I had a hard time sleeping last night.\u00a0 I think this schedule of getting to sleep as soon as it gets dark messes me up.\u00a0 In addition, while most of my body was warm, my face was cold and my nose got stuffy.\u00a0 To add aggravation to this, my dislocated clavicle makes it hard to sleep on my right side.\u00a0 All in all, it is a mess,, and sleeping in a tent when it is cold, its for the birds. Still, Hueco Tanks is an awesome place.\u00a0 I shot some pretty awesome sunset photos there, even though the ones I caught the day before in Seminole will probably the banner photos of this trip.
\nAt any rate, I was up just before sunrise, and packed within the hour.\u00a0 I left the park with a feeling that this is a place I need to come back for the third time.\u00a0 I rode towards El Paso but then deviated North of it and was treated to some of the best riding so far, the pass over the Franklin Mountains State Park, West of El Paso.\u00a0 What an awesome combination of rocks and downhill riding.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 However, after that, I broke my first commandment, minimize time on the interstate.\u00a0 Today though, I spent over 200 miles on IH-10.\u00a0 The only redeeming aspect of it was that my options were few for this stretch, considering I needed to make over 400 miles. The cross through Southern New Mexico was uneventful.\u00a0 Even the border patrol guys waved me through.\u00a0 Once I entered Arizona, the winds started to pick up.\u00a0 Just before the major southern winds picked up I had stopped for lunch, and noticing signs of what was in store ahead of me, I removed the beak from my helmet, and lowered the windshield to minimize the sail effects that help cross winds whip the motorcycle around.\u00a0 So, I was riding with the BeMWu angled over, but thankfully the wind was steady.\u00a0 In both New Mexico, and in Arizona there were 30 and 20 mile stretches where signs on the side of the road warned about sandstorms and zero visibility.\u00a0 Thankfully all I got were dozens of sand devils dancing in slow motion on the side of the road, sometimes partnering in beautiful choreography with pecan and walnut trees.
\nSo far I though it all would be a pretty blah day with the exception of the sand devils and the Franklin Mountains.\u00a0 But things really picked up once I left IH-10 and started heading south towards Tombstone.\u00a0 The high desert started unfolding and the ride to the town that makes a living thanks to the Gun Fight at the OK Corral was just great.\u00a0 When I got to Tombstone I heard a rattle from the motorcycle, but did not pay much attention to it.\u00a0 I parked on close to the court house and started walking around.\u00a0 This is a town that enacts gunfights three times a day, and most people seem to go there to relieve childhood fantasies that involved cowboys, guns and saloons.\u00a0 Having found out that I had gained two hours from Texas time, because Arizona does not do daylight savings, I had the chance to really hang out here.\u00a0 I did pay $7 to watch three nasty looking guys ‘shoot’ each other.\u00a0 However, I also had the chance to have some really good mango and pomegranate sherbet, while hanging out and talking with a couple from Prescott.
\nThe final stop was the historic courthouse.\u00a0 Only in the south will you find a sweet looking lady who, with a southern and polite drawl will encourage you to visit every room and the ‘gaaallows’ outside.
\nFrom there it was back to the motorcycle where I finally realized where the rattle had come from.\u00a0 The nut of one of the two bolts that secures the windshield had fallen off.\u00a0 This caused the windshield to rattle.\u00a0 There wasn’t much I could do at that point, so I just pul the bolt in my pocket.\u00a0 I left Tombstone and headed to Rio Rico via Patagonia and Nogales.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 Thanks Steve Turley for the tip.\u00a0 This is just absolutely spectacular, and no pictures could do it justice.\u00a0 I literally was sailing on the BeMVu through a rolling landscape of riparian forests, and hills covered by an ocean of green, yellow swaying grasses, with heads of yucca with their flowering stems protruding over it.\u00a0 I was wishing I could have spent the whole day like this.
\nAlas it had to come to an end, and I eventually rolled into Nogales.\u00a0 There I spotted an Autozone, where I managed to find the bolt I needed to fix the windshield somewhere in the back corner.\u00a0 From Nogales it was just a few miles up the road to Rio Rico, where I am spending the night in a real bed, and had a real shower.\u00a0 What a treasure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had a hard time sleeping last night.\u00a0 I think this schedule of getting to sleep as soon as it gets dark messes me up.\u00a0 In addition, while most of my body was warm, my face was cold and my nose got stuffy.\u00a0 To add aggravation to this, my dislocated clavicle makes it hard to… Read More »Day 4: Breaking my 1st Commandment and a Gun Fight<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2o6Hc-gJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jaderiderjourneys.com\/2endslavery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jaderiderjourneys.com\/2endslavery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jaderiderjourneys.com\/2endslavery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaderiderjourneys.com\/2endslavery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaderiderjourneys.com\/2endslavery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaderiderjourneys.com\/2endslavery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1038,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaderiderjourneys.com\/2endslavery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037\/revisions\/1038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jaderiderjourneys.com\/2endslavery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaderiderjourneys.com\/2endslavery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaderiderjourneys.com\/2endslavery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}