I stayed at the motel down the street so I didn't have to throw my son out 2 nights in a row, and he could get his time travel machine working. The original plan, which is not usually the actual thing, was to have a leisurely morning coffee and wait for the BMW shop to open and then maybe clean the bike up and do a quick trip up to Grants to visit a guy I have been pen-paling with. But, Once I started the bike up and pulled onto Rt25, I had to go for one more ride. It was 40 degrees so pretty cold, but I had plenty of layers so I decided to ditch the plan and just head to Las Vegas NM and go north over the hill to Taos. Only one hitch. I traveled for a couple hours east basking in the cool morning sun and it occurred to me that I had not seen any signs for Las Vegas for, well, 2 hours. Hmmmm. I stopped and sure enough I had taken 40 east instead of 25 north, yes, for 2 hours. But I immediately realized there was a road that went through no-mans-land north to Las Vegas, where I could continue on to Taos. Another meditative morning clearing the noggin.
The road from Las Vegas to Taos was twisty with lots of small towns that looked like old ski bum meccas. I could see a lot of snow on the peaks and sure enough as I climbed it got colder and colder and then the roadsides got more and more snow covered. There was a lot of sand in the road from previous storms I suppose so I had to take it real easy in the turns. There was a few miles that I watched for ice since it was definitely below freezing and there was water in the road. I had to wait a half hour for a road crew to finish work up, and there was one car in front of me who kept the flag guy busy the whole time. So no chatting with the flag guy.
I got to Taos and tried to go north into the town proper but there was a lot of traffic and I saw a busy burrito truck so stopped for lunch. The size of the crowd was correct for how good this guys burritos were. Yum..
I headed south toward Santa Fe and did not realize how far it was, but the road was smooth and not much traffic going south. I decided to skip Sante Fe and took the bypass that directly fed into Rt25. I texted jake and he was not getting home early so I decided to take the Turquoise Trail (Rt14) which I have been on a couple times. It goes on the east side of a small range so the sun kept disappearing and the temperature drops fast here when the sun goes away.
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| Warming up in the soon to set sun. |
I pulled over at a nice big roadside paved area and just sat in the sun as it started disappearing. I go back to Rt40 and then back to Jakes place. He got back around 6 and we walked a long way to a Chinese restaurant he wanted to try. Nice long cool walk with your son is a nice way to end the day.
I check the odometer and it looks like I put about 3100 miles on this trip. My plane leaves tomorrow mid-day so maybe I can take a small ride in the morning, or just sleep in. Final odometer reading after Jake and I rode to breakfast the net morning as 90518 and it was 87368 when I started so 3150 miles total.
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