Harley Dave's

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Well the trip has begun on time, I left Jacksonville, Florida at 08:30, to you that don't do Military time that’s 8:30 A.M.. The weather was a nice sunny day as I head up Hwy 1&23 to Waycross Georgia. This part of the trip is old hat as I have been there many times before. Just as you come into Waycross there is the old wrecking yard A&B Auto Salvage that has every kind of old car parts you could think of. If you care to look for classic goodies this one has it. I did see some 57 Chevy’s and vans of all types. I know they have a variety because I had to get parts there myself in the past.

Taking a turn onto Hwy 82 is where the pattern is set as this is the road I have chosen to take all the way to Lubbock Texas. It is my idea to see the back country as it were, that is to say look at life here from a view different than from that of the Freeway. Since time is not a large factor I am privileged to take up full use of this. As many of you know I just retired from my career. Now I am trying to adjust to having all this time on my hands.. As I write this I see that it is going to take some time to do that. With all this time of no work I find it hard to slow down already. When I left I was just going to drive a little bit each day. Ha Ha. That didn’t work I drove for 11 hours before I shut down the first day.

I should get something straight I am not riding my bike on this trip but I am carrying it with me. Seeing as how long I plan to be gone it is much cheaper to take my Fifth Wheel Travel Trailer. It just so happens to have a 10 ft. garage built into the back to carry the scooter. I think that is why they call it a Toy Hauler. Anyway on to the trip. Georgia is beautiful State with all its rich red dirt in the fields. Some of the crops are starting to grow already this time of year. Making quite a contrast with the green on top of the red dirt. There are many old house’s on the verge of falling down that would have made great pictures to take but that is one disadvantage of driving a big rig, there is never a place to pull over and get a shot of them.

Funny thing about not having my co-pilot with me. That would be my faithful navigator, my wife. So since she was not going with me I had to rely on a GPS system hooked up to a Laptop. Now let me tell you these things are great. But they do have their down falls. Two things so far stand out. If you make a wrong turn which I did, It will recalculate your route for you. Nice feature until you find yourself going thru every back street in town. Although it did get me out of town and back on the right road. Next when the weather turns bad which it did. Just like anything else that works from space to get it’s signal, When the sky gets covered up so does the signal. So it starts to recalculates constantly. But all in all it is working good so far.

This has been the first day. Miles traveled about 500. Now it is time to slow down and take my time right Ha Ha. This is what is going to be the hard part, SLOW DOWN and smell the rose’s.


The trip thru Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi was not much of a change compared to Florida. The scenery is mostly the same in all the southern states. They all have their swamps, forest and farming. But not to be mistaking all are well worth driving thru to see it all. Now I said that I was going to slow down and smell the rose’s. But I haven’t been able to drop to a lower gear yet. So damned if I didn’t run 800+ miles today.

Going out west you expect to see some things different, but I didn’t expect to see Buffalo in Arkansas or a herd of Camels in Texas. But sure enough there they were. And there it was again I couldn’t pull over to get any pictures. The ground is just saturated in every state I have been in. 60 miles out of Lubbock Texas I ran into one of the worst storms that I have been in. The rain was blowing so hard from the side that I had to slow down to 30 mph to keep it from turning me over. I was warm and dry but not so lucky for 3 dressers that came out of the main part of the storm. I wished I had been going the same direction so I could have given them a dry place to wait out the storm. Oh well that is just part of riding cross country that we all have done. Tomorrow I head for New Mexico, so we will just have to wait and see what comes off.
New Mexico is Bountiful country to go thru . It was my intention to run on the old route 66 but since I have not been this way in along time I was surprised to find that much of it is now gone. It has been covered up by freeway or just removed. There was so much construction around Albuquerque that they even used part of the old road for all the equipment to park on and store the road base. Just forget about traveling it to steal one of the road signs. They aren’t there anymore. I-40 is one rough puppy to travel at this time. Now I am in Arizona and shutting down for the night near Holbrook. I am still trying to slow down but it seems to evade me so far.

My laptop is connected to my cell phone to upload all this and check mail. So it takes along time to do. Data doesn’t flow very fast and it doesn’t always work. But it is better than nothing. Well off we go for more adventures.



So who says that it's not cold here in the month of March? I took this one out of the window at 65 mph. It fooled me, didn't turn out to bad.

Friday, March 11, 2005

I have finally slowed down a bit. I only drove a few hours this time. The reason for that is when I uploaded my website via my cell phone, it was so slow of a connection that it timed out. But not before it erased my main page and left it blank. How disturbing is that? Well enough to get me hauling down the road to find a Flying “J” truck stop. They have wifi for all of us that like to keep up with the net and as in my case, my website. Took about five minutes to get hooked up. I uploaded my site and now I was so happy with myself I decided to spend the day here In Kingman, Arizona and play on the net and take naps.

Saturday, March 12, 2005

I arrived in Las Vegas about 8:00 A.M. and the weather is just beautiful. I shall visit one of the local Casino’s just for food ha ha. Coming into Nevada I was stopped at a check point just before Hoover Dam. Security is very much in force on both sides of the Dam. They searched my rig inside and out for about 15 minutes. I had to open up cabinets and the side doors on the camper. But that is ok with me because it is a part of the new way of life that all Americans are going to have to endure, because of 9/11. I will stay here tonight and move on some time tomorrow “ I Think “. One thing that has truly amazed me is how green this state is. I used to live in Nevada for many years and have never seen it this green. The locals also say that this type of weather has not been seen in over 40 years.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

It seems that fate has been working with me again. If I had slowed down like I had planned to and drove only a few hundred miles a day I would have been caught in that big Snow Storm that hit Las Vegas, New Mexico. If you hadn’t heard they got two feet of the pretty white stuff. So as the fickle finger of fate had me knock off a ton of miles to get here to Fallon, Nevada I missed the winter snow. It is still cool here at night, averaging around 32 to 34 degrees at night and warming up in the 50’s in the day. Since I have arrived at my sisters house, we have been building corrals and cleaning up the horse pins. With all the bad weather they have had this year cleaning up after them has fallen way behind. Yes I am still running equipment to clean up, not much shovel work ha ha.

I did receive a great email from my friend in England, Steve and his wife asking me to keep putting up pictures of my travels in the United States, as they don’t get to see the real stuff from brochures. I am glad that they are enjoying following along with me on this trip. So my blog is reaching out over the big pond to all my friends over there. As it almost always happens I will have to devise a way to upload the pictures from here, because the last time I did that using my cell phone connection it wiped out my main page due to the very slow connection that it has. It is fine for just surfing the web albeit very slow it can be done.

Friday, March 18, 2005

Ah another day of work completed. I know that these are not the kind of pictures you expected to see, but this is what I have been up to for five days here at my sisters ranch. I had all but forgotten how hard everyone in this business works. Now I know why I didn’t pursue being a cowboy. As you can see we have a lot of work to do tomorrow. I will be loading this horse pucky ( that’s not what I call it really ) and


most of the main work will be done. It has been a few days since I shot any pictures up to my site, sorry about that. But this kind work starts at 4:30 A.M. and last till dark. We are suppose to get rain and maybe snow tomorrow, so back to more cold weather.

Monday, March 21, 2005

Last night I went to Reno, Nevada to see my friends that I have known for many years. It started to snow just after I got into the city limits. It was just a light snow so the roads were not covered and getting thru town was a breeze as they live on the northwest side of town. So I grabbed the camera and took a few pictures of the mountains in the area.

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There is allot of construction on the freeways going thru Sparks to Reno, but just like all big city’s these days they can’t build them fast enough before they are outdated. Got up this morning had some coffee and headed back to my sis’s ranch to help her out some more. I had to warm up the truck for a change because the wipers were frozen to the windshield.

Sunday, March 27, 2005

This is a picture that I took at Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side of the lake. The temperature was 36 degrees and was warm enough to ware nothing but a T Shirt believe it or not.



We also took the Gondola ride to the top of the mountain and got some really great shots of the lake from 9,000 feet up. It would take up to much room to put them all up so you will just have to take my word for it. Ha Ha. My beautiful wife grabbed a plane into Reno and stayed two days with me, and we drove around the lake and enjoyed ourselves everywhere we went. Now she is gone back home and I am all alone again. Oh well that’s what a extended vacation is all about when you are retired and the little woman still has to work. I plan on pulling out of here in the morning and start the trip back towards Florida if the weather permits.

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Well we are on the road again headed for Casper Wyoming. I looked at the weather report and it said rain and wind if I went the southern route or the northern route. So I decided to go north to Wyoming. As it turns out I ran into snow about fifty miles into the journey and it has snowed on me for 12 hours. I finally pulled over to get some sleep about 40 miles inside the Wyoming border. It was getting just to icy for me to continue in the dark. Outside temp at 8:30 P.M. is a warm 32 degrees burrrrr. Tomorrow I will just have to wait and see what time it starts to melt before I leave. The radio said that they are expecting around a foot of snow before morning.



Well the snow didn’t come as expected, It is just a light snow. The nights are cold though, dropping into the twenties at night. I will be here for three days and then onward to South Dakota.

Saturday, April 02, 2005

Well I arrived in South Dakota yesterday at my son’s house in Hot Springs. As I pulled in he heard the same noise that I had heard for awhile. It turns out that I lost one of the trailer brakes and did a lot of damage to the wheel housing. With my son’s help we repaired it today and should be ok for the next leg of the trip.



This is a small lake just North of town here in Hot Springs. This is real pretty country. It is called the Southern Gateway to the Black Hills.

Friday, April 08, 2005

Well the trip continues as the weather has finally broke in my favor. Off to Kansas to see one of my brothers, just south of Wichita Kansas. But as all things seem to be following Murphy’s Law on this trip today was no exception. The wind kicked up and trying to travel in any east direction brought my mileage down to 7 miles to the gallon. So I decided to let Mother Nature work for me. I pointed the due South for the rest of the day. And low and behold the mileage jumped up to 17 MPG. I just love a tail wind LOL. After leaving South Dakota where I expected to see the great and mighty Buffalo, they weren’t there. Instead I found them in Kansas. So here is a fine shot of just many pics that I took.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

So this has been a great trip for me to take but I picked the wrong time of the year to travel out west. If Murphy’s Law is the real deal then he followed me everywhere that I went. For all of the six weeks that I was on my little run I had only about five days of good weather. I drove in more wind and snow than I can ever remember in my life. The wind blew as high as 105 mph. In Nevada. And snow as deep as 36 in. in New Mexico. I drove in snow all the way from Nevada to South Dakota. When I left S.D. the wind was so bad that it cut my mileage to 7 mpg. So I turned South towards Kansas and got up to 17 mpg. Go figure what a tail wind will do for you. Anyway I made it home last night and it is good to be back in warm weather again. Oh Murphy is still with me, the temperature has dropped to the 40’s at night here and 60’s in the day. So with that I leave you with one more picture of Lake Tahoe and all its snow.