There and Back: 6500 Miles in the Southern US on a Triumph Tiger Explorer

[Imnosaint]

On my return from this cross-country trip my spouse asked if the journey was what I’d thought it’d be, and I didn’t have an answer. Why did I do this? I cut a clip during the journey where I laid out three purposes or priorities I’ve carved out or uncovered since my terminal diagnosis; peak experiences, authentic connections and worthwhile pain.

The trouble with these is that they’re all intrinsic. They’re all about me, even the authentic connections. Their takeaway is still some kind of validation that I am what I taught all those years. I read somewhere that pain turns us all into narcissists. I think that’s very true.

I think travel does just the opposite.

This is an attempt on my part to separate that out, to elevate the thousands of miles spent between billboards of injury attorneys, porn shops, pro-life, Trump and Jesus, who, for too many it appears, are one in the same. And I get that I can’t judge a state by its advertisements, but Missouri, my goodness. Writing about any ride jogs lose some deeper meaning for me, and I’m hoping this does the same.

The Bountiful to Santa Clara leg was bookended by not wanting to leave and wanting to get there. It’s become my home away from home through the love and grace of a great, good friend and in proximity to more, one in particular who would join me on this trip, an adventurer himself, not just on the road but on the staffs for notes and improvisation.

We’re a moto-mixed-marriage, Ed on his bad-ass cruiser, a Yamaha Warrior, and me on the utilitarian Triumph Tiger Explorer. We left Southern Utah early to get the miles to San Diego behind us and win some time on the other end to descend to the tidepools of Cabrillo, feel the Pacific Ocean and get some footage to mark the start of this C2C tour.

The emotion of this peak experience caught me by surprise as I wept at its significance. This was the first time I cried since the diagnosis.

Our stay at a hostel was offset by fine dining right next door where Ed and I sampled a half dozen items of the happy hour menu and watched the Gaslamp district’s eclectic population roll, strut, stroll and limp by. Our room at the hostel had eight berths, but only three of us occupied them, the three Es, Ed, Eric and our new friend from Mexico City, Enrique.

(Yes, Ed's shirt is a bit of foreshadowing.) We didn’t realize at the time the luxury of our stay at the hostel until we reached our accommodations in Tucson. The ride there was beautiful along Highway 8 through the Cleveland National Forest, skirting the border with Mexico, the nothingness of the Goldwater Air Force Range, and into the anthropomorphized saguaro in the heart of Arizona.

Of all the deceptions of the world wide web, few seem to hit the low mark of hotel-booking sites and apps. While Facebook certainly puts humankind’s best face forward, booking sites do the same for seedy motel rooms. If you come away with nothing else from this, get past the remarkable deals and savings and be sure to read the reviews.

Tucson’s redemption lay in the visit from two people and their amazing son, people who’ve been present through it all in my living, despite my being noticeably absent in theirs. And by present I don’t mean something said when roll is called, I mean full on, pressed against the dike of coming undone. Everyone should be loved like this.

They came down from Phoenix just to visit and to give us the native’s tour of Tucson, including remarkable Mexican cuisine. Is there any other? The only downside was being deposited back at our Zombie-infested, meth distributing, showerheadless excuse for budget accommodations. The glimmer? It provided the low bar for the rest of the trip, below which I’m glad to say we never descended, though El Paso only surpassed by virtue of a shower head.

Interstate Ten from Texas’ tip to the State’s, um, lower intestine is the real estate that makes any traveler wonder, why did I do this? San Antonio, like the rest of the state, was in the throes of infrastructure improvement, while my own seem to be crumbling. This fifth day of the journey, not only did we celebrate Cinco de Mayo with our third consecutive Mexican evening meal, I had my own Battle of the Pueblo with a bone-on-bone grind from my shifting foot and ankle that was protesting every upshift and every step. Peak experience, my ass. This was miserable.

But the thing I’ve learned about pain – about worthwhile pain – is appreciating its absence, especially when that contrast is expedited with an ice pack, a handful of Tylenol, and melatonin. It was a good morning to leave San Antonio and with newfound optimism in commercial hospitality and acetaminophen we rode our way through Houston with the destination of Lafayette programmed into my navigation.

But the BAMFcycle had different intentions. At a gas station in the thick of Houston the old Warrior wouldn’t turn over for Ed. It’s been my experience on older bikes that sometimes the ignition key switch needs to be talked to sweetly and handled like dabbing drool from an infant.

This combination worked and we made our way to a pleasant rest stop about fifty five miles east of Houston for lunch, James Taylor something, something, not the notable bard of American folk music. In the routine of getting back on, the BAMFcycle wouldn’t start, even with cajoling the key. I put a rudimentary circuit tester on a 12V lead from the battery and there was nothing.

Disruption on a motorcycle trip is enough to make any bystander say, well, that’s why they call it adventure. I’ve had enough disruptions in my adventure career to want to punch anyone in the nose who has the lack of sense to say anything akin to this. Break down in a car and Maslow remains a bit satisfied in the hierarchy of needs. Breakdown on a bike and you’re now a pedestrian without shelter.

Ed made some calls, secretly thanked his premonition to have roadside service, and after a while of entertaining rest-stop stoppers with the point of this journey, a flatbed showed up with a very capable and communicative operator who got the Yamaha loaded and secured and transported to our new destination for the evening, Beaumont, Texas.

And really, given the circumstances, I was able to book a nice hotel not a half block from Cowboy Powersports where the Warrior was deposited that Monday afternoon, and even better, there was an upscale Italian chain restaurant in limping distance from our digs.

We had to stay in Beaumont because Cowboy Powersports wasn’t open on Mondays. You’d be hard pressed to find anything to do with motorcycles – sale, service, tours, parts – open on a Monday. Tuesday morning found Ed and I waiting outside the service entrance thirty minutes to opening.

We got in right when they opened, but that’s how both of us roll, conditioning, I’m guessing, from years of wrangling students in travel contexts across the country and around the planet.

The battery compartment on Ed’s bike is under the seat behind a panel with fasteners for which I didn’t have the right bit. When the shop got into it they found the positive terminal on the brand-new battery simply broke off – the solder failed.

 

[Imnosaint]

Part Two

The fix was quick, a new non-cheap-ass battery, and before you could say Let’s get the hell out of Beaumont, we were back on the road, this time to New Orleans.

The deeper into the South we went, the less homogenous America became, despite the Buc-ees, the McDonalds, the bad drivers. Denny’s turned into Shoney’s, Popeye’s into Bojangles and each state had their own brand of bad driving habits, like completely ignoring the turn indicator in Louisiana.

And the miles and days were starting their oxidation on the both of us, twenty five hundred miles in a week. Ed made that night’s reservation in New Orleans which I had programmed into the Zumo and when we pulled up to the hotel downtown, Ed asked over the helmet headsets, “What is this?”

Once we got the bikes unpacked and then parked a block away, and all the panniers and packs up to the room, the thought of going out on the town was quickly evaporating – a sad state for two music enthusiasts to be so worn down by motorcycle travel. We settled to eat at the hotel restaurant which surprisingly made up for not getting out. The fare was superb, alligator and crawfish prepared by an extremely talented young chef who talked to us about the nuances of properly preparing alligator. She knew her stuff.

It was there when the little epiphany began to emerge, something I’m familiar with but keep tucking away when I’m on the road. I roll with two circles, and I don’t mean the giant gyroscopes beneath me, I’m talking about what I imagine, and what reality brings. Every once again they intersect, but reality always has surprises, nuanced among the hard surfaces and olfactory onslaught of motorcycle travel. In New Orleans, there were two, the lack of pretense amongst its parishioners and how narrow the streets are in the Big Easy.

We navigated them the following morning to Decatur Street where we landed right on top of a bucket list destination, the Cafe du Monde. What we had for breakfast goes without saying, but the sum of all the pain to get there was well worth it. Laissez les bon temps rouler. Bien sur.

 

[Imnosaint]

Part Three

My original plan had us slabbing from NOLA to Orlando in a day, a ten plus hour, six hundred thirty miles of slabbing between storm systems, an indication of my temporary insanity. Since I built in a day to work with in Florida, I time-shifted it to that leg and split the distance difference across the top of the Gulf of Mexico, crossing Mississippi and Alabama and landing us in DeFuniak Springs, Florida, for the night where nothing extraordinary happened.

Ed and I were met at our next destination, Clermont, Florida, by the destination provider, another human being who’s been indelibly present throughout my life. He put us up in a very nice hotel for two very restful nights with some laundry thrown in and a fabulous lunch in historic Clermont at Cheeser’s Palace. Next time you’re in Clermont, Florida, I’d highly recommend it.

There I was in the land of peak experiences surrounded by Disney World, Universal Studios and NASCAR, having a peak experience with two ultimately-present friends, feasting on an award-winning Red Baron sandwich.

Ed was uber-present, always in my mirrors, across the table or sawing logs. While he was there for the purpose of the journey, the road trip to top all road trips, from the left to the right coast, I knew that he was there for a different reason; to make sure I was alright, my concierge as another riding companion put it.

We left Clermont before sunrise, my favorite time to ride – little traffic, cool air, sunrises – and we were treated to a Florida sunrise with a huge orange ball moving up from the east. We rode the Purple Heart Highway to Florida City, but we chatted over the helmet comms how calling it the Urethra Highway might be more appropriate, if not much less patriotic.

We made good time to the gateway of The Keys, able to check in early and stash some baggage with the determination to ride all the way to Key West and back before the day was out, maybe even catch a sunset along the way, but the parking lot that is Highway One, and the only route to The Keys made the minutes tick away at an alarming rate. After watching a couple of Harley riders lane-split their way past the Mothers Day weekend traffic, we decided to do the same and made some progress optimistic enough to perhaps still consider going all the way.

We had yet to stop for food since Clermont and found a great spot in Key Largo, the least tourist encumbered and had fried cod sandwiches with Key Lime pie.

The deeper we got into The Keys, the less touristy they became, hopping from one island to the next and enjoying the sensation each bridge provided, until travel of any kind became lethargic and then interrupted with crazy stupid car crashes, and crazy-stupider drivers.

The more we played the first-gear-clutch-shuffle, the more my optimism waned – we would not be ticking Key West off the bucket list. We turned around on Marathon, doubled back to Long Key to get some pics and footage, and queued up once again on the One corridor to get back to the mainland, practicing our lane-splitting skills along the way back to our room in Florida City.

I spent every evening in an editing workflow, downloading footage from two GoPros and my iPhone, and piecing together the day’s story to music I had previously arranged before leaving on this, um, journey, a song for each day’s leg, something to catch the culture of the travel. Not a session went by without some technical hiccup, elongating the process and leaving me to crash into sleep while a file uploaded to YouTube. This got old fast.

I’ve spent my career telling stories and teaching how to tell stories, finding a new way to interpret the same old thing, nuancing what’s usually overlooked, or just throwing a cut together because I’ve run out creative juju. Doing this audio/visually is constant calisthenics for my brain, an exercise in contrast, pace, color and context, too much effort for a clip that typically isn’t watched beyond its first thirty seconds, or so YouTube tells me.

 

[Imnosaint]

Part Four

Leaving just past sunrise the next morning, I lead Ed through Florida’s southern tip on a bit of a tour of her more unvisited parts, having somehow set my navigation preference to avoid toll roads, where Florida’s Turnpike was the only way we were going to expedite the miles needed to make it to yet another legendary friend’s home in St. Johns, just south of Jacksonville. The previous day’s harsh weather in that area cleared and all apps pointed to a pleasant ride up Florida’s east coast, though Highway 95 wouldn’t provide much of a view of it.

Just south of Port St. Lucie, my helmet comm busted through the road noise with Ed’s voice, “My bike just died,” which it did, at speed on the two-lane turnpike. Cue AC/DC. I was easily a quarter mile ahead and immediately pulled into the emergency lane, Sunday morning Mothers Day traffic zipping by unrestrained by any apparent speed enforcement. I pushed my loaded Tiger backwards that quarter mile to get to Ed’s position, where he was already on the phone to get another flatbed dispatched.

I parked the Tiger, emergency flashers on, and tried to start the BAMFcycle with a gingerly turn of the key, but nothing. One plus of the turnpike is its STARR rescue operation, trucks outfitted to assist in just about any kind of vehicle breakdown, except for motorcycles. Our incredibly kind and young STARR driver waited there with us, his truck being a barrier between speeding traffic and our bikes, until he got another call and had to respond.

Of course, it was Sunday. A bike shop that could assess the BAMFcycle’s issues wouldn’t be open for another two days. We were thirty five hundred miles into the trip, the halfway point, twelve days into a twenty one day itinerary.

While we waited for the flatbed to show, we debated what to do next. “I want you to keep going to your friend’s,” Ed said, reluctance hovering in his tone. I had already made that decision, something I’m not happy to admit.

The Warrior’s symptoms seemed terminal to me, though I didn’t mention that to Ed. We agreed I’d move on to St. Johns and then on to Charleston, our big left-turn-to-home point where I’d wait for Ed to catch up if he could ratify his bike’s mechanical infarction. He’d hole-up in some knife-in-the-neck motel, as he called it, calling around to see if anyone would look at the bike on Monday to no avail.

I made it to St. Johns and enjoyed the presence of one of the greatest influences in my life and had a long overdue conversation over dinner, met his new companion and crashed hard that night. His neighborhood was a doppelganger for the one I left in Cary, North Carolina, where I first met him, and where my oldest son died. If it was for this guy and his then-companion, I don’t think I would’ve survived the loss. That the environs mimicked that area compounded the gratitude and the grief.

I left Monday at sunrise and as I made my way to Savannah, Ed kept me updated on his thwarted progress in trying to get to the bottom of his bike’s lifelessness.

I forced myself off the highway into Savannah and on to Tybee Island. I zipped by Daytona Beach, the Kennedy Space Center, not to mention not stopping at two National Parks, I was going to stop and see something, gawddammit. I fell into the rut my father dug on family vacations hell-bent on just getting there. Without Ed, stopping seemed pointless. But even with Ed, we passed our share of giant yarn balls and two-headed sheep without stopping.

After Tybee Island I got back on Ninety five and then seventeen to Charleston where I stayed with my long-time newly-wedded friend and colleague and his amazing spouse.

This would be where I’d wait for Ed to catch up and join me for the return to the West, but on Tuesday he called with the news that his bike was unrecoverable there, that he was shipping it back to Utah, and was arranging flights for his return home that day.

My Charleston friend took me to Hannibal’s for lunch. I ordered an Arnold Palmer and the server brought me one. I then saw the drink choices on the menu – lemonade, ice tea and soft drinks, along with a drink called the Obama. When our server brought us our fried chicken and collard greens, I asked her what the Obama was, and she pointed at my Arnold Palmer, “It’s that drink right in front of you,” she said, smiling.

We then went to my friend’s campus downtown where he teaches, the College of Charleston, where he showed me the brick and mortar history of that beautiful institution. Almost made me want to get back into the classroom.

I was treated to scratch-made dumplings for dinner, a dish Xi introduced to my family years ago, along with hot pot, so this was as good as coming home.

That evening I charted my way home across the country to the Wasatch Mountains, somehow thinking I could do five hundred miles at a stretch, Nashville, Kansas City, Denver, and then home. After the first five-hundred fifty mile day over the Smoky Mountains into Tennessee, I added another day to my return so I didn’t somehow kill myself in this life-honoring journey.

 

[Imnosaint]

Part Five

I gave the Tiger the usual once-over when I spotted the anomaly on the rear wheel – a spoke was tearing lose from the flange on the tubeless rim.

I covered the tear with JBKwikweld, not in some delusion that this miracle stuff might fix it, but to give me an idea if the spoke was still in progress of making its exit. Day three of the retour I stopped at a rest area in Kansas when my daughter called, her timing impeccable. She asked how the rim was doing, about which I had spaced off so I went to have a look.

Well, merde. Pardon my French. The rest area became a no-rest-for-the-wicked area as I removed the Explorer’s rear wheel to get a better look at this mysterious phenomenon and remove the offended spoke so it wouldn’t flop around whenever I came to a stop, but it wouldn’t come out.

I called the Triumph shop back in Salt Lake City and explained my predicament. The service tech gave me his professional opinion, I should have it remedied immediately, and then his personal insight, that rim is made with redundancies, you’ll be alright. Alright for another one thousand fifty miles?

This is where I had to check my ease at giving the benefit of the doubt, but these guys just did a remarkable rebuild of the Explorer’s top end and I didn’t have a reason to not trust this guy’s instinct. “We have guys come in with six or seven spokes missing at a time and they never notice it,” were his parting words. And, really, I didn’t have an alternative.

I zip-tied the errant spoke in place, mounted the wheel back on and loaded the bike and rode it those miles without ever looking at the wheel again during the journey.

My last stop was in Longmont, Colorado where I stayed with my kids and recharged for the last leg home through Wyoming, the most challenging part of the trip. Crosswinds wore the Tiger Explorer out, so when I stopped for gas and pulled into a parking stall, the old motorcycle took a nap.

We both fought fifty mile-an-hour crosswinds across the state only to have them tip us both over at rest.

Was it all I thought it would be? The wisdom garnered in the six thousand four hundred eighty six miles is that only one circle really counts on a trip like this, the reality circle, because the imagined circle sets up unrealistic expectations that lead to disappointment.

You know what exceeded those expectations, though? The people I met along the way, the solidarity of motorcycle riders regardless of age, gender or race; eating soul food with soul brothers who found we had much more in common than we would’ve otherwise thought; my ever-present friends who span decades in my life; and how much I missed Ed on the way back. I kept looking for him in my mirrors.

And let’s not forget about the cicadas in Tennessee.

 

[alanymarce]

Great writing and insights - thank you!

 

[goldtooth]

Love this story, thanks for sharing
nate

 

[Ozarker]

Great posts.

Only thing wrong, you're cruising interstates on a really nice dual sport, get off road with that Tiger!

 

[Imnosaint]

Yep, wrong on so many ways. Slabbing was the only way I could get this done in the window afforded.