SW Adventure

[Lapchik]

Heading out Monday May 18th. Follow along if you like.
https://maps.findmespot.com/s/DS28#history/assets

I will do text updates along the way, but I probably won't do pictures until I get back home because trying to do html coding on a cell phone is a real pain.

[Lapchik]

Monday, May 18, 2026 (585 miles)

The Honda had exactly 42,000 miles on the odometer as I pulled it out of the garage today. It was at 41,999 the last time I pulled into the parking lot, so I had done 8 big donuts in front of the garage to roll it over. After starting the day with a 40 mile drive to drop the kids off at their mom's house, I swapped the grey mobility blob for the freedom machine and headed south like an overly excitable dog that had just slipped its collar. I left with a gray sky above, wet road below, hazy horizon ahead, and in every other direction was a Canadian goose, hissing and honking at any vehicle that dared to drive to near its freshly hatched goslings. Unfortunately, the weather never improved. It was 55° when I left the Minnesota lakes, it drizzled and rained off and on through South Dakota and Nebraska, and it was 41° as I finished riding through the sand hills pulled into the hotel in North Platte.

[Lapchik]

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 (626 miles)
Today was another day mostly dedicated to getting farther south, but I did do a little sightseeing. If you are ever in St Francis Kansas, stop in at the motorcycle museum and ask Lyle about his Maico dirt bike and the collection of trophies surrounding it. I stopped at a couple tri-point markers today, and mount sunflower which is the highest point in kansas. A couple minutes after I got there, some people showed up and they told me they were revisiting the place where their wedding proposal happened 35 years ago. After that, I went through the Kansas Badlands, which to be honest, was less impressive than I thought it would be. It is interesting in that it is so incongruous with everything around it for quite a distance. After leaving that area, it was flatlands all the way to Boise City Oklahoma. It seemed like every town I went through had a town on the left, comprised of mostly abandoned buildings or buildings that should be abandoned, co-op silos on the right, and an oddly well-kept cemetery. There must have been a dozen of those towns. When I got to the hotel, a pair pulled up on motorcycles as I was unloading. The lady turned out to be an anthropology professor from chicago, riding back home after transversing most of route 66. She and her riding companion had just come up through Las Cruces and Taos, NM. She was also on a CB500X Honda, but one version older than mine.

[Lapchik]

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 (614 miles)
I started the day with a bit of a downer. Black Mesa Oklahoma was closed due to a fire. Honestly I'm not sure if I wanted to walk nine miles anyway, and I'm only upset about the trail being closed because of how boring the drive is to get there if I ever decide to try again. The Alpine Hot shot crew said the fire should be out but they are going to be monitoring it all day as the wind comes up. The guy I was talking to said no one on their crew would care if I climbed it, but that they also wouldn't go out of their way to save my dumb a** if I did it. Without a concrete answer on is the fire out from the hotshot crew, and the Oklahoma parks department saying the trail is closed, I just checked out the dinosaur prints in the creek bed nearby and grabbed a Tri-State marker before continuing on my way south. I got both CO NM OK and NM OK TX tri-point markers today. At first I thought Oklahoma had the worst unsealed roads I had ever driven on, but then Texas made itself known. Just fast enough to click into second gear, with ruts ranging from a little tickle on the suspension to full on ski moguls, it was the worst washboard road I've ever seen. I just plodded along for 5 miles rather than backtracking 10 and finding a paved route around it. As a reward for that punishment, the road pastbboys ranch was newly paved and just curvy enough to keep your attention but not so much so that it took serious effort. That didn't last long, and it was like I was in the Oklahoma panhandle or southwest Kansas again. Flat. Dusty. Cows. As I got further into new mexico, the plants became stranger, like I drove into a Dr Seuss book. Sure, it's normal for the locals, but it's pretty wild stuff to me. Since I had nearly half a day freed up by the black Mesa fire, I decided to go farther along my route then I had planned. I'm very glad I had that extra time, because Amarillo Texas and Clovis New Mexico are not towns that I would want to have to spend the night in. Speaking of which, $20 to spray paint a Cadillac half buried in a field? No thanks. I drove to Roswell and took a drive-thru tour of downtown. There's no shortage of gift shops all selling the same alien stuff. Since it was only 4:00, I decided to keep going. When I got to artesia, I needed to head west, but there was a considerable storm cell that direction. I made a big loop through that town as well, trying to decide on Carlsbad, adding about a hundred miles to my route and probably taking up half the day tomorrow, we're heading over the mountains. When there was a break in the storm, I took off for Alamogordo. The flatlands started to undulate, the yucca plants went from little bushes to being 6 ft tall, and the incredible smell of the desert after rain greeted me as did the flowering cacti. That didn't last for too long, as the elevation read out on the GPS started to shoot up. I stopped at about 5800 ft to loosen all of my sealed containers. You have a stack of Pringles explode in your saddle bag once on Pikes Peak and you don't let it happen again. I probably should have stayed there for a while and made myself one of my little dehydrated camp meals, because when I got to cloudcroft, I found the air to be far too thin. I stopped by the train trestle to catch my breath a bit, and then headed down the mountain to lush thick air below. The view just after the tunnel between cloudcroft and Alamogordo is pretty incredible. So is the difference in weather. Uphill side it was just above 50° and sprinkling rain, and a couple turns after the tunnel it was at least 20° warmer and sunny. It's the first time I've felt too warm on this entire trip so far. I wandered through Alamogordo and picked the hotel near some nice restaurants, where I made up for my previous couple days of gas station warming tray food by having calamari and chicken scallopini. I'm wishfully hoping that my ever reddening face is a result of wind burn, but I have the data to suggest that I am not applying sunscreen frequently enough and am going to have to find some aloe tomorrow morning.