Beauty meets Beast
Jeff and his machine. Yes, there is room between the stuff bungeed to the back and the stuff bungeed to the front. Under all this stuff lies a G650GS.
These are rocket launchers. You thought you were well armed bringing your gun on a cross country trip; wrong.
Seriously, the tubes carry things like tent poles, extension cord, big photography lenses, food, etc.
There's so much going on here, it's better to just zoom in and look. Tucked behind the tank bag are the original gauges.
At this point in the blog, you're well acquainted with my ride. I will share that on this trip, I had 3 new toys with me though. 1) Go Pro camera, mounted to my helmet 2) PLB - Personal Locator Beacon...commonly known as Spot and 3) A heated jacket liner. There's video at the bottom of this post. As for the PEB, I didn't realize that you didn't just turn it on to forward your track to a web page, you had to enable the tracking feature. I figured that out in Phoenix. Sorry those of you that were trying to follow my trip. As for the jacket liner...oh my was I spoiled. Somewhere North of Phoenix, climbing into Flagstaff, it was dropping below 60, so I decided to spoil myself just a little bit and cracked the switch just past the on position. In seconds, I was toasty warm. I can only imagine how comfortable this will be when the temp is in the 30's and 40's. No more heavy layers of clothing for me! Enough of this. You want to see pictures, right?
Of note in Phoenix was my evening's accommodations. I stopped at a Motel 6 in Northern Phoenix. I knew I was in the wrong place when I pulled in. There was lots of police activity a couple hundred yards away in a K-Mart parking lot, and there were prostitutes on bicycles patrolling the parking lots...that and the teenager vaping on the balcony with his butt hanging out of his pants. I'm trying to think of some similar fashion statement I used to make as a teenager....um...none come to mind. Maybe Mom or Dad will remind me sometime.
All that stands between me and a wide angle lens is about $800. I just can't see spending that much on a wide angle lens...then again, I really like landscape pictures and have missed several because I didn't have one handy.
There were 3 rappelling teams at the Grand Canyon this weekend practicing. If you're planning on an accidental fall, this would have been the right weekend.
Jeff at work.
...and video. I promised video. This was the most entertaining part of Historic Route 66 - Oatman Az.
Here's a link to Jeff's video of the preceding twisties.
This is a map of the whole circuit. I suppose it was 5 hours to Phoenix, another 2 to Flagstaff. We walked around the Grand Canyon taking pictures for awhile and ended up in Kingman early in the evening. Kingman to Redlands, including 10 miles of very cool Historic Route 66 was 5 hours. Now a bad weekend getaway!
Round trip = 990 miles.
