truck and decided to call it a night at a dingy Econolodge that charged me a lot of money, but sometimes safe is better.
The next day I rode from Lordsburg to San Antonio, TX and it was pretty uneventful. I covered a lot of miles and discovered that I 10 through that part of Texas from Pecos to San Antonio is a lot better then I 20. It has more hills and a little scenery, where I 20 is all dust land. I stayed in a Super 8 a little west of San Antonio because it was getting late and the desk clerk was willing to give me a room where I only had to lug my stuff a short way while my bike could stay in front of the lobby and a good price.
The next day I rode from San Antonio to Baton Rouge. It was a crappy day rain and forty degrees all day. Just to add to my little aggravations Houston goes on forever and has terrible traffic, especially near to the downtown. They did have some car pool lanes for a while but it still sucked, stuck in slow traffic and getting forty degree rain.
I truly discovered how big Texas is going across the longest way. There was a mile marker in Beaumont, TX near the Louisiana border that said something like 863 on it.
That night I stayed at an Embassy Suites in Baton Rouge near the LSU campus, ate a good dinner, steak not craw-fish, and got up early the next morning to work on my approach towards Chicago. Looking at the weather forecasts on this Friday night, they were now downgrading the Chicago weather on Sunday afternoon to say the possibility of snow in the late afternoon. With that in mind I wanted to get as far as I could on Saturday out of Baton Rouge to give me the most flexibility for Sunday.
The good thing on Saturday was that when I left Baton Rouge after the good free breakfast from Embassy Suites it was in the fifties and sunny. I hit Memphis around 4:30 and figured that I’d take I 55 to I 57 and make the most direct route to Chicago. So I ate dinner at some Memphis barbecue and was back on the road. I hit I 57 around eleven that night and stopped to load up Missouri cheap cigarettes for me and a friend. By that time it was in the high thirties but not that bad and I decided that my goal was Marion Illinois about 75 miles or a little more down the road.
The next little bit went fine and there are a million motels in Marion because the big federal prison is there. I did a cheap but nice enough Super 8 reviewed the weather and went to sleep.
When I reviewed the weather they’d downgraded the forecast more. They were now predicting snow in Chicago around three Sunday afternoon and just as bad they were predicting snow or sleet between Champagne, IL to Kankakee, IL starting around 1:30 that afternoon. So I decided that I should get up at six in the morning and try to make the last 325 miles before the bad weather. All those days of riding and weather caught up with me a little and I over slept the wake up call by an hour. When I got on the road without breakfast it was close to 7:30. I figured that I’d just ride like heck stopping only for gas and try to beat the weather. I didn’t even buy gas before I hit the road, because I still had 2/3rds of a tank. I stopped a hundred miles up the road in Effingham, IL and bought gas, had a small coffee and took back off. Sure enough when I got to Champagne, IL it started to rain and was in the low mid thirties. Now I was getting scared and as I got towards Kankakee I saw snow flakes on my wind screen. By that point I’d gone about 175 miles out of Effingham and was down to less then a quarter on gas. If I tried to get back on the remaining gas I was going to get home on fumes.
So, I got off at Kankakee, IL where I saw gas next to the highway and just filled up to go, it was all the more scary then because I could see slush in the gas station parking lot. I just carefully got off, into the gas islands, filled up and back on the highway, without even taking off my helmet.
Luckily for me the flurries and rain stopped ten minutes or so up the road and I went on to suburban Chicago where I’ve parked my bike in Brian’s garage to avoid taking it into my alley and garage as they were blocked by snow and ice. Brian gave me a ride home and the trip was over.
I didn’t take pictures because I’m just to lazy, so I can’t post pictures with the story
So, on Christmas Eve with disapproval from my business partners and everyone in my life, I packed my bags, attached them my FJR and took off from Chicago for San Diego, I'd carefully looked over the weather forecasts and thought that I could avoid snow and ice but there's always more risk leaving Chicago on Christmas Eve.
On the night of the 23rd I didn't finish work until midnight and looked at the weather one more time. The forecast had been changed to include the possibility of sleet between Chicago and St Louis in the afternoon so instead of cancelling I decided to take a two hour nap, pack and go. Still with the packing and all it was about 4:00 AM when I pulled out of the garage.
Life was good, it was near 40 degrees, I had my heated jacket, insulated pants and boots, heated grips with warm gloves and was off for an adventure. That day when I got near to St Louis I pulled off and re-checked weather. Now they'd downgraded the forecast for Missouri along I 44 to say that there could be sleet or snow down from Rolla, MO towards Springfield, MO. So I made a change in plans and decided to take I 55 to Memphis and then cut over on I 40 towards Little Rock, AR. I hated the change as I was hoping for time in southwest Missouri and Arkansas riding some of the Ozark roads. On the other hand I didn't want to dance with snow or ice. Because I was operating on two hours sleep I’d taken more rest stops then I normally would and a nap in a subway restaurant near Memphis, that got me thrown out of the restaurant for sleeping. So, when I hit Little Rock it was after ten at night. The weather was still good near forty degrees and I had a second wind, so I figured I could make Texarkana that night, which I did. In Texarkana I got a Holiday Inn through Hotwire for $48.00. As a footnote if I’d certified my ride with IBA I’d have done over 900 miles that day and would have done one more hour for a sanctioned award.
The next day I headed off across the vastness of Texas. I took I 30 to I 20 and crossed the Dallas/Ft Worth metroplex. I stayed with I 20 that day all the way to I 10 with my goal being El Paso, TX. As these days go I take longer breaks and eat meals on the road, so I didn’t get to Pecos, TX until near midnight which was making El Paso a hard goal as it’s the better part of three hours past Pecos. None the less I got back on the bike and headed on, partly because that part of Texas has few and expensive hotel rooms due to the oil fields.
Every trip has a moment that can change your plans and this is when the moment to change my plans hit me. A little west of Pecos I 20 west ends at I 10 and I got onto I 10 to go up into the mountains and on to El Paso getting towards one in the morning. That stretch is very lonely, under-populated and not traveled late at night. So I was the only vehicle on the road most of the time. I was coming up the mountain towards Van Horn, TX at near 100 MPH as nobody was out there and the speed limit is 80. All of a sudden I see this tan colored animal running at my bike. I’m very freaked out in that second, but it looked too small to be a deer. At something like 97 there’s not much you can do to change the direction or even the speed of the bike that won’t risk going down, and the animal had miscalculated my speed so that he wasn’t going to get hit by the front of the bike but rather he was going right into my side. At that last second I realized that he was a Coyote and he realized that he was going to hit the side of the bike. He started to turn sideways and I took my left foot off the highway peg and ended up kicking him in the ribs at 97 MPH. I don’t know what happened to the Coyote because the bike stayed on it’s wheels and I didn’t go back or stop. I do know that my foot hit him in the ribs because I could feel the ribs. I also knew that my left foot felt like someone dropped a hundred pound weight on it. Now I saw the advantages to steel toe boots.
A little up the road, maybe ten or fifteen miles there was a parking for trucks lot on the road and I pulled off to check out my damages. The bike was fine, the Coyote never touched it, but my foot was feeling rather shattered. The other good thing was that when you get off a motorcycle there’s the instant when all your weight goes on your left foot as you pull your right foot over the bike and my foot held up my weight even if very painfully. So I took three Naproxen Sodiums for the pain and climbed back on to stay in Van Horn, TX about another 45 minutes up the road at a Days Inn ending a 700 mile day. I hobbled on in and went to sleep with the face of the Coyote indelibly etched on my brain.
I’d had plans of mountain touring in West Texas, New Mexico or Arizona, but a bum foot kind of ended some of those thoughts and the next day I headed west on I 10. Around seven that evening I came down the mountains from Lordsburg, NM into the Arizona desert and hit the outskirts of Tucson, AZ. It was Friday night, I’d ridden hard the first two days, had a bum foot, and San Diego was still over 400 miles away. So Hotwire had a Sheraton across from the main Tucson hospital for $50.00 and that seemed good to me. Also Tucson was having it’s coldest night in a year and it was down in the twenties at 7:30 in the evening.
The next day was also uneventful as I rode on to San Diego. Knowing I only had a little over 400 miles and being tired I let sleep have it’s way and didn’t leave Tucson until near eleven in the morning. Between Tucson and San Diego even on the I 8 there are some nice mountains and the part of the trip in California has some level of challenge. Either way I was in El Centro, CA at about 6:30 that evening and called to arrange going to dinner with my brothers in San Diego at 8:00 which I did.
I spent the next few days in San Diego hanging with my brothers and doing less riding then I wanted, also with San Diego having the coldest weather they’d had in the last ten years. San Diego’s coldest weather was fifties in the days and thirties at night, so for me it wasn’t that bad. Now I began to think about going home, but the cold front was all across America and Chicago was having zero degree weather for the foreseeable future. So I kept looking at the weather and putting off the day to leave for Chicago on account of weather. Finally they were predicting that Chicago would be in the low thirties without snow for the weekend of January 10th so I decided to leave San Diego on the morning of the 7th and figured that there was a window of opportunity to ride the last leg on that weekend.
One of my days in San Diego I spent the day shopping with my brother and his girl friend. They took me to used record shops for Raymond, arts and crafts shops for his girl friend and a motorcycle dealer for me. I ended up buying a Sena SMH 20S as my splurge for the trip.
For my ride home with the cold across America I decided that I’d do more miles, but stay with I 10 across Texas through to Baton Rogue and then take I 55 back from Baton Rouge to Chicago. At 7:00 that morning in front of my brother’s garage I was putting the finishing touches on packing when a guy came over telling me I had a nice bike, I looked up a few minutes later and he pulled a 2014 red FJR out of his garage, now that’s a nice bike.
That day I made it to Lordsburg, NM which is about 600 miles with my goal being El Paso. At Lordsburg it was late in the evening and over 4,000 ft. in altitude, but it was still in the high thirties. My problem became that the New Mexico mountain winds kicked up to numbers like 40+ MPH. I began to really worry about getting blown into a truck and decided to call it a night at a dingy Econolodge that charged me a lot of money, but sometimes safe is better.
The next day I rode from Lordsburg to San Antonio, TX and it was pretty uneventful. I covered a lot of miles and discovered that I 10 through that part of Texas from Pecos to San Antonio is a lot better then I 20. It has more hills and a little scenery, where I 20 is all dust land. I stayed in a Super 8 a little west of San Antonio because it was getting late and the desk clerk was willing to give me a room where I only had to lug my stuff a short way while my bike could stay in front of the lobby and a good price.
The next day I rode from San Antonio to Baton Rouge. It was a crappy day rain and forty degrees all day. Just to add to my little aggravations Houston goes on forever and has terrible traffic, especially near to the downtown. They did have some car pool lanes for a while but it still sucked, stuck in slow traffic and getting forty degree rain.
I truly discovered how big Texas is going across the longest way. There was a mile marker in Beaumont, TX near the Louisiana border that said something like 863 on it.
That night I stayed at an Embassy Suites in Baton Rouge near the LSU campus, ate a good dinner, steak not craw-fish, and got up early the next morning to work on my approach towards Chicago. Looking at the weather forecasts on this Friday night, they were now downgrading the Chicago weather on Sunday afternoon to say the possibility of snow in the late afternoon. With that in mind I wanted to get as far as I could on Saturday out of Baton Rouge to give me the most flexibility for Sunday.
The good thing on Saturday was that when I left Baton Rouge after the good free breakfast from Embassy Suites it was in the fifties and sunny. I hit Memphis around 4:30 and figured that I’d take I 55 to I 57 and make the most direct route to Chicago. So I ate dinner at some Memphis barbecue and was back on the road. I hit I 57 around eleven that night and stopped to load up Missouri cheap cigarettes for me and a friend. By that time it was in the high thirties but not that bad and I decided that my goal was Marion Illinois about 75 miles or a little more down the road.
The next little bit went fine and there are a million motels in Marion because the big federal prison is there. I did a cheap but nice enough Super 8 reviewed the weather and went to sleep.
When I reviewed the weather they’d downgraded the forecast more. They were now predicting snow in Chicago around three Sunday afternoon and just as bad they were predicting snow or sleet between Champagne, IL to Kankakee, IL starting around 1:30 that afternoon. So I decided that I should get up at six in the morning and try to make the last 325 miles before the bad weather. All those days of riding and weather caught up with me a little and I over slept the wake up call by an hour. When I got on the road without breakfast it was close to 7:30. I figured that I’d just ride like heck stopping only for gas and try to beat the weather. I didn’t even buy gas before I hit the road, because I still had 2/3rds of a tank. I stopped a hundred miles up the road in Effingham, IL and bought gas, had a small coffee and took back off. Sure enough when I got to Champagne, IL it started to rain and was in the low mid thirties. Now I was getting scared and as I got towards Kankakee I saw snow flakes on my wind screen. By that point I’d gone about 175 miles out of Effingham and was down to less then a quarter on gas. If I tried to get back on the remaining gas I was going to get home on fumes.
So, I got off at Kankakee, IL where I saw gas next to the highway and just filled up to go, it was all the more scary then because I could see slush in the gas station parking lot. I just carefully got off, into the gas islands, filled up and back on the highway, without even taking off my helmet.
Luckily for me the flurries and rain stopped ten minutes or so up the road and I went on to suburban Chicago where I’ve parked my bike in Brian’s garage to avoid taking it into my alley and garage as they were blocked by snow and ice. Brian gave me a ride home and the trip was over.
I didn’t take pictures because I’m just to lazy, so I can’t post pictures with the story
