Day 2 of bigbend trip oct '04
After lengthy negotiations the night before, 7:15 was decided as a roll out time. I started the day with a Red Bull. why? i dont know. Sure the stuff keeps me awake but it makes me jumpy. and i cant stand the taste. I found Greg and Brian in the parking lot about 6:45 and we decided to go to Skillets next door. Skillets tends to get the waitresses that have been rode a little too hard to work at the nicer chain breakfast diners. food is good, not great.
Andrew to Greg: "Did you get what you were looking for?"
Greg to Andrew: "Yes, but we found no tranquility there."
at least that might have been what he said. It sounded profound at 7:05 while waiting for the hotcakes to arrive. After woofing down breakfast, we saw the LaQuinta had a automatic waffle maker.. huh.. will remember that for next time. I did pocket a few otis spunkmeyer muffins for second breakfast and elevensies. [Chris started a lord of the rings theme at dinner yesterday]
Leaving Del Rio, you first pass over the Amistad recreation area. the water is amazingly blue. didn't get any pics. We had Jason in front because he had the radar detector. I think we would have survived without it. very low quantity of law enforcement this trip. mostly border patrol and park rangers.
I was riding second or third and we came upon a semi. It started buffeting the crap out of me and i had everybody else with their 130-140hp go round it first. The red bull was still working its jittery mojo on me and i couldn't help think the other guys were gonna regret inviting a peckerwood who couldn't pass a semi on such a great trip. a few seconds later the window opened up and i blew past it just fine. it takes a bit more planning to pass when your 50hp down and 100lbs up from the rest of the crew.
first stop day 2 Pecos River
the mouth of the pecos
next stop Langtry
this is Brian. he's wearing a shirt from a horror convention where he was the guest speaker. I'm travelin with a celebrity for gosh sakes. will try to link to his website after i get the bulk of this report put together. try this brian's website
The reason I haven't mentioned the road yet is because its plain, straight, empty, dragstrip 204 miles long 'tween Del Rio and Alpine. and the best way to have fun at a drag strip? go fast young man. on the 125 miles from del rio we all got bad gas mileage. My mom's gonna read this report so lets just say i was doing 6750 rpm in 6th gear for a real long time on this stretch of road. we could have gone fast longer but Jason hit reserve about 15-20 miles out of Sanderson [he was passing a semi at the time], and everybody else [ but me :-) ] was close to reserve.
{we aint seen nothing yet}
the patch from Sanderson to Marathon was even faster. 55 miles in 30 something minutes? OOF! and the results of such behavior?
So thats 55 miles on 2.6 gallons.. hmm. This is what happens when weight and wind resistance overcome horsepower. The last 1/5 of the throttle doesn't make the bike go faster it just makes the gas disappear faster. If I'd been thinking, i might have dropped it to 5th and pushed to redline, but i still had a redbull jones going on, so its better that i wasn't thinking.
We ate at Jonny B's soda fountain in Marathon. Nice place. full soda fountain menu. Phosphates, flavored cokes, malts, shakes, floats etc. the malt blender ran for about 5 minutes straight, but nobody complained about the taste so they must have their technique figured out. i had a grilled cheese. I try to eat light when doing long travel days.
being the last one in, i tend to get the photogenic end spot. I'll try to share more next trip. On the return trip, this parking lot looked A LOT different.
Chris and Brian.
I don't remember 385 from marathon to the entrance of the park. It must have been good but not fantastic. Here's a shot from the parking lot at the entrance to Big Bend State park. I didn't get any pics of the sign but it looks just like the one from the other end of the park. got pics of that one.
I like how the page background i picked lines up with the asphalt in the pic above. Almost like i planned it that way.
The road in the park is awesome for scenery, not bad for riding either. I ran wide in a sweeper and ran about 10 feet of gravel on the wrong side of the white line but got back on the tarmac without incident. I'll try to blame it on the red bull, but it was probably all gone by the last bathroom stop.
The next pic was taken from the gas station in the park. i tried using the panorama feature of my camera. I'm afraid to 'imbed' it on this page because it will probably screw the page formatting and make all my paragraphs one line high, but 3 feet long.
heres the link: the view of the gas pumper
Shortly after getting gas, we headed left. Chris headed right. we turned around, waited for Chris to come back. Chris comes back and decides to fart around in the visitor center. There goes Chris to fart around.. fart, Chris, fart.
big bend. just awesome.
great no parking sign, huh? oh you noticed the 2 moochers in the background. Off the left side of the pic is a dumpster and a building so these 2 are pretty tame
These pics are from the chisos basin park ranger station. There are some curves on the way into this spot labeled 10 and 15 mph. They really are 10 and 15mph. If you can U-turn your bike in a double car garage faster than 10 mph, then you can take these corners faster than 10 mph. Chisos Basin is also where the only drop happend on the trip. Unfortunately we didn't see it, so we couldn't point, laugh and take pictures. Thankfully, his new boots saved his ankle and the bike barely had a scratch.
Brian, Greg and Chris getting deer pics.
and ready to roll out
i think I'll split day 2 in half.
