A 17 Day ride to the American west coast and back

[Shano]

We talked briefly and I learned she's from Salt Lake City in Utah. I planned on passing through Salt Lake on my way to Moab, so I asked her if I could crash at her house for a night and she said yes! So I got a phone number and a little bit of hope. It helped that she was cute too

Remember, photos or it didn't happen... An interesting write up for sure, enjoying this.

[scottieh]

Back at it.

4 days of camping in the national parks of Washington was everything one can expect when you're surrounded by thousands of people. Many of the large camps were being torn down as the big day had already come and gone but there were still about 2,000 people in the woods by my guess. The kitchens cooked food and brought it down to the main circle two of the nights. I knew absolutely no one around me but each night we all became friends. We shared joints and passed it all around. At one point someone stood up and gave a speech about marijuana and then passed out a few ounces of very high quality weed to anyone who came up. My new friend came over and said to everyone "alright, somebody help me smoke this cause it ain't mine." Good times. During the day I walked around the trade circle and looked for anything to trade. Remember that stop in California for "camping supplies" I mentioned? It was to pick up a half ounce of medical grade plant so I could trade for some cool stuff in the woods. When you are dealing with a trade based economy like this one, it's a good idea to have a very tradable item and weed is something everyone wants. I know it sounds like all people do in this place is sit around smoking pot, but there's more to it. I spent 5 hours one afternoon chopping wood to fire the stoves that boiled water for the tea camp. I also helped roll dough for the bread all 2,000 people would eat for dinner that night. There's no shortage of things to do in a 3-week-old civilization and I tried to make myself useful for the time I was there.

Leaving was an adventure. After hiking out the 4 miles of trails and dirt road, I found myself talking with another motorcyclist who needed help with his bike. Nothing he was doing would get the bike to start. It turned over and sputtered out gas but it never ignited. After trying everything from jumping his battery to dragging his 1983 Harley Ultraglide tied to my bike around the gravel roads and bump starting it, the guy eventually remembered he had unplugged the coil to one of his cylinders to prevent theft. it was a very comical moment of suppressed frustration. With the coil plugged back in and with a fresh jump from my bike it roared to life like the horrible beast it was. We talked about the Revolution and the downfall of America. He said he was a lawyer in a previous life who represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. I wasn't sure what to believe. He rode his bike up the hill and then stopped it! I heard him do it and cursed quietly for I knew his battery wasn't strong enough to start it again, and I had already packed most of my things up by this time. So I rode up to him, asked him nicely why he stopped his bike, and then watched as his starter refused to turn over. Oh well. After that whole exchange I ate some lunch and then packed the bike up for the third time. Heading out was dusty as I was stuck in line to exit. I tried to pass whenever I could but the roads had so many cars on the shoulders it was hard enough for one lane of cars to go let alone two plus me passing. Mercifully it only lasted for an hour and I was soon back on tarmac heading down the mountain towards civilization, or Babylon as they call it. I got towards a highway and ate an ice cream bar at a gas station. It was the first truly cold thing I had tasted in days. So good.

It was the day when those tires I ordered in San Francisco were to arrive in Portland. The shop was on the way back to my friend's place so I decided to take care of it this day. However when I got to the store I realized I was fucked. Some idiot somewhere along the supply chain had written down the wrong product number for the Pirelli's I wanted and they delivered another set of knobby tires instead of the Enduro MT-90's I had spent 30 minutes on the phone trying to order seven days ago. I asked about ordering down the road again but it was Thursday and their supplier did not deliver over the weekend. Meaning I would have to wait another 6 days before the correct tires would be available to me. I was for the first time in a long while very upset. The situation infuriated me because I had been looking forward to getting those stupid Dunlop 606's off my wheels for a thousand miles of tarmac at this point. Instead I would have to put up with them for another 3,000 miles and hope that they wouldn't wear out before I reached home. I vowed I would not shop there again. The store is called Cycle Gear. I shook it off the best I could and got lost driving to my friend's house. Apparently in Portland the highways don't have exits on both sides of the highway. So the road I wanted was only directly accessible on the other side of the road. Surprise! When I got to the house I stripped down and changed clothes. It had been about 10 days since I had changed clothes. I pack light on my trips, bringing only one change of clothes and changing into fresh linens was a very welcome thing. We all sat down and ate dinner together and talked about my adventure and I slept late and hard that night.

[Mezo]

We shared joints and passed it all around. At one point someone stood up and gave a speech about marijuana and then passed out a few ounces of very high quality weed to anyone who came up. My new friend came over and said to everyone "alright, somebody help me smoke this cause it ain't mine." Good times.

Sounds like good times.



Nothing wrong with some herbal now & then.

Mezo.

[Bernieboy]

Scottieh,
Love your story. Hope you got some video or photos of the 3aj towing the 'sick hog' trying to start it? You could also consider submitting a script for the new season of 'WEEDS' . We have just finished watching up to series 5. So we know what life is really like over there!!

[scottieh]

Woke up late as usual and ate some of the food I had left behind 6 days ago at the house. One of the other roommates was back in town from an excursion to New York and we talked for a long time about Texas since he had grown up and lived there for 25 years about an hour south of Austin. I think our mutual connection to Texas is what convinced him to let me stay at his place.

I sat down and spent a good hour trying to figure out where I was going to go that day. I had made route plans all the way up to Oregon, but heading home was completely up in the air. I discovered a single 2-lane highway that twisted across the entire state of Oregon.

Highway 26 left Portland roughly where I was staying and would spit me out in Idaho, which would lead me to Salt Lake City in Utah. My main goal was to get to Moab where I intended to stay a few nights. Leaving town was a bit of a trial. Portland seemed to be under perpetual road construction and the lights never timed out right to actually get anywhere. But my street was lined with shops and coffee houses and made for interesting sightseeing. I spotted a leather shop and stopped. Someone had stolen my leather riding gloves from my bike while it was parked for those 5 days at Rainbow Family. To their defense, I shouldn't have left them on the bike. However, mother-@#$%&*'s. The shop was a beautiful store of leather. They didn't have much in the world of gloves but if I ever needed a jacket it would have been a great place to buy one. I finally broke through the city limits and started making some decent time when I spotted and stopped at a town called "Zigzag, Oregon" It was important to me because I had just recently met a former motorcyclist with the words "Zig" and "Zag tattooed on his forearms. He claimed he stopped riding 8 years ago and hadn't had a driver's license in all that time. In his honor, I stopped at Zigzag, Oregon and had a cup of coffee at a mountain lodge. http://zigzaginn.com/

Quickly the elevation changed and I began a steep climb up a hill towards Mount Hood, peaking at 4,000 feet. It got cold. 4,000 was the highest up I had been in a while as I was beginning to enter the high plains of the American west. Coming back down was a relief and soon I was in a valley back at 85 degrees fahrenheit where I crossed the Deschutes River. I was entering Native American Indian country. The roads crossed through all sorts of reservations and signs for fry-bread, a flat bread fried in oil, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frybread dotted the road. The Oregon country was a fascinating ripple of land crossing all varieties of ecology and traversing it was a great lesson in geography. A mere three hours from the Pacific Ocean the earth was a dry grassland that was once home to many of the dinosaurs made famous today. All along the route I passed attractions for fossils and even entered a few counties named after paleontologists who did research in the fields nearby.

I ate lunch at rest stops from the food I brought with me and kept winding my way through the state. More grasslands, more fossils, and a few canyons with fast flowing rivers cutting through them. It got dark quicker than I hoped and I had to make a decision of whether to go for Idaho, or just stop in Oregon for the night. There were national parks every 80 miles or so but they only existed in elevations above 3,000 feet, and every time I climbed up to elevation, I got so cold I knew I wouldn't be happy camping, so I hightailed it back down to warmer climates. My decision was finally made for me when I saw an RV stop in a valley and learned that it was only $7.00 for the night. Sold. I laid my stuff out and slept on the grass watching owls silently fly between trees overhead. Tomorrow would hopefully find me on a nice couch in Salt Lake City. Of course, things are easier said than done.

[scottieh]

My first stop in the morning was to mail some letters in town half an hour away. However, I ended up having one of the longest, strangest conversations with two guys in a head shop in downtown Ontario, Oregon. The guy who owned it had serious head trauma from some kind of accident and was functioning slightly below normal. His movements were strange because every step or reach or motion was precisely calculated to do what he wanted, but often led his hand or step to detour from the objective in a large arcing tangent, like Johnny Depp mimicking Hunter S. Thompson in Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas. Very bizarre. I eventually was given a small metal pipe for my conversation with him, my objective for having even walked in the door.

Unfortunately entering Salt Lake City required taking a major highway because the damn city is surrounded on the west side by a GIGANTIC SALT LAKE.

Not many backroads cross that wasteland. The Bonneville Salt Flats Speed Week takes place out here somewhere, but not while I was around. Need to make a trip out for that freakshow http://video.nationalgeographic.com/vid ... -week.html

Entering Utah I spotted storms everywhere. It seemed I was destined to get wet so I pulled over and put on the hot "water-proof" gear. I stopped a half dozen times trying to stall and wait out the storms. Finally an hour outside the city I saw a massive black cloud formation hovering off in the distance so I stopped again and was immediately approached by cars asking if I had just gone through the storm. They were talking about what I was heading for and spoke in fearful terms for their lives having just driven through it themselves. I decided to wait a little longer. The day was getting late so I called up the girl I met at Rainbow Family and left her a series of messages about being near the city, can I stay with you, etc... Slowly I crept closer, ever wary of the rain, and stopped for dinner a half hour outside the city in a tiny town of 200 people. The only place still open was some bar inhabited by "Sarge" and his bevy of local alcoholics. I decided bar food was better than cold food and had some kind of chicken thing and a lot of beer. Oddly, Utah still has laws regulating the amount of alcohol by volume beer is allowed to contain at 3.2% Crazy. So it takes a lot of beer to work the same magic as normal.

I left to find a campsite but all the state parks I had scouted were booked full so I went to a commercial campsite and paid $35 for a tent space! A hotel costs that much! The night was cool and the sun was setting so I laid on the bench and checked my phone one more time to make sure I hadn't gotten any phone calls, and lo and behold my Rainbow Family friend called and offered me a couch to sleep on. Woohoo! I called her back, got directions, got my money back, and then got lost in Salt Lake City for an hour trying to figure out its wacky road naming conventions. The house was one of the most inviting places I had ever been to before. It was a shared co-op house where 8 roommates divided 9 rooms, a large meditation/yoga/massage room, a garden with greenhouse, chicken coup, bee hive, and many other projects. Two of the roommates were about to go DJ a music show and had developed an aerial aerobics routine for while their music played. Most everybody else was doing their own thing so I talked with my new friends for a few hours and fell asleep comfortably on a big couch all to myself. My first soft sleeping surface since the artist co-op in San Francisco. This was turning out to be one of the best adventures of my life.

[Mezo]

Why they call it the Rainbow Family Scottie? hippie stuff?

Mezo.

[Bernieboy]

Scottie
Your adventure continues You know you must visit Mormon HQ while you are there. I was there recently with Action man and got a free guided tour of the whole place. No hard religious sell and beautiful fresh faced young girls treating you as welcome guests. Perhaps you can get the Tenere blessed for the rest of your journey

[scottieh]

Why they call it the Rainbow Family Scottie? hippie stuff?

Mezo.

This is a good read that gives some of the background of the Rainbow Family as well as a best guess at its naming origins.
http://www.welcomehome.org/rainbow/info ... ology.html

[xtjoe]

Nice , more pics