Outside Greeley

Today's post, dear readers, is by our very first guest blogger here at Thalashouse. Not only a guest blogger, a mystery guest blogger. Never fear, the mystery will be revealed in good time, but to give up the ID of the mystery guest blogger now would spoil the story. So bear with us, enjoy the suspense, and read on...

There I was, minding my own business (and aren't we all when these things happen to us?) outside Greeley, Colorado. It was a fine, Chamber-Of-Commerce weather kind of day, and I was whizzing along just enjoying the sunshine, the wind-beneath-my-wings feeling, and just starting to think of grabbing some grub. That was when I met Thal. It really couldn't have gone worse. First off, I don't know if you know this but you should if you don't, she rides this big, screaming, red and chrome monster of a motorcycle. Second off, and this is important, she wears this terrifying, shiny, dragon-painted, red helmet that really flares in the sunlight. So the glare surprised me, then the dragons surprised me even more, and the next thing I knew I was getting sucked into the slipstream of that screaming monster she calls a bike. I got spooked and dove for cover, and unfortunately chose a refuge that was already occupied. After the first brain-rattling impact it took me a bit to gain my bearings and figure out that I. WAS. NOT. ALONE. You humans have these terrifying things you call "arms;" they're wobbly in places and bony in others, they branch into five crushing death heads at the end... really, they're awful and we don't know how you can stand them. Thal assures me the initial impact stunned and hurt her, too. My mother will be pleased, my exoskeleton is something she really prides herself on.

Right, so, blinding impact - then I realized I was trapped up in this tube-like cavern alongside one of those arm things. It kept trying to crush me! I fended it off with a flurry of quick stings and breathlessly started to climb. Wobbly parts, bony parts, back onto more wobbly parts... It was getting pretty tight in there and the arm kept jostling around like it was trying to squash me. I was terrified, so I stung the nearest wobbly part out of pure petulance! I kept climbing toward the dim light filtering into the tube, but it just kept getting tighter and tighter, and there looked like there was no way out! I honestly didn't think I was going to get out alive about then. I made it up the arm and out onto a hard-ish part Thal says was her shoulder when the wind suddenly dropped off.

There was a great jostling, commotion, shaking of the earth, some frantic yelping, and then suddenly I was free! The blue skies were overhead again! The wind was beneath my wings again! I flung myself into the air and executed the least graceful takeoff known to wasps the whole world wide. But I made it! And, so, reportedly, did your regular blogger. She will be returning to you as soon as the swelling in that arm goes down.

*This post inspired by my good friend Sidecar. And a wasp up my sleeve.

clean country livin'

On Mother's Day, I tooled down to Marble Falls on the bike to meet my mom and aunt for lunch. We found new roads that we'd never ridden before, and the Firewheels were blooming all over the countryside. The rain has been just enough but not too much this year, because some of the fields were literally afire with thick clouds of these little guys dancing in the breezes. And then my uncle fixed up fajitas at the end of it all. A more perfect Hill Country day could not be purchased from the Sears Catalog, I assure you.

After lunch, the neighbors called about a turtle they'd found. There must be some ongoing story with the turtles, but I don't know what it is. My aunt announced that we had to go collect this turtle. My mom chivvied my aunt into living on the wild side and riding over on the bikes. Even when you have grandchildren, you're still the big sister and the little sister at heart! So mom hopped on the back with me and my aunt hopped on the back with Rose and we cruised on down to rescue the turtle. We wrapped him up in a spare do-rag and carried him in Rose's tank bag, around the neighborhood for a pleasure cruise/shock the neighbors tour and then we released the poor traumatized little turtle back into the lake. This sort of stuff doesn't happen to people who live up in town, does it?

sometimes, it's the side trips...

Photo credits are a mix on this one. Some are Rose's, some are Chewy's. If it really matters to you which is which, ask me.

Most of the time, when I'm headed off to have a vacation, I have a pretty good idea where I'm going. I have fairly well planned what I'm going to do when I get there. After all, I might not be passing back that way again soon, and I don't want to miss a gem of an experience because I didn't know it was there for the having. But I never nail my schedule to a solid surface and stretch out all the slack, either. It's a blessed thing to reach a fork in the road and have the luxury of choosing which way to go. Sometimes instinct guides me, sometimes it's the allure of something shiny on the horizon, sometimes it's the promise of beauty passed in a rumor while chatting with the locals. Other times, it's a mundane highway sign, placed there by the good folks at the local transportation department purely for my edification. (Ok, for the edification of the general public, not me in particular. But it seems like they're written just for me sometimes. The universe has an impeccable timing chain, I tell you.) On the last day of my Utah vacation this summer, we rode over to Cedar Breaks National Monument as planned. I had bashed myself in the noggin with some sinus medication, so I stretched out on my bike and took a nap while the crew took these amazing photos. Medicated was better than congested, but it made me easy prey for the sunbeam-laced cat nap that came looking for me later. The vistas at Cedar Breaks are amazing, and really leave you with the impression that a Creator was looking at all those neat hunks of rock and thinking, "What if i just frosted this landscape with Cedar trees? I know! I'll liquefy the seed mix and spread it on like those Chia Pet things! This'll look AMAZING in about 10,000 years..."

Chelli had things at home that needed her attention, so she left Zion in the direction of Hurricane to get a t-shirt and then to point her headlight homeward. And so Rose, Chewy, Sylvia and I found ourselves at Zion National Park in southern Utah, staring at a fork in the road. It was pretty nearly our first unplanned turn of the whole vacation, and we were about 6 days in at that point. It took us to Kanab, UT. We'd been on an ATV tour in Tropic, UT a few days earlier, and our guide had mentioned that there were some old Hollywood movie sets in the vicinity that were used to film some of the episodes of Gunsmoke and several Hollywood westerns. He lamented the fact that another set had burned down under suspicious circumstances. Apparently the locals had recently rebuilt the set used in The Outlaw Josey Wales (and some other classic westerns) to make it safe for tourists to visit and the scuttlebutt said that extremist environmentalists had torched it because they were unhappy with the resulting traffic. This still-standing TV set was only barely holding together. The whole thing was posted "No Trespassing" but that hadn't stopped a few people we saw from sneaking in. I don't know whether Chewy was more disappointed that cheaters were prospering (in that they got close-ups) or that the John Wayne set was burned down. Either way, it was easy to see why they wanted to keep people out. The gallows looked like it was being held together by the wisp of rope that was dangling from the crosspiece, and all the other buildings had the look of using their very staircases as crutches.

Camping in Kanab was just as scenic as everything else in southern Utah. And I think it was staring up at that butte, sipping a beer and polishing off the last of my macaroni and cheese that I finally let go of the need to know where I was. I don't know how or when this need overcame me. I remember reading the map for my mom on long road trips when I was not more than 10 years old and not caring at all where we were. Somewhere in the succeeding 10 years, I turned into a (slightly compulsive) Navigator. In Kanab, I managed to let go of it for a while.

Lots of people have written books and sung songs extolling the idea that life is more about the journey than it is about the destination. On the one hand, I can appreciate that. But I know enough psychology to know that the sorts of people who are inclined to write books and sing songs are the only people for whom that is absolutely and essentially true. For those of us more inclined to consume art than to create it, life might be journey, destination, or some mix of the two. For me, life is HERE and life is NOW, so the destination and the journey are equally important. Yesterday is pretty much irrelevant, tomorrow is an infinite fan of possibilities that cannot be comprehended, while the present is everything. It makes me rotten at pattern recognition, it explains why I'm 10 minutes late for everything, and it makes me great at Navigation. I can limit the field of possibilities by taking a fork today. Knowing where I am in the moment allows me to foresee, insofar as one can foresee, what possibilities I am allowing or denying by making a choice. Plus, something about vacation tends to slip my inner Perfectionist a Valium Martini, letting me make Navigational choices both literal and figurative without agonizing first over whether it is the perfect choice.

So we woke up the next morning in Kanab, and instead of going home as we had planned, we looked at that fork in the road and took it to the Grand Canyon. I sure do love having some slack in my schedule, because sometimes the side trips are the best part.

Leave Only Your Footprints

On our third day in Utah, we woke up in some chilly high-altitude morning darkness in Torrey. The idea had been to get out to the first lookout in Dixie National Forest just after sunrise (because it would be too dark to ride there before sunrise) and then roll on through our day from there. We actually crawled out of our tents just after sunrise, because it was too cold to be out tearing down your nice warm campsite and still define the activity as "vacation". We were slow moving that morning, but it gave the coffee shop across the road (<3 coffee!) time to open up and sell us coffee and that gave the non-coffee drinkers in our party time to visit the local tourism office two doors down. The local tourism office had some interesting information about our planned route, like the fact that there was a great little slot canyon a short hike off the main road, if you knew where to look. (I'm experimenting with the Google Map link. If you DO NOT see a blue dot in the middle of the map, you can click the "View Larger Map" link to see where that canyon is and what photos other people have posted of it.)


View Larger Map

We did make it out to that overlook, and the view was worth it, no? Now, some of you know I have a miserable sense of elapsed time. How long does it take to do laundry? About an hour. How long to make macaroni? About an hour. Watch a movie? Write a blog post? Eat supper? Walk the dog? Get through airport security? About an hour. I'm not at all scientific about time. So Chewy and Chelli got as far down the road as they were going and turned around, and they saw me keep on going. I was going to The End Of The Road, you see. And that got me in trouble, because the time that elapsed between passing them as they turned around on the road and seeing them again at The Beginning of The Road was too long. "Too long" is a scientific measure of time describing the time it takes for others to get tired of sitting in the hot sun and move from worry about you to aggravation with you. Irritated as they may have been, they took some awesome photos!



In the "too long" period of time that I left everyone waiting, however, I went clear to The End Of The Road. I saw some amazing scenery and got some of the real solitude that visits to the desert always promise. I could never be that far from civilization as long as I was on a paved road, but I spent "about an hour" not seeing any other vehicles, and the time and space to let my thoughts expand and roam were a treasure to me.

On the way back to The Beginning Of The Road, I decided to stop in at that little slot canyon. I had noticed it on my way out to The End Of The Road, but thought it looked too busy. So I went on by in search of my solitude. I was rewarded, because by the time I'd reached The End Of The Road and come back "about an hour" later, the place was abandoned. I hiked across the creek and up into this quiet little nook between high stone walls. It was cool, shady and just a little bit damp at the very back where the sun can never really reach. I just squatted back there and listened to the wind whistling over the top of the canyon and the rustling of the cottonwood out in the creek bed, hiding the mouth of the canyon from casual passersby. If it had been a little warmer that morning, if my phone's alarm clock had been a little louder, if we hadn't stopped for coffee, if we hadn't engaged the local guy at the information office... All those things had to happen to give me that quiet, shady moment in the back of the slot canyon. I know I was but one of many visitors that day and many other days. After all, how secluded can a place be if you can find out about it at the tourism office? Still, for that little while, I had the place entirely to myself.

I felt a chill coming off the wall, but whether it was from the rock or the wind I didn't know. So I reached out to touch the stone to feel just how cool it was... The canyon floor was deep sand, and the stomping of all the previous visitors had dusted the walls with powder. Where I touched the yellow stone, I left a little damp mark and my hand came away gritty. I tried to wipe it clean against my pants, but couldn't; the grit of riding and hiking was all over my clothes. So I dug a little at the base of the wall where the sand was still wet from carrying the last rain some months before. The permanently shaded little hole filled up with just enough water to rinse my palm clean. I stirred up the sand and made mud, wet my hand, and made a proper handprint on the wall. The mud was a dark red on the yellow-brown wall, the only sort of graffiti I could bring myself to create.

I hiked back to my bike and rode back to my anxious friends. I never took a picture of the handprint because I gave up carrying cameras on these trips after our RoadTrip07 when I realized how much better Rose's photography is than mine. So my handprint evaporated off that wall, I'm sure, well before I tucked into a plate of lunch and pie at the diner at The Beginnng Of The Road. And that's what it's all about, right? Leave nothing behind but your footprints. The only lasting impact any of us can make is in loving the people around us and treating them gently. I'll try to remind my friends of that the next time I keep them waiting "too long".

howl at the moon...

Rose and I recently returned from a vacation in Utah. It seems like an odd place for a queer couple to vacation, but the land is beautiful and the motorcycling is outstanding. We had a thrilling time.
Our first few days were lazy and fun, just passing time getting across West Texas (snooze) and into Cortez, CO (beautiful). We enjoyed the warm hospitality of my aunt and uncle in Las Vegas, NM along the way and sampled some terrific cuisine in Taos. We even shopped! Furthermore, we bought something! Neither Rose nor I shops recreationally so that was a noteworthy moment. It was a home decor item so large we had to ship it home as it wouldn't have fit on our motorcycles. Srsly. I'm sure that I'll post a photo of it once we get the room painted and hang it on the wall.
We met up in Cortez with some friends from Bakersfield, CA and another friend from Phoenix, AZ. Chewy (one of the two from Bakersfield) started having trouble with her bike out on the road. It turns out an electronic component in her bike was on the fritz, and this is a widespread problem. They had several dozen back ordered at the shop where she stopped for repairs, so we had a makeshift solution for starting her bike: keep trying until it works. It turns out, though, that the uncooperative electronic component governed other miscellaneous systems, like headlights and the cooling fan. These will both be important later...

So on our first day out, we hit a bunch of big destinations: Mesa Verde, the Four Corners, Goosenecks State Park, and a terrific (in the terrifying sense of the word) piece of road called the Moki Dugway. About 2/3 up the Moki Dugway, Chewy's bike overheated and we had to pull over. (Fritzy Electronic Component strikes again!) On the face of a cliff, in a switchback, five bikes parked on the gravel, with sunset approaching rapidly. And that wasn't the scary part of the day. Just so you know, everything worked out okay. Now you don't have to scroll to the bottom of this post looking for the awful news before you come back to finish the story.



After about an hour waiting for the bike to cool, we carried on. This meant we were passing through Lake Powell territory right at sunset, but we were still a good hour and a half from our destination in Hanksville, UT. As full darkness got serious about settling on the mesa there, Chewy's absent headlight became a real problem. (Fritzy Electronic Component strikes again!) However, she's a real tough lady and not one to stop riding for something so silly as absence of light. So she put me out front, and she rode just off my flank so she could use my headlight to illumine her path. Everyone else followed behind. Really, this worked pretty well as long as the road was straight and flat. We had to slow down significantly to take the curves, though. UNTIL... [dramatic music: DUN-DUN-DUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!] the coyote.

That's right, gentle readers. I had my first motorcycle/wildlife encounter. This little coyote was out in the middle of the road, sniffing something on the pavement that I'm certain was quite disgusting and probably dead. As soon as I saw it, I jammed on my brakes and (reportedly) created quite a nasty-smelling cloud of rubber smoke behind me. I did not manage to avoid the coyote, but I did manage to avoid the pavement. So I call that a tie. I hit the thing with my tire and then IT hit my left foot and went spinning off into the darkness. Some brainiacs have asked me when I tell them this whether the coyote lived. Now, really, if you hit a wild wolf-like creature on the highway at night, would you go unarmed out into the desert to look at the outcome? Really?!?! Just FYI, the pictured coyote is one that we stumbled across in a national park the following day.

About five minutes later, the massive rush of adrenaline wore off, and I had to pee like i have never in my life needed to pee. And I went through both basic training and military survival school, so I know about needing to pee. :) Luckily, we were only another 10 miles or so from Hanksville, at that point. We pulled up at the first gas station and examined my bike for signs of damage and everyone else's teeth for rubber cinders. Turns out there were none of the above, but I finally got to pee. We concluded (and rightly so) that it was too late by then to expect any restaurants to be open in this roll-up-the-sidewalks-at-dusk sort of town, so we bought some cans of Chef Boyardee and rolled to our campground.

Chef Boyardee heated over a camp stove, when savored with that Boyamigladtobealive sauce and topped with superb company, is probably the finest gourmet meal I've ever eaten.

a list...

THINGS THAT RULE

• Getting a standby seat on the earlier flight
• Getting moved to an aisle seat
• Hot, fresh nachos with sour cream
• Taking a vacation
• Riding motorcycles
• Good times in great company
• Buying your wife a Ride Bell
• Homemade Beef Jerky
• WoW Raids with phat lewts

THINGS THAT SUCK

• Crying babies on your plane (redeemed by falling asleep on taxi)
• Yip-yip-yipping dogs on your plane (damned for NOT falling asleep, EVER)
• Warmed-over nachos that spent 3 days in the fridge
• The last day of work before vacation
• Locking your wife out of the house while you're shopping for her Ride Bell
• West Texas Highways in August

Y'all have a great week. We'll be back soon.

overheard in my truck

ME: so i'm going to put those risers on my bike sunday.
ROSE: but i have [string of activities] & [visiting friend] here this weekend
ME: what, like i need help?!? it's not that complicated. besides, before i met you, i had to turn a wrench by myself. you can do [string of activities] while i change out the risers.
ROSE: oh. okay. but i just thought you'd want the extra hands, to make it easier to position things...
ME: hmmm... yeah, and since [visiting friend] is leaving on sunday, you'll have time to help me.
ROSE: oh, no! you don't want my help, that's okay. i won't intrude.
ME: oh, come on, honey... you know you're dying to come wrench on my bike. *evil grin*
ROSE: no... you do it yourself. *grin*
ME: see, now it's a contest between your Butch and your Stubborn. Which one is gonna win?
ROSE: we'll see. that's a close fight. neither one likes to lose.

The Road Goes On Forever...

At the end of our last installment, the intrepid motorcyclists were in Virginia, having braved the glorious and terrifying Blue Ridge Parkway in both rain and sunshine. Finding themselves in Virginia, and needing to be in Texas, Thalassa and Rose hie themselves home. Again, you can't really ride a straight line anywhere here. So we pointed ourselves in the general direction of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and wriggled on down to its delightfully tortuous bounding road, the Tail of the Dragon. We had planned this quite carefully, actually, so that we could do it on a weekday. I don't know if there are any humans who actually enjoy densely packed, crowded situations, but for some reason we all tend to jam ourselves into attractive places together on weekends. I can't imagine a more miserable riding experience than one in which I was being hampered from the front by a slow bike while crowded from behind by a fast bike on a road that doesn't even try to lend itself to safe passing zones. Weekends are reported to be crowded out there, so Friday was our preferred approach. Even with the Honda Hoot motorcycle rally in nearby Knoxville, TN we had a fairly clear road to ride. We didn't see any accidents or even any really silly behavior. Generally, everyone was polite and responsible - which is bad for my writing, but good for my health. I include this fact only because some of you readers actually know me in real life and care whether I get off the bike with the same number of limbs I had when I clambered on it.

We ordered our ride pictures from Killboy as I promised. All the other photography (except as noted) is Rose's because she's good at it, and I'm not. The road was really a blast! It IS all it's cracked up to be... I can't begin to imagine what riding it was like back when the speed limit was 55 mph. These days the limit is 30, and while I recognize that's artificially low in honor of the road's notoriety and the crowds there, I still felt like 30 was awfully fast in some of the corners -- maybe I'm just a nervous nelly. Then again, if you look at the chicken strips on my Valk, they're damn narrow. I know I've never been out to the edge of the tire, but I'm certainly not riding it upright through those mountains, either. Whichever, once we'd ridden the Tail of the Dragon, bought our t-shirts and tchotchkes, jawed with some bikers and gawked at some of the bikes in the parking area, we rolled on down to our next destination road, the Cherohala Skyway. It was actually prettier and more fun to ride this one than Tail of the Dragon, simply because it's a much more open road and has some nice passing zones built right into the mix! (as the old Duncan Hines commercials would say) Rose reports that it is her FAVORITE ROAD EVAR!eleventy!

We leaned and wriggled and swerved our way on down to the end of the Cherohala Skyway and pulled over to powwow about dinner. There at the scenic overlook, with a background babble from the beautiful mountain river that I swear was a wee stream just a few miles up the hill, we met a delightful guy who was just the picture of every "retired Jewish Yankee winters in Florida" joke you've ever heard. I swear, visiting with him was like talking to a cartoon or a sitcom character. He had the accent, the attitude, the face... Ultimately, of course, he was a real person with questions about how two girls could pack for two weeks in those tiny saddlebags and what was the fastest way back to Knoxville, and whether we'd really ridden all the way from Texas by ourselves, and whether he'd make it back in time for dinner. We used our GPS to give him some directions and we rolled off to meet up with some old friends in Athens, TN.

Have you ever wondered what your preacher was like before he was a preacher? I've often wondered that, myself. Unless you get a chance to sit down with said preacher's mother, though, you don't usually get the answer to that question. Well, in this case, our old friend has just become a preacher. I've only known him a couple of years, but Rose and he were coworkers back in the day. Apparently, the two of them were running buddies in their misspent youth. Of course, they've both matured and taken on responsibility as it's come careering at them, but every once in a while you see that glint in their eyes... you know they could still go back to being hellions, if only for a weekend. We had a wonderful dinner and tour of the new house and new church that our friend is going to be leading, and then we settled in for a good night's rest while visions of hairpin turns and sweet sweeping mountain vistas danced in our heads. (These two shots are from Moonshine Photo)

Blue Ridge Parkway? or Heaven? You be the judge...

After our rotten and rainy Saturday on the BRP (Blue Ridge Parkway) we awoke in Boone, NC with bright and sunny skies. Seriously, it was like a whole other country. First, we backtracked a short way to visit Grandfather Mountain. They actually make motorcyclists read a half-page "Hazards Warning" upon entering the park that basically explains that this is a Mountain with twisties and possibly even SWITCHBACKS on it and that you should neither take these things too fast nor too slow, lest you fly off or fall down. This, of course, made me grin from ear to ear with gleeful anticipation. So we took off (at a reasonable pace) and cruised up to the first building on the mountain, which was the Nature Museum. They had some really fantastic displays there. My favorite was the dendrochronology. They had used a tree cross-section as a timeline and marked rings on the tree with historical events that took place in the year the ring formed. Informative and aesthetically pleasing! Also, based on their displays of native plants, I'm fairly certain that I have strawberries growing in my flowerpots out front. They were supposed to be asters, I think. That's what I get for using my compost as fertilizer.

The Nature Museum also included a number of live critters on display. We saw the otters, but they were asleep in the shade and not out being cute for our benefit. How rude! They had some zoo-like animals and others that were quite plainly rescued animals that were unable to survive in the wild. Like this majestic guy, a bald eagle who was maimed by a gunshot wound. Our favorite, however, were the genial black bears. The bears were quite interactive, at least as long as someone on our side of the wall had a packet of treats in hand. Yes, at Grandfather Mountain you are encouraged to feed the bears! This seasoned pro was working the crowd of tourists quite handily. There were kids competing with each other to see who could toss their food closest to her mouth, because if it was close enough she'd snatch it out of the air. Too far away, and she'd let it roll off, to be licked up later, when she got around to it... We sat down in a shady spot and considered our options at that point. We could:

1) Eat a bear and hope nobody noticed
2) Gnaw each other's arms off
3) Go back to town for lunch

We, quite reasonably I think, pointed our headlights down the mountain. We stopped for a quick photo, where you'll notice the pointy bits sticking out of the mountain behind us. Those are, apparently, the nose and beard of the Grandfather. If you look at the mountain from the right vantage, it's supposed to look like an old man in profile, complete with bushy beard. Who makes this stuff up, anyway? We rolled back into Boone, NC for lunch at Tupelo World Cafe where I had Roasted Yam Jalapeno Soup. It tasted as fascinating as it sounds. The menu looked startlingly similar to, but more diverse than, the one at Coyote Kitchen, and it turned out that's because Tupelo's owners were the founders of the Coyote Kitchen. They know good food, that's for certain.

Thence, it was ON WITH THE CURVES, ALREADY!!! We didn't get too many more pictures that day, because we were "burdened" with riding mile after mile after relaxing mile of sweeping curves through mountains, glens, passes, and meadows. After the 13-hour slog from Dallas to Atlanta on the previous Saturday, and the treacherous rainy riding the day before, the BRP on a Sunday was exactly what I needed. I got into my groove. I even have an iTunes playlist especially for this mood, appropriately titled "Sunday Morning". I jammed, I rolled around curves and over hills, past waterfalls and cabins, wineries and horse pastures. It really was heavenly.
Oh, and the forest? The rain from the day before had given everything a clean glow, a little lift. It smelled fresh and fertile and green. How I can describe a smell as green after making fun of someone for seeing a Grandfather in a mountain is surely one of the Great Mysteries of the Internet. We whiled the hours away cruising through some of the prettiest territory in North Carolina. We did get some scenic overlook shots that day, and there was some mighty nice scenery to look over.

There's really no way to photograph it and ride it at the same time, but we had the distinct pleasure of riding the Linn Cove Viaduct that day. I will leave it to your trusty Googling skills to find more photos of it, if you're interested. It made my enginerd senses tingle because the construction of that particular bridge was used as an example of first rate work in some of my engineering classes back in the old school days. It made Rose's biker senses tingle when she recognized, halfway down the viaduct, that her desktop wallpaper for a darn long time had been a publicity shot of her motorcycle riding that same stretch of bridge. This would be the geek equivalent of waking up in a closet full of stuffed animals plus one wrinkly alien and realizing that you were IN THE POSTER with E.T.

It was getting to be arm-gnawing time again, so we grabbed one more scenic overlook shot and scooted on across the border into Virginia, where we both worked for the week. How mundane!

All the road that's fit to ride...

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Atlanta for work, and then the following week I had to be in Abingdon, Va. For those of you who motorcycle, you probably know what turf is between Atlanta and western Virginia. For those of you who don't, it's quite seriously where angels would go to ride a motorcycle, if they had to choose something within the Continental US. Here's a graphic to make it clear:

You should notice two things about that picture. First, that no matter how you route yourself, you end up skirting or crossing Great Smoky Mountain National Park (green blob at map center); and second, you can't draw a straight line from Atlanta to Abingdon because the roads are all bendy. Given that the Smokies are round-ish green mountains with lovely vistas and moderate temperatures that are a human's best friend and that non-straight roads are a motorcycle's best friend, this is then teh perfect place to ride. Ask any angel you meet.

Really, I can't say enough about how fabulous and fun the ride was, IN GENERAL. However, our first day out was rainy, and I assure you that while our rainsuits kept us dry, there was no love lost on the clouds (aka: fog as thick and soft as cotton bolls) we stumbled through when we ATTEMPTED to ride up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Notice, if you will, the fact that although this photograph was taken at a scenic overlook, there is no scenery to overlook. The background closely resembles a cotton boll. After a little bit of that, we gave up and visited Linville Falls instead. A very short and pleasant hike through easy territory yielded us this neat little vista point:
Rose liked the flowers along the way. They call these "Mountain Laurel" but they look nothing like the Mountain Laurel I know here in Texas, and most disappointingly, they don't smell like my Mountain Laurel. *le sigh* I guess the angels got busy arranging the roads and forgot to perfume the flowers. Then again, it could have been the cotton boll fog just absorbing the smells. We only hiked out to the first waterfall because we were in serious danger of gnawing
each other's arms off at that point. Dark was falling and we had yet to reach a town that would do for dinner and hotel as we'd been ambling along the Parkway and other back roads in South and North Carolina which are known for their scenery but not their plentiful commercial services. Probably because the two are generally mutually exclusive. At a rest stop on our way up to the Parkway Rose found a plant with leaves bigger than her own head. Given that we couldn't see much further away than 100 feet because of the rain and cotton bolls fog, this was a choice bit of scenery for that day. We decided to take a tip from Mad Maps and go for dinner at a place called the Coyote Kitchen. This was a serious leap of faith for me because I've eaten at enough Tex/Ari/Cali/New-Mex style southwest eateries actually located in the Southwestern United States that I'm pretty much a connoisseur by default at this point. I don't enjoy the misguided attempts of yankees trying to make Southwest-Mex food and getting it wrong. Frankly, if I think the place is going to bill itself as a Southwest-Mex eatery, I'm only going to eat there if it is:

1. south of I-30
2. if I see actual Hispanic people in the kitchen preparing the food* or
3. it comes highly recommended.

Furthermore, the I-30 border is a stretch. I used to say I-20, but I found a good TexMex place in Fort Worth that's just south of I-30 so I moved it north just for them.

Blessedly, and under clause 3 above, the Coyote Kitchen was fantastic. They were veggie/vegan friendly, the staff were friendly and attentive and above all, everything tasted fantastic. They had a number of different Caribbean-style salsas, and while I only ate the Mango Lime and Cranberry Chipotle myself, I would say based on these two that all the salsa in there was good enough to feed the angels. Seriously, it was so good I bought the t-shirt. Now I can say, when hyping this place up to random strangers on the street, that I have Been There, Done That, and Bought the T-shirt.

We drifted off that night with happy tummies and thoughts of waterfalls dancing in our heads...
And we woke up the next day to glorious sunny skies and perfect riding weather. But that's for another post...

*Yes, I am aware this is a blatant racial stereotype. I'm willing to accept the potential consequences to my immortal soul so as to avoid eating things like burritos topped with marinara.