Merry Christmas!

[820wards]

Drove across the desert on my motorcycle one time... I was holding it right on 85mph, and it was hotter than he!!. I kept seeing dark colored dust going up behind me in the mirrors, so i kept watching it, trying to figure out what the heck was on the road doing that. Anyway, next gas stop i noticed my rear tire had tiny dust sized pieces gone from all over it!

That got me to slow down a bit, as the rubber was dusting right off the tire! It didn't do it at lower speeds...

Rob

Rob,

That sounds like it was fun bike ride until the tire mishap. Good thing it didn't blow out at that speed.

jerry-

 

[Brmorgan]

That was not a fun trip! I'll bet eveyone was cranky the entire trip. It's like driving through Nevada during the summer, once you've seen Nevada in the daylight, you drive it at night.

jerry-

Ya, we spent a day in Boise visiting my distant cousins and basically killed the whole day in the mall taking advantage of the AC. It got a lot better once we got farther east, I don't remember it being inhumanly hot like that when we visited Yellowstone or Rushmore.

 

[mrbentontoyou]

long hot drive with no A/C story:

4:30 am, morning of july 4th, 2005

the band i was in at the time was leaving for our first tour of the U.S. Well, a tour of the southwest anyway.

we pack our mid 80's conversion van full of gear, leaving only the two front seats and two rear captains chairs free for human occupation.

this van is dark blue, with no A/C and a broken fuel gauge. The "vent" only blew hot engine bay air at us so it was windows down the whole trip, rain or shine.

We drove straight through from Brooklyn, NY to our first show just outside Phoenix, AZ. Temps in the high 90's just kissing 100º the whole four day journey.

We continued to LA, San Diego, back to LA, San Jose, San Fran, Vegas,Flagstaff AZ, and the last show in Albuquerque, NM before a straight 40 hour drive back to Brooklyn.

We weren't so great at booking shows back then so there were sometimes days of downtime between shows. All told we were gone for 5 weeks. crossing death valley on the way to Vegas it was 110º.

This was just before GPS units were readily available everywhere, I got us everywhere with an old atlas. Our gas gauge was long broken in the van so I was also in charge of keeping tabs on milage. We would fill up, drive 270 miles and fill up again.

All in all it was a lot of fun but that van never smelled the same!

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL!!!

 

[BobL]

Drove across the desert on my motorcycle one time... I was holding it right on 85mph, and it was hotter than he!!.

In the 1970's I rode across australia on a motor cycle with a mate. We planned to take 2 days to ride to the nearest capital city (Adelaide - 1700 miles) but we hadn't quite planned on the temperatures reaching over 100. On the first day we rode in a T-shirt and nearly dehydrated ourselves so we had to stop often to drink. Next day we saw other bikers wearing full leathers so we did the same, it was hot but sweat loss was slower so we did not have to stop as often. Crossing the Nullabor Plain it reached 117F in the shade. To stay cool we would stop at every gas station we could find (sometimes only every 100 miles or so) and douse ourselves with water till our leathers were saturated and then ride on. On the third day as we entered South Australia, the scorching northerly winds were so strong (later we found out they had reached 50 knots) that it generated a dust storm for a distance of 300 miles and visibility was poor so we had to ride slowly and as they were blowing at right angles across our path we also had to ride at an angle into the wind to go straight. By mid afternoon as we approached the small town of Ceduna we noticed very very few cars or trucks were moving and everything that was moving was making black tracks. We stopped at a gas station for the usual hose down and drink and I put the side stand of my bike down in a tarmac car park but it went straight through the melted tarmac. Walking from the car park to the small gas station store we left a trail of black foot prints in the tarmac. Inside the store the gas station operator said it had just reached 125.6 F a record for the town and no one as moving.

The rest of the trip was more comfortable and we even managed a week in Tasmania where we met up with a group of other riders, one of which wrote off his bike when he hit a boat on a trailer on a mountain pass. On the east coast of Tasmania it rained non-stop for two days and at one point we had to ride in ankle deep water for a few miles.