Xenotropic Systems

I decided I wasn’t really liking the software I was using at findu.com and how it was integrating with the blog, so I decided to see if I could get something else going. I wrote a completely new system that uses the database at www.aprsworld.net. I also signed up for a Google maps API key, and we’re interfacing directly with them as well. This should make things a lot cooler than just trying to swallow things in iframes. Let me know how funky it is. It can be accessed by using the “current location” link to the left.

I got a late start in the morning because I had stayed up later last night visiting with friends. Nevertheless I ended up on the road at around 8:30. I decided not to grab gas in Prescott because I estimated I had enough to get me to Flagstaff without any incident. I haven’t even come close to running out anywhere along the way yet.

In the recurring theme of avoiding freeways at all costs, I took AZ-89A out of Prescott towards Sedona. The road continued to amaze me. There was another section outside of Prescott Valley where there were about 10 miles of 20mph curves. I got bottled up behind some people, but that didn’t make it any less awesome. I think the most incredible part was getting into Jerome, AZ. When I saw the signs indicating the milage into the town, I assumed that it was at the end of the curves. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. You end up rounding a 20mph corner and seeing the “Entering Jerome” sign. The town is built upon the switchbacks back down into the desert. Houses and stores are terraced into the side of the mountain itself, and you make your way back down the desert floor through the town. I should have stopped to take some pictures, because it really is pretty amazing.

The weather started to heat up when I hit the valley floor. Things started to head into the 90s, and I knew I was back in the desert. I stopped at a little store outside of Sedona to grab a Gatorade and stretch my legs. This area is another one of those “this is Arizona?” moments. There are lush green trees by the river, and it actually seems like a livable place.

After the store there were some more incredible curves, but the traffic was ridiculously heavy. Cars were lined up for miles while the Sedona tourist set gawked at the scenery around them. It’s bad enough the road was signed at 20mph, but you had motorhomes that were clogging things up at around 5 mph.

I stopped in Flagstaff for a fuel stop, and then it was back into desert riding again. There are many things you have to fight about this kind of environment. First is that you are essentially in one position for long periods of time. Normally when you’ve got some curves in the road, you have to shift your weight and move your arms to maneuver the bike. Not so on straight desert roads. Your throttle hand also gets more abuse because it isn’t actually working, it’s just trying to keep itself in the same position all the time. You kinda develop some ways of combating this like being able to straighten your fingers while still holding the throttle open, or standing up on the bike for a few seconds to restore some circulation into your legs and ass, but it’s mostly just trying to fidget around to keep your body parts, and you, from falling asleep.

I got another Gatorade in Tuba City. It’s near reservation lands, so it had the obligatory “Injun Smoke Shoppe” in with the convenience store. Outside of Tuba City was my first real worry of the day. On the horizon were intermittent thunder clouds. For quite a while, the road managed to almost purposely weave its way around the rain that I could see falling. My biggest worry was the road being flooded out, and becoming impassable for a motorcycle. My exhaust pipe is much lower to the ground than a large truck or something. I didn’t really hit rain until a bit outside of Kayenta. The rain was falling fairly hard, so the droplets were big and hit with some force. I decided not to don my rain gear because I figured it would be over soon. I didn’t experience much more than three minutes of rain, and the roads stayed fairly sane.

I gassed up again at Kayenta, and grabbed a sip off of the Camelbak. I was going to go to the bathroom, but it turns out they were closed here due to “low water pressure.” I don’t know exactly what that means other than I’d have to hold it until the next stop. I also enjoyed some of the lowest gas prices on the trip. That $4.169 is for premium, not regular unleaded. I don’t know if this is just the price of gas, or whether Navajo Reservation taxes are just lower than State + Federal that you pay on the outside.

I was starting to get pretty fatigued by this point in time, so at Teec Nos Pas I stopped at the post office and got off of the bike for just a minute or so of shaking myself out. You’d be surprised at what just these little stops can do for you. I had intended to stop at Four Corners and take some pictures about 5 miles down from Teec Nos Pas, but I saw the line of RVs and cars going into the place and thought better of it. Most of those vehicles have air conditioning and can afford to stay out in the sun for a while. I’d end up sweating my ass off. Instead, I pushed through to Cortez.

Outside of Cortez there was a little traffic backup. There was a Harley-Davidson there without a windshield and the front end looking pretty nasty. Everyone seemed okay, and they had a flatbed tow truck to pull someone out of there. When I went by, I could see what the situation probably was, because there was a Harley shaped dent in the back of the SUV pulled over at the side of the road. It looked like the Harley rear-ended it for some reason.

I had a snack at McDonald’s in Cortez. Just a few chicken nuggets and a large drink. The Barq’s root beer was terrible because they had the mix set way too low. It turned out to be slightly brown soda water rather than any sort of root beer substance.

There were storm clouds in the distance between Cortez and Durango. I again decided to play a “wait and see” attitude towards my rain gear. This mostly paid off. I stayed dry until around 5 miles outside of Durango. This was actually okay, because after a day of desert riding in the heat, getting wet was a pleasant change. It was only 5 minutes of riding in the rain anyways, so it wasn’t that miserable.

I stopped at a gas station in Durango to throw on my jacket’s rain liner, and zip up the vents in my pants. It was also a good opportunity, since I missed the turn to stay on US-160 through Durango. Everything was pretty good until I had to go travel on the gravel roads to Dawn and James’s house. Normally, it’s not a huge deal, but the rain was sprinkling on me, and making the road surface a little wet. This made the traction even less than it would normally be on a gravel road. Plus, I had to take the roads so slowly that I couldn’t really leave my visor down because there wasn’t enough wind to clear it of the rain. That meant I just had to keep it up, and deal with being pelted in the face with raindrops.

It took me a while to traverse all the gravel, but my TomTom performed admirably and I made it right to the house without any incident. For this reason alone, it was proabably a great buy. I’ll seriously have to look into getting the “Rider” version that’s built for motorcycles. The biggest plus I can see is having a better screen for seeing in sunny weather.

I arrived around 7:00 local time (I lost an hour due to the Pacific to Mountain time change), and had dinner with the family. Unfortunately, Ian wasn’t able to eat with us because he’s become sick. This isn’t the sniffles kinda sick, but apparently the puking all over the house sick. He did come upstairs after dinner when Dawn, James, and I were chatting. James was gracious enough to offer me a couple of beers and I eagerly accepted.

At around 10:00 I trudged my way out to the trailer to set up camp for the next couple of days. As I’ve written before, the trailer is kinda a cool place to hang out. I spent a couple of hours writing and unwinding from the fairly harsh day. Another day closer to Springfield…

Total Fuel Cost: $36.85
Not Budgeted

I had been debating ever since I left Corvallis whether I was going to swing down to Prescott or not. I have a friend that I’ve known for like four years online that I’ve never met up with. We started playing Star Wars Galaxies together, and kinda drifted from MMO to MMO together. I haven’t heard to much from her lately as she quit doing the WoW thing for various reasons, and I’ve had kinda a hard time getting back in touch.

I made the decision last night that I’d go ahead and swing through Prescott. There’s a Motel 6 there, so it’d be fairly cheap to stay there, and it won’t add too much to the budget. Unfortunately, that decision meant that I’d be switching the two-day layover in Mesquite to a one-day. I know that Grandma was disappointed a little, but I think this side-trip had to happen.

The problem with planning a trip from Mesquite to Prescott is that there’s this huge hole in the ground in the way named the Grand Canyon. You have to pretty much go around it to get anywhere in Arizona from Nevada. I was trying to avoid Vegas like the plague because traffic there really sucks and apparently they’re tearing up every roadway in existence there anyways. I chose to take the road that skirts Lake Mead. This way I might get to see some scenery as well.

Before I left, I managed to dump the bike on its side. I guess this is good luck since dumping it when it’s stationaryis a whole lot better than when it’s moving. I had the bags all loaded up and realized that I wanted to do my morning chain-lube job. I’ve learned on these long trips just to do it at the beginning of every ride day, and it keeps things nice and lubricated back there. Unfortunately, with the bags on the bike becomes a lot more unwieldy to put on the centerstand. I didn’t heed the warnings the bike was giving me about how bad an idea this was, and it went over on the right side. I had to warn Grandma off from helping me try to lift it up since it’s heavy, and I couldn’t remove the one side bag that was squished. There was no real damage to the bike, other than a little spilled gas on the ground.

You could see where the county maintenance ended on the Lake Mead road, and the Federal road began because the quality of the road surface went to absolute shit. I really wish I had an adventure-tourer for this sort of thing because I was getting shaken all over. The lake was scenic, but nothing to really write home about. I think because people in Nevada don’t really know what lakes look like, they’ll go off about Lake Mead. Incidentally, this is also a great way to go because if you enter the recreation area near Moapa, you don’t get charged an entrance fee, and when you turn on to the road towards Hoover Dam, you don’t get charged like everyone else.

I headed towards Hoover Dam on US-95. They are doing some heavy construction by the dam itself, and I saw the makings of a really high bridge over the Colorado River. I’m thinking that the purpose of it is twofold. First, I think that they just want to widen the road to four lanes. Second, I fully expect them to shut down car traffic going over the dam itself. They seem to have become so concerned with terrorism on the dam that they’re freaking out. There are security checkpoints at both ends where they pull over and inspect vehicles like RVs, or whoever they like. They also have signs in the parking area warning people that they’re not allowed to bring anything over a certain size on to the dam.

I texted back and forth with Dylan on the dam because I just had to send the obscure musical reference “Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam…” to see if he’d get it. Of course he did.

The road out of Hoover Dam was pretty boring. It was four lanes all the way down to Kingman and straight. It was a little hot out, but nothing that was too oppressive. I stopped for some gas and some lunch in Kingman. I ordered some stuff from Carl’s Jr. since we don’t really have those back east, but for some reason I wasn’t really interested in the food. I picked at it while I rested, but I did manage to drink two 32 oz. containers of Squirt.

US-95 follows I-40 for a while, and then takes off south towards Phoenix. Again, I managed to find what is a divided four-lane highway most of the way. My endurance has been way off, and I’m only really able to manage 70 miles before getting off of the bike. I’m not sure what to attribute this to. I could be out of training, or just getting old.

On the last real stop of the day, I grabbed a Gatorade in Congress, AZ. I soaked my shirt in water since it was topping 100° again. As I was about ready to leave, a guy that’s about the definition of cowboy walked up to me. He had the hat on, and even the stereotypical “one squinty eye.” He asked me if I was going up Yarnall Hill. I just told him I was going towards Prescott on AZ-89. He just wanted to warn me to be careful since there were a lot of motorcyclists that get killed up there.

The hill was pretty severe. 20 mph curves abounded, and if you missed, it was off of a sheer cliff. There were around 5 miles of these, and suddenly at the top you came into the little town of Yarnall and everything started to change. The temperature started to drop and there were little fields popping up by the side of the road. It was a harbinger of things to come.

I finally made it to Wilhoit where my friends lived, and I managed to find their place. I hadn’t really told anyone I was coming, so I didn’t really expect anyone to be there. They were apparently at work, and I left a note with my cell phone number on it so that they could call me at the hotel if they wanted to get together.

I headed into Prescott and got the payoff for the entire side trip. For the 17 miles between Wilhoit and Prescott there are some of the nicest curves I’ve ever seen. Other than having to follow a motorhome through about half of them, it was pretty fun. It’s kinda like Orofino, except where in Idaho you have 40’s and 45’s, this is full of 20’s and 25’s. The curves are so severe that they just set the speed limit of the whole stretch of road down to 30. It’s too bad these were at the end of the trip when I was all tired and not able to take full advantage of them.

Prescott is also nothing like what I expected. You get a couple miles out of town and you start to notice that there are ponderosa pine trees by the side of the road. It had been raining recently, so I also smelled the scent of a real forest. The temperature dropped into the 70s, and things became pleasant. It almost reminded me of somewhere like Bend or Sisters. I didn’t really expect something like this in Arizona of all places, and was pleasantly surprised.

I checked into the Motel 6 and took a quick nap. I bought the $3 Wi-Fi connectivity they had so that I could check in on everything. I ended up getting a text message from my friend that they had gotten my note, but couldn’t call my phone for some reason. I e-mailed her back the telephone number to the hotel. About a half an hour later I ended up getting a call from her. They were having dinner with their in-laws, but she’d give me a call later.

Papa John’s pizza was for dinner. I probably ordered a little too much. I wanted to say by the phone in case my friend called and honestly I was a little too lazy to go out. Her husband gave me a call a while later, and I agreed to go out to their place to hang out for a bit. This meant that I’d have to traverse those curves on AZ-89 again. It’s a different experience in the dark with lightning going off all over the place. I ended up taking it really slow both ways, because I didn’t want to fall off of the cliffs to the side of the road.

I got back to the hotel around midnight and decided that I needed to revise my departure time to 9:00 instead of 8:00. I set my alarm and pretty much passed out. I’m glad I made the decision to head through Arizona. It was great to meet up with friends, and the roads at the end were incredible.

Total Fuel Cost: $25.63
Not Budgeted

This seems to be all the buzz among the geeks around, so I’m deciding to try it out. It has a client, Twitteriffic, for the iPhone, so I’ll see if I can do some updates at gas stops or something to see what happens. I also installed a little plugin for ecto so that tweets should come out for every new blog entry I post. We’ll see how the whole thing works out.

I woke up on time, but ended up leaving Winnemucca a little late. Aunt Sue cooked an awesome breakfast, and I was a little lethargic in the morning. At the end of the day, it didn’t really matter, because I arrived in Mesquite at a decent hour, around 6:00 p.m.

The morning ride was actually cool in the desert. Between Battle Mountain and Austin was in the 70’s. What made the ride grueling for most of the day were the desert winds. I felt like I was going to be blown off the road most of the time, and I was angling the bike into the wind for most of the day. This makes the ride pretty tiring. It’s not like going around some mean curves, because at least you can see those up ahead in the road and prepare for them. It requires that you keep the bike constantly muscled into the wind, and you have to be ready for a gust that will blow you around. It’s stressful, you’re always on guard, and it’s fairly athletic. I really hope I don’t have to do too much more of it, but something tells me that Kansas will be even worse.

I met a group of Harley-Davidson riders going down Hwy 50 in Austin at the gas station. There are a group of curves to the east of the town on Hwy 50, and the first guy there was laughing at his buddies because he was the one having fun in them. They were from around Austin, TX, so the joke was pretty good. They asked my advice about Oregon, because they were headed towards Astoria and the Columbia Gorge. I was pretty wiped out from the winds, so I spent a while chatting with them about stuff at the gas stop.

It gradually started to warm up on the way down to Tonopah. My endurance was starting to suffer a little bit, so I at least got off the bike for a quick drink in Carvers. There’s nothing there, and the gas station looked long since shut down, so it was grabbing a nip out of the Camelbak and stretching my legs.

I backtracked into Tonopah to grab some lunch and tank up on some more gas. Coming back out of town, I saw a missile mounted on a pole on the side of the road. It turns out this was the entrance to the Tonopah Test Range where they ran the stealth fighters out of when they were still classified. There were signs all along the road about low flying aircraft.

I stopped briefly at Warm Springs to make sure that I was on the right track. There literally is nothing in Warm Springs. The buildings that are there are dilapidated and look like they’ve been closed for some time. But it is entrance to the Extraterrestrial Highway. It’s named this because it’s the closest approach to the famous Area 51 at Nellis AFB. I had wanted to go on this highway the last time, but it was flooded out when I had tried to go. It’s lucky that I got gas in Tonopah because there was a sign saying that there was no gas for 111 miles. It was pretty much right on. The entire length of Nevada Highway 375 lacks a single gas station, and there’s pretty much only one town along it. Luckily Dylan didn’t come, because his fuel tank isn’t big enough for a run down the ET Highway. He’ll have to fix that before we tackle it one of these days.

The one town on the ET Highway is Rachel, NV. This is where they have the “Little A’Lie’Inn” hotel. Using the word “hotel” is rather generous though. I didn’t really know about Rachel until I rolled up to it.I wanted to stop, because the wind was again hampering my endurance to around 50 miles without stretching out at least a little. There’s no gas in Rachel, but the A’Le’Inn is a bar/hotel/etc. I didn’t go inside, because it looked pretty sketchy, but you can see the pictures from outside.

I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel in Rachel. I continued on to Alamo which was pretty much the first opportunity to get gas. I got a chance to get a good stretch, and doused my shirt in water to get cool on the road. By this time the temperature was approaching 105° F. I don’t know why, but I was very nervous that the bike was going to begin overheating for some reason and I kept a close eye on the engine temperature. To its credit, the VFR performed admirably, and didn’t really give me any trouble. Things were a little greener by the side of the road because there were a couple of lakes along the way that provided an oasis-like feel to things.

I saw one of the weirdest things that I have really encountered right at the junction between US-93 and NV-168. It was a new community named Coyote Springs. It exemplifies Southern Nevada for me. It was essentially an entire city that was being created from nothingness. The first thing done, of course, was a golf course. The web site says they have plans for 150,000 homes. These people are literally creating life from nothingness. Apparently their major problem has been acquiring water rights for the community. It’s mildly ridiculous to have to bring in water just to start a whole new city.

I made one last stop in Moapa just to stretch the legs again, and grab some cold water. The water in the camelbak was pretty much dead by this point in time, and the temperature continued to rise, averaging out at 108° or so. I buzzed the freeway for the remaining few miles into Mesquite, and when I hit the exit it was 111°. I was glad to see Grandma. She heard the bike, and greeted me at the door. Dinner was some cold cut sandwiches that tasted really good after just getting off the road. We went out later that night to say goodbye to one of Grandma’s Salt Lake friends that was visiting, and I convinced Grandma to stop by the liquor store to grab some beer. I found some Arrogant Bastard, and things were mellow. A good end to a tiring day.

Total Fuel Cost: $49.78
Estimated Fuel Cost: $54.94
9.39% under fuel budget