Ghosts and a School Parade

We stayed at a small hotel, the Vendrome, in Prescott, Arizona for the past 2 nights. Built in 1917 and modernised in 1983 the hotel is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. A sign outside the front of the hotel records a previous advertisement proclaiming rooms in the hotel as being $1.50 for a single room and $2.50 for a double. We paid more, but for the quality of the place, at less than $100 a night, it was good value.

The hotel is said to be haunted. The story is that at some point in the hotels history, a small girl and her cat starved to death in room 16 and both her ghost and that of the cat can be heard in the hotel. We didn’t hear anything.

This is room 16 which people stay in even though it is now more like a shrine to the girl and her cat, with toys and trinkets being left for them....

On one of the evenings we spent in Prescott, there was school parade, so I grabbed my camera and fired off a few shots. The light was going fast and as a consequence, I was struggling to keep the pictures from blurring even with cranking up the ISO setting ....

The next day we did see this..... I guess the U.S. Marshall has good taste!....

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Day 100

Wow, it is now 100 days since I collected my bike from the cargo facilities in New York City and rode the first 14 miles to start my tour. A lot has happened in that time and 14 miles has turned into 14,000 miles. I certainly am pleased about what I have seen so far and very thankful that I was fortunate enough to be able to make this tour.

Today we left Flagstaff and headed south west on US 89A. I had been looking forward to this road for a long time as I had read good things about it.

It didn’t take long before we hit our first piece of scenic twisty road and that was called Oak Creek Canyon. This lies between the cities of Flagstaff and Sedona. I understand that after the Grand Canyon this is the second-most visited area in Arizona and it was easy to see why. The road falls steeply through a number of hairpin bends and it is great fun to ride.

Near the northern end of the canyon, there is an overlook with a terrific view....

Travelling south along 89A we made the most of stopping and looking at these views which was a good thing, as stopping places are few and far between. Sadly the state has decided to put State Parks in the only places where stopping for photos is possible, but charges $10per vehicle to enter two of these and $6 for the third place. I wasn’t about the pay $26 for the chance to be able to take a few photos, so we carried on riding. A point to consider is it costs $10 per vehicle to enter these State Parks irrespective of if you are two people on a motorbike or 5 people in a car. That somehow doesn’t feel fair, so it was another reason we carried on riding!

We did stop on the road for a couple of shots with the point and shoot camera....

This is Slide Rock State Park which if yu have a family, looks like a great place to spend the day....

As we neared Sedona, the scenery became even more stunning....

I liked the way the building in Sedona are all low and painted in subtle reds or browns to blend in as much as possible to match the colours of the scenery. Very clever. The building s in this next photo are even difficult to spot....

We turned off 89A and found a great spot....

We planned to have lunch in Jerome, which is a tiny but quaint town set on the side of a hill. We ate in the Jerome Palace which is nowhere near as grand as it sounds, but it is claimed to be the home of the Haunted Hamburger. I never did find out more about this claim, but I did have perhaps the tastiest lunch I have had on my entire trip there. Their artichoke dip is delicious!

Realising that some bloggers like pictures of the food they are eating, I did remember to take my camera into the restaurant, but didn’t take any pictures! I did however see an enormous chocolate cake in a display cupboard on the way out, so I snapped that....

As we left Jerome and continued south, the road climbs steeply up the mountain and the view from the top is pretty good....

I have been disappointed with the quality of the pictures I am getting from my point and shoot camera recently. It is really struggling to deal with the harsh sunlight I am seeing as I head further south. It is a few years old now, so I did some research and ordered a new Panasonic Lumix TZ10 Digital Camera. Due to the voltage differences, I had to order this to cope with the European 220 volt system, so hopefully this will arrive soon enough at the hotel Jackie and I are using as a base to travel around Arizona. Many thanks to Paul for arranging to forward the camera on to me!

We arrived in Prescott and checked into a historic hotel. I will write more about that and the school parade I saw, tomorrow.

I enjoyed day 100.

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I See My Wife For The First Time in 3 Months

I left the town of Thatcher on day 96 feeling excited, as after 3 months, I would be seeing my lovely wife today! I headed towards Phoenix with a good feeling.

The journey today was about me seeing things I have never seen before. Cactus for example. When I was a boy I liked to grow miniature cacti but nothing like this.... this cactus was maybe 15 feet (5m) tall....

Then I saw a hill covered in these cacti....

A short while later, I saw flowering palm trees at the side of the road. I have never seen this before either....

Than another first – cotton fields....

The land as I rode towards Phoenix was what I would call a desert – not the classic sand dunes type desert, but so hot and arid that very little grows....

The ride on US 70 was unexciting and hot. The road only got interesting around the town of Superior as it followed Queen Creek Canyon and went through a short tunnel, but to be honest, it was nothing to write home about. This was part of the canyon....

I reached Phoenix in the late afternoon and it was fantastic to see Jackie again! We spent a great evening together talking about what we would see and do over the next two weeks.

One of the guys I met in Sturgis, Wayne, lives in Phoenix and he suggested a visit to see the Saxon Motorcycle manufacturing facility....

So, the next day Jackie and I met Wayne at Saxon and Peter Morris, Saxons Chief Business Development Officer, showed us around and told us about the organisation, the manufacturing process and of course the bikes....

Saxon change their bikes each year and they currently have 8 models for 2010. These can be seen on the Saxon Motorcycles website, but here are a few that I took pictures of....

Their bikes did seem remarkably good value, especially when taking into account the favourable Dollar to Pound exchange rate!

The day just got hotter and hotter and both Jackie and I were suffering with the heat.... okay, the thermometer on my bike was in the direct sunlight, but this was HOT....

In the afternoon I went to meet Lucky of the Great Motorcycle Pizza Tour blog....

Lucky lives in Phoenix and was working this day just a few miles from the hotel Jackie and I were staying at, so it was a great opportunity to meet another blogger....

Of course, we talked about bikes, travelling, work and of course Pizza! It was great to meet with Lucky even if we didn’t have much time.

That evening Wayne had organised a dinner for him and a lot of his friends, plus Jackie and I. We went to the Rustler’s Rooste, a western steakhouse. We were all on bikes except Pam who I also met in Sturgis. We entered the restaurant on the upper level and to get to the main restaurant floor, there is a slide which most of us chose to use. The option of using the stairs just seemed too boring to take!

I am trying as many new things as possible on this tour, so when I saw Rattlesnake on the menu, well I just has to try it.... Yes, it was okay and yes, it did taste just like chicken!

Jackie and I were having such a good time, I completely forgot to take any pictures of the group! Wayne however did take one of Jackie and I....

Thanks to Wayne for arranging such a good dinner with great people in such an interesting place!

On day 98 Jackie and I rode to Flagstaff which we will be using as our base for the next 12 days or so.

I forgot to include a couple of pictures previously from when I went to the H-D dealer on the west side of Flagstaff, so here they are.... both were taken in their parking lot and the first shows a statue made from exhaust pipes / mufflers....

The second is a railroad car and yes, it is parked outside the dealership....

Lucky told me some strange things happen in Arizona and he was right! Perhaps it is the heat that causes it!

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Looking Back....

I was asked recently what were my favourite things from the tour so far, what were my highlights and where did I like the most. That is a tough question because there have been so many good things to see and do. I tried to answer the question as fairly as I could. Of course, writing any sort of favourites list has the danger of people not agreeing or saying they would have added this or that, but here is my list. I have added this to the panel on the right hand side of this blog and I will keep it up to date by adding any new favourites as I continue my journey.

I have deliberately avoided listing this with any sort of any order, so I have simply listed them in the sequence that I saw them.....

• Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, New York City.
• Lobsters in the New England states.
• Provincetown in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
• Niagara Falls. New York.
• Chicago, Illinois.
• The Harley-Davidson Museum, Milwaukee.
• The Sand Hills, in Nebraska.
• The Badlands, South Dakota.
• Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, South Dakota.
• Needles Highway in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
• Devils Tower, Wyoming.
• Bighorn Canyon, as it was such a surprise!
• Cody, Wyoming.
• Riding Beartooth Pass, on the Montana/ Wyoming border.
• Bison, waterfalls and geysers of Yellowstone
• The Tetons, Wyoming.
• Colorado and the Rocky Mountains!
• Riding above the tree line – Mount Evans, Pikes Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park.
• Bishop Castle, near Colorado City, Colorado.
• Skyline Drive, Canon City.
• Million Dollar Highway
• Antelope Canyon

• Back roads and small towns anywhere.
• Meeting really nice people, in just about all of the places I have been.
• The camaraderie of bikers. Everywhere, USA.

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The Choice.... 14,000 Miles.... Jack Arrives.....

I had a choice to make.

My travel over the next two days would take me to Phoenix.

The choice I needed to make was do I take a rest day and then travel in one day to Phoenix on the direct route down the interstate from Flagstaff, or do I go the long way around and ride a road that a guy called Gary suggested to me when I was in Manila in Utah. The road that he suggested I should ride was US 191 in eastern Arizona that had 1000 bends in 90 miles. I liked the sound of that but it was a long way – the journey to Phoenix was about 600 miles this way, so it meant a couple of hard days riding.

I took the long way around.

The first part of the journey was going to be dull. I left early, music on, cranked the throttle open and got going for 113 miles eastbound on I-40 riding right into the sun! Soon I reached the exit I would take and I rode through the Petrified Forest National Park which also takes in part of the Painted Desert.

The Painted Desert gets its name from the vibrant colours of the rock which contains iron and manganese compounds which give the rocks their characteristic red and brown colours. Almost no topsoil exists here so the rocks are exposed....

The National Park also contains ancient petroglyphs – simple pictures carved or cut into rock surfaces. These images were made in the rocks between 650 and 2,000 years ago. You are not allowed near these, but you can see them from a distance....

The Petrified Forest part of the park is interesting. The area was once a wet grassland where many tall conifer trees grew. Over time, these fell and were washed into the nearby floodplains where they were quickly covered by mud, silt and volcanic ash. This sediment prevented oxygen reaching the trunks and thus prevented decay. Over years, the trunks became saturated with water containing silica and the silica replaced the natural wood tissue, turning into quartz and preserving the wood into its petrified condition we see today. As the climate changed and the soil disappeared, this exposed the petrified trunks....

I left the Petrified Forest a little wiser, but with a long ride still ahead of me.

Keeping a close eye on my fuel gauge and not relying on the low fuel warning light, my journey took the Leading Ladies and I along some straight roads....

In the afternoon I reached the small town of Alpine. It didn’t register with me beforehand, but the name Alpine reflects the terrain in this area of eastern Arizona – there are mountain ranges here that I simply didn’t know existed and Alpine sits in the San Francisco Mountains right on the border with New Mexico. The road I had gone out of my way to ride is US 191 and the interesting part runs from Alpine to Clifton through the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. I rode back up to 9200 feet on this road.

I stopped at a small restaurant for coffee. I sat on a comfortable sofa on the front porch and nearly fell asleep, it was so comfy....

While I didn’t count to check if there was actually 1,000 bends on this road as claimed, it certainly seemed that way. The road was almost totally void of cars and trucks are not allowed to use this highway. Being a Saturday, I did see some bikes, but not as many as the road deserves. I think that is because US 191 is a long way from anywhere, with now large cities nearby. I felt as if I almost had the road to myself.

Despite being in a mountain range, it is difficult to take photos of the views because of the trees (it is a forest after all) so I just relaxed and enjoyed the road. At one point I did ride passed this sign which I thought was so wonderful, I had to go back and photograph it....

There was one place when I was afforded a view.... click on the picture to enlarge it to see part of this road winding through a valley....

I tried to capture a view across the mountains. The haze and a point and shoot camera that I think is playing up didn’t help, so this is the best I snapped....

Near the town of Morenci is a huge hole in the ground. Well, to be more precise, it is the largest copper mine in North America. It is truly vast. Here is just a part of it....

I reached the 14,000 mile point of my tour so far. This was just west of Clifton, near the Gila River, on US 191....

I found a hotel to stay at in a town called Thatcher. I had ridden 493 miles today and I was tired. I decided not to venture far to find dinner tonight and there was a Denny’s right next door!......

My regulars readers will remember that a good friend, Paul, joined me for the first part of this tour in the New England States. This is Paul....

Well, Paul’s wife Sarah gave birth to a 6lb 12oz baby boy a few days ago. Here is their son, Jack.....

Congratulations to both Sarah and Paul – they have a special son!

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