Cornering Consciousness

Season of the Bike by Dave Karlotski There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds. Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and height as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physic...

See map. Really, it should be The Best of Arizona , because St. George to Mesa sounds pretty mundane. And for all intents and purposes, Mesa is, the whole Phoenix area is, mundane that is; suburban sprawl and clogged arteries called freeways. The mundane disappears when the Joshuas line the Carefree Highway and the Saguaros are crowned with blooms that look much like daisies. Early Friday we mounted and rode I-15 to the Overton exit and picked up 169 that turns into 167, the road that rolls along the shoreline of Lake Mead on Nevada's side. Just out of Overton 167 turns into 169 which is under construction, has been for three years now, a gigantic project with divided two-lanes. Just into Lake Mead Recreational area, the road dissolves to perpetually moistened slippery paste for fourteen miles. Beyond that the road firms up but is no consolation to one's posterior, bumpy enough to rattle loose dental work and random thoughts. And then the road turns to silk encouragi...

It's a journey of stark contrasts; 50's on the coast, 100's in the foothills, twisties on 1 and 58, mind-numbing straights everywhere else, a Honda and a Harley, and the Cavalier at San Simeon and Motel 6 in Bakersfield. But, what's a road trip without it. We drew comments at about every stop today. At McDonald's in Bakersfield another patron asked about our trip (we're pretty obvious in all the gear) and then talked about his yearly tour of the western states. In Barstow a little ol' lady in an old red VW went on about her daughter (who was standing there filling the Bug) rides a Harley and how her son-in-law was wiped out by a semi in Laughlin last year - stories we never like to hear. In Vegas, "Didn't I see you ladies northbound I-15?" He quit talking when I showed up. There was no one around at the Mojave Air and Space Port where we stopped for a photo, save one guy who was hauling huge pumps on a forklift who advised us to park in a safer...

Relaxing was the order of the morning. Coffee, robes, fire, ocean. It's not often when I can get to a state of letting the little things go, but it happened this morning. This is a magical place for us, a feeling that surfaced the moment we pulled up to the Cavalier. We started our marriage here and have returned every time we've ridden the PCH. So it's no wonder we have a hard time leaving this behind. Mindy said she cried as we left Cambria. Tough to do in a full face helmet, but she's a tough girl. It was in the low 50's in San Simeon and twenty minutes away in the vineyards of Paso Robles we couldn't shed the layers fast enough as ambient temps hit the century mark. It was toasty all the way across the valley. Another of our favorite stops is the Donati Family vineyard. We stopped there March 2008 when we were shooting the PCH documentary and while the crew was setting up the shot a Google Street View camera car pulled and caught us. Spin it around and you...

Tuesday, May 19th. Our turn-around day, and with some chagrin. Actually, a day hasn't passed without any of the three of us saying, "Let's stay." The train in the distance. And if somehow we were able to manage that, sell our upside down house, liquidate our stuff, buy that VW Westfalia and wash feet for a living, how long until someone says, "I sure miss Zion?" Paul Simon's song, Train in the Distance , has a bridge that says, "The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains." No truer words. But I have to believe I'd never get tired of this, this junction of land and water seamed by a ribbon of asphalt, ridden by a machine that leaves no yearning for something different. It's a satisfaction to share this with ones I love so much, first hand, saturating all our senses, indelibly impressing our memories, along with these pics, a satisfaction that I've never come by previous, or in any other p...