Passes & Canyons Blog

The Old Farts Motorcycle Club headed southwest this year, to the land of blazing heat. Descending into Laughlin, NV, we could feel the heat rising until it felt, in the most literal sense possible, like a sauna. Probably about 110 degrees.

We rode about 1,600 miles this time, and learned a number of interesting, useful things. For one, you can’t get a cold brew anywhere on the Navajo reservation. We pulled into Tuba City, AZ, hot and dusty and ready for a swimming pool and/or a cold beer and found that neither was available. No pool was actually surprising considering we were at the Quality Inn. The redeeming factor was that the people working at the Quality Inn were absolutely the nicest, more friendly, most helpful folks you’ll ever meet. Plus, it was a gorgeous evening to sit out on the lawn and enjoy the perfect, cool night.

There were nine of us this year and that’s really too many. That many guys can’t just roll into town and expect to find room at the inn. And having reservations for the whole trip removes the spontaneity that has so often led to the best part of our trips.

So what do you do? You can’t tell three or four guys they’re disinvited next year. No, the only approach I can see that makes sense is to take more trips and you just assume that some guys will be on one trip but not another. With any luck, this will be a situation where too much of a good thing is resolved by having even more of a good thing.

It’s hard to believe, but we’re leaving on our annual bike trip in less than three weeks, June 15. This is kind of early for us, but we’re going south, to Arizona and New Mexico and Nevada, so it will be warm. There will be nine of us this year in this Old Farts Motorcycle Club excursion.

We’re going to ride the Unaweep Highway, which several of us have been on, but other haven’t, and it’s a good one. Then we’ll head on down through the Monument Valley and on to Fraser, AZ. In case you’ve never been to Fraser, let me tell you about it. It’s an old mining town not far from Sedona, and it sits up on the side of a mountain so steep that the road zig-zags back and forth through town. The front of a building faces the street in one direction and the same street passes by on the back side of the building. There’s no such thing as a cross-street.

From there we’ll head on to Laughlin, NV, where we’ve been a couple times before. It’s a lot like Las Vegas was before it got huge, and it’s on a river just down from a dam and reservoir. Nice place. Then we’ll work our way on home again, spending a couple days in places in Colorado that we’ve passed through but never stopped at.

Less than three weeks! Hot dang!