Desert Chill

Marty and I hit the road on Wednesday headed back to Reno, Nevada. I had called the garage and the Kawasaki Ninja's clutch repair was completed.  What a huge relief those words were to my ears.  As we headed down the dusty mountain road from Ken and Charlene's home, we mapped out a route that took us an hour out of our way but would take us around the base of Mount Shasta.

We rolled along on a two lane highway through northern California forests where easily one in every four vehicles was either a logging truck or a flatbed truck hauling lumber to market. Once we made it to Susanville, we were back on familiar roads for the run back to Reno.

We headed straight to the garage where Charlie greeted us and explained the problem with the clutch. A linkage rod had worn and separated from its mate, so when the clutch handle was squeezed, the rod rotated but failed to move the parts inside the housing. He had a spare rod on hand and was able to complete the repair with no delay waiting for parts.

We returned the SUV to the Enterprise rental office. I wanted to ride the bikes as far east as possible, so rather than wait for Enterprise to pick us up, I had Marty follow me on the Harley. I smiled as I watched him wrestle with a bike that is twice as heavy and half as nimble as his little Ninja. "I don't know how you ride that hog," he said.

Once more, we packed up and rode off into the desert.  A stiff cross wind buffeted us from the north. I checked the weather along the planned route and saw snow in the forecast for Yellowstone park. A dreary, cold, and wet weather pattern was squatting on our route. We were feeling the chill already, but at least it was dry.  We stopped about 6:00 pm to put on warm clothes.

This time lapse video captures the last hour of the ride as darkness fell.

All in all, we covered more than 600 miles that day