Click here for the large version (20 MB, about five minutes over a broadband connection).

Click here for the small version (3.5 MB, about ten minutes over a modem).

Not particularly inspired or coherent, but better than nothing, I hope. Thanks to Mike Eldred for the background music inspiration. I was thinking of several options, but that Van Morrison track was just too perfect.

That's all she wrote, folks. Thanks for tuning in, participating, hosting and making my journey a memorable one. I hope to see you all soon.

2. Texas is hot. And by hot, I mean boiling-over, clothes fully saturated with sweat hot. I mean you'd-better-carry-water-because-you'll-drop-to-the-ground-from-heat-stroke-if-you-don't-stay-hydrated hot. Georgia is twice as hot as Texas.

3. Seat issues aside, sport bikes work just fine for touring, so long as the riding position isn't too racy. I had some issues with pressure on my right wrist (throttle, brake) and a little soreness in a couple of my fingers, but for the most part I was pleasantly surprised that my body didn't break in one way or another somewhere in the middle of the trip.

4. Carburated motorcycles do not like to sit still. I sort of knew this already, but it became a much more painful reality once we got to the lower states, where we would inevitably have to sit in slow-moving traffic. The hot sun is bad enough when you're wearing a black jacket, but an air-starved, heat-generating engine sitting between your legs is twice the torment. This is one of the main reasons that...

5. States that don't allow lane-splitting (which, unfortunately, is everwhere but California and Hawaii) suuuuuuuck. This is one of the most aggravatingly stupid laws that Cal bikers have to live with. If I come up to a traffic light in the aforementioned swealtering sun, then there is no reason, safety or otherwise, that I shouldn't be allowed to drive to the front of the line in between the cars that are waiting. Those cars have air conditioning and can afford to wait for the slugs in front of them to get moving. I don't, and shouldn't have to.

6. Slow-passing drivers suck more than non-lane-splitting states. For the love of all that is smoothly flowing, people, please push that gas pedal down when you make the decision to pass a vehicle. 1 MPH faster than the passee is not acceptable. A similar note to the truckers: That motorcycle 100 feet back? It is not going the same speed as you, I guarantee it. Don't merge until it's gone past.

7. The bugs come out at night. Not having made a trip like this, and only having driven my motorcycle at night inside San Fran, I thought bug build-up on my helmet visor was pretty bad during the day (splat... pause... splat...), but the first time I did some driving at night I realized how wrong I was (SPLATSPLATPLTSPTPSPSPPSLPSLTPSLTPS). And the first time I tried to wipe some of them off while driving I discovered that a dense group of bug carcasses is a lot better than a blurry layer of bug goop.

8. Listening to music on the motorcycle is a giant pain in the ass. Figuring out a strong combination of sound clarity and outside noise blocking is very difficult, and you often don't know you don't have a good seal until you're already up to highway speeds. And it's hard to get the helmet on without knocking them out of place. And you're always accidentally yanking the cord, hurting your ears. And all the trouble and frustration is completely worth it because driving with your favorite music is ten times better than driving in silence.

9. Not all wi-fi hot spots are created equal. Some of them aren't even lukewarm.

10. Whit Gurley is capable of driving 8700 miles in six weeks without getting a speeding ticket. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it.

Good to see you again, Frisco.

Five minutes before this was taken, these bags looked brand-new.

The mileage above is exact - 8700 on the dot - and my trip has also ended exactly six weeks after it started. Would you like to see the whole route? Sure you would, here it is:

Click the image to see a much larger version. I plan to get this map laminated and use it for the same purpose on future road trips.

Looks like dirt, doesn't it? But what you're seeing is the gap between my glove and my jacket sleeve. I was wishing for awhile that I had time to get my whole body looking that dark, but that actually looks pretty nasty.

The visor has to be cleaned a couple of times a day, but I stopped caring about the rest of the helmet weeks ago.

WASH ME

Note that I will be posting one more blog entry (besides the one above) in a day or two that will feature a nice end-of-trip nugget.

Man, I thought Monday was tough until I met Tuesday. Nature seems to want me to really pay for entry back into my normal life. The ride from Vernal through Salt Lake City to Winemucca, NV wasn't really packed with lovely scenery or anything else particularly interesting, but it did come with a handful of peril. It all started with the Salt Lake, which had the most ridiculously strong winds of the trip (I passed an overturned semi at one point). I was fighting with them pretty much the whole time, with moderate rain in spots, right up until... this (330k QuickTime movie).

I just wasn't aware of the distance between service areas in this region. Lucky for me I have a Motorcycle Touring Service membership (sort of like AAA). It took about an hour for the guy they called to arrive and give me 1.5 gallons of gas for $90. No, seriously. Supposedly they're going to reimburse me for that, but it's still beyond ridiculous. While waiting, I caught up on my yo-yo-ing, handstand practice, sand kicking and desperately-bored photo taking, as you'll see below.

It gets worse. I got on the road again, and although the winds became a little less troublesome, the temperature dropped quickly and more rain clouds appeared on the horizon. Before the evening was over with I was bundled up with just about every piece of moto gear I own, driving through fairly heavy rain in the dark. Visibility was so poor that at one point I was relying solely on the traffic cones to tell me where the actual road was. What fun!

But eventually it all let up and gave me a very clear, smooth (but f-f-f-freezing) ride the rest of the way into Winemucca, a couple of hours east of Reno. Unless something bizarre happens, I'll be rolling into San Fran this evening.

The headline refers to yesterday, I got into my hotel room too late to mess with posting an entry. Picking up at the end of the last entry, I finally made it out of Lyons (a day later than I had planned) by finding a mechanic who both had a chain to fit my bike and had time to put it on. Once that was finished I proceeded to Highway 40, which runs through the heart of the Colorado Rockies. This is the route that Ben convinced me to take in favor of the faster but much more desolate I-80, and I'm glad he did so - I passed through some stunning scenery.

After the stunning scenery faded away I had a really smooth, fast, vehicle-free ride through a lot of what was left of Colorado and into Utah, but that came to an abrupt halt when the sun went down, because that is apparently when the rabbits come out to play "dodge the motorcycle". I missed around a hundred of them, but unfortunately hit two. I don't think they would have been a real danger to my safety as long as I was going in a straight line, but I also had the threat of deer to deal with. There were signs posted periodically and I passed three that I saw. Might have been nice if it wasn't so unnerving. After all that, I had to contend with the fact that in each of the podunk towns I passed through, almost none of the motels had rooms to spare. I finally got into a room at 11 PM in Vernal, UT, from which I will be leaving for Salt Lake City in a few minutes.

Photos below include choppers from the first shop I took my bike to, random shots of Lyons and Silar the dog, and the amazing Colorado countryside.

Poor thing. She was so exhausted that she plopped right down when we got to the pump. Ah well, I'll let her sleep for a few minutes.

Actually, it might have had something to do with me not putting the kick stand down all the way when I stopped and leaned the bike over - it just kept leaning. Took me several minutes to decide what to do, but I was able to just pull it up with brute force (brute that I am) after removing the bags. Fortunately, nothing was really damaged. Except my pride.

Anyway, I'm now in Lyons, CO, just north of Boulder, staying with my old college friend Allison (who hasn't aged a day in nine years) and her husband Ben. Lyons is a really cool little town that sits in the middle of some pretty amazing Colorado scenery. Unfortunately, my chain problem has gotten much worse and may cause yet another bike repair delay. I'm going to consult a shop tomorrow morning for the verdict.

Since I didn't see anything particularly interesting on my way to Selena, KS today, I figured I'd fill you in on the current state of my motorcycle. The bike has had ongoing issues for the past week with the fuel/air mixture, creating a sort of gurgling, bogging-down sensation that has at best been a minor nuisance and at worst (in hot weather, for some reason) been a collossal pain in the arse, forcing me to rev the bike up a lot just to get it to accelerate with traffic. Fortunately, that issue seems to have subsided somewhat over the past couple of days (possibly an elevation effect), but only to make way for a new problem: my chain is essentially dead.

Either because I haven't been lubricating it frequently enough or just because of old age, it has stretched a great deal, the result being that it bounces and jerks around while I'm moving slowly and creates an embarrassing clattering sound. It can't be fixed right now - I'd have to wait for it to ship to a mechanic, which would take at least four days, and I should be in SF by Monday evening anyway. So the clattering will continue.

And there's an old and growing problem with the exhaust system that limits my bike to about 10000 RPMs at all times. And for the past three mornings I've also had to crank the damned thing for a few minutes before it will start, and I worry about the battery holding up. Oh, and did I mention only one of my two front brakes is functioning? Yeah, somehow one of the rotors got warped (this almost never happens), so I had to get the last mechanic that worked on the bike disconnect one of the calipers. It's not a huge deal because I can still brake fairly quickly (quicker than most cars would be able to), but I certainly don't have the braking power I ought to.

So basically I expect to roll into my driveway with smoke pouring out of the pipes and fluids dripping from the engine, with holes in the pastic and two flat tires. The bike will backfire loudly a couple of times after I dismount, then collapse in a pile of steaming motorcycle carcass.

I finally arrived in St. Louis about an hour ago, but seven hours ago I was taking in what is without a doubt the most impressive museum of this trip. I ate dinner last night at a bar a couple of doors down from the Columbos, OH motel where I was staying (amusing sign sequence from their parking lot shown below), and ended up discussing my trip with a nice couple (also motorcyclists) who sat down next to me at the bar. I mentioned that I was planning to catch the topiary garden in town (I've started using this website to look for interesting sites on my route) and the Motorcycle Hall of Fame a few miles east, and they clued me in to the National Museum of the United States Air Force, which is in Dayton, a half hour or so west of Columbus. I've been a huge fan of military aircraft since I was a kid, and if I had had any idea that museum was there I would already have been planning to visit.

So I dropped by the topiary garden (it features sculpted hedges that mimic Seurat's famous Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte painting), which wasn't in the best shape and was therefore a little underwhelming, then the moto museum, which was interesting but didn't contain enough sportbike exhibits to really thrill me all that much, then moved onto the AF museum, where I was in heaven. I wish I had gotten there before 3 PM because I honestly could have spent all day there and not gotten bored (and I didn't realize until it was too late that some of the famous experimental planes that I would love to have seen were in a different building nearby). The Air & Space Museum in DC is terrific, but the NAFM puts the Smithsonian collection to shame. Included were planes that I had built models of, planes that I had flown simulators for, planes that I had watched documentaries on and a host of fascinating planes that I had never seen or heard of. Among my favorite exhibits were the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-22 Raptor (I couldn't believe they actually had one), German jet and rocket planes that could have turned the tide of WWII, Bockscar (the plane that dropped Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan, of which they also had replicas), and an F-4 cockpit that you could sit in (I swear I could have sat in that thing for an hour daydreaming about dog fights and supersonic flight). And shown at the end of the large collection below is the stupidest looking plane I've ever seen, the "snoopy nose" C-135 A/RIA.

P.S. - My apologies to Aunt Jean for poking fun at her suggestion that I visit friends of hers in Illinois in order to meet their daughter. I hadn't really planned the return trip at that point and didn't realize that I would in fact be going through Illinois after all, so it would not have been a hundred miles out of my way (but I still wasn't inclined to make that particular stop).

After another bike repair rigamarole, I will finally start my voyage home tomorrow morning. It dawned on me yesterday that on this trip I will have visited all four of the places that I've lived, in the order that I lived in them. Arlington, VA (right outside of DC), where I lived for a couple of years before moving to SF, is my last "real" stop of the trip (aside from Boulder, CO, at which I'll be visiting with one last college friend before making the last legs home), and it's been a relaxing one. Spent one day and night with an old Arlington roommie, Doug, then spent a couple of nights with my old friend and two-time roommate Jamie, his fiancee Kimberly and their three precocious dogs. Beer, great food, pool, ping-pong, and X-box action have been the highlights of the visit (an hour with a local improv comedy troup, not one of the highlights). Photos below: the house we all lived in, a war memorial sculpture, the colonnade of the National Building Museum, and three shedding machines (these do not include Kimberly).

I lived for a year in Raleigh after graduating from college. I mainly consider that a wasted year because Raleigh really isn't like the "cool" towns that I had seen in North Carolina (Asheville and Chapel Hill), it's just a college town like Knoxville, so it was basically a move from a small-ish southern city that I didn't really care to live in where I had lots of friends to a small-ish southern city that I didn't really care to live in where I had zero friends. Maybe I'd have felt better about living there if it had somehow boosted my career or something, but... no, not so much.

Still, I've occasionally felt a mild urge to revisit the place and wondered if there would ever be a convenient time to do so, and it so happens that Raleigh falls almost exactly between Savannah and DC, so here I am. I didn't have any success hunting down the handful of people that I knew there, but I was able to take a tour of some of the places that I remember, most importantly the state art museum, which was always my favorite part of Raleigh. Below are photos of the house I lived in (which is a different color now, but you can sort of see the the way it used to look here), "The Acorn" from Acorn Park, and sculptures from the museum, which include two panorama shots of the giant "Picture This" installation sculpture that I discovered a decade ago while exploring the museum grounds after hours. Kind of hard to make out from ground level, which is part of what makes it so cool (but here is an easier vantage point).

I would have to say that Georgia rivals Texas and even Death Valley in the oppressive heat department and has more state troopers than all the other states put together. After a pleasant but swealtering stay with my aunt, uncle and cousin/honorary sister in Atlanta, I am now stopped on Tybee Island, just outside of Savannah, where my old friend Eric lives. Swimming in a warm ocean for the first time in a year and a half was terrific, and touring the old, laid-back Savannah downtown was almost as good (except for the blister I wore on my toe because Eric made me walk, like, hundreds of feet). Random pics below.

Sorry about the comments, guys - something wasn't set right in the blog software and it was treating them all as spam (I was wondering why nobody was responding), so I wasn't being notified that you were posting them. They're all restored.

Anyway, I've been in Knoxville for a few of days now, having a great time with friends and family. The 'rents played a little concert for us at my friend Nicole's BBQ, which everyone loved. Then six of us, most of which had effectively zero golfing experience, "played" eight holes at a cheap public course, which was slow but fun. Random photos below.

Oh, and one addition to the previous entry: during my last night in Jackson I witnessed my second ever hockey game, an amazing contest between the only two teams in my nine-year-old cousin Grant's league wherein he scored the final, tie-breaking goal of the championship game for his very underdog team within the last three seconds. It was a spectacular event.

Continued stagnation on the blog front, I know - the blog-worthy parts of the trip are sort of on haitus while I visit friends and family in Tennessee. Just finished a great weekend stay with the grandparents in Ripley and am now staying with two sets of aunts and uncles in Jackson. I'll head east for hometown Knoxville on Wednesday. Below are a few random photos: Goose's cat Onyx, a sign marking Nutbush city limits (props to those who know why I would bother taking this photo), the surreal creations of a Brownsville sculpter, and Dixie the horse. There would have been a few more, but I just inadvertently deleted a few of them before importing them to my library. Whoops.

Not much to report. In fact, there's nothing to report at all. After stays in Gallup and Roswell, we're currently crashing in Sonora (pronounced 'snore-uh'), Texas, and will arrive at Goose's home in Alvin tomorrow evening.