ARIZONA

Hello from Arizona. Cherry and I spent the night in Flagstaff at the noisy but cheerful Howard Johnson motel, right beside a railroad track with the noisiest freight train horns in God's creation, at all hours of the night and morning, (the motels sells earplugs at the check-in desk - you have to laugh!) but with the compensatory bonus of a "beer barn" right next door!, me and Cherry felt we could overlook the racket. This photo of me and Carlos The FireFighter from Florida, a biker on his way home from Sturgis (via Arizona... go figure...) who pulled into the same motel just minutes after I did, was taken in that very beer barn about half an hour after the fact. Carlos was riding with his friend Al, who declined to be sociable, owing to legitimate exhaustion, but Carlos and I had no such prudent sensibilities. As it was only 9pm, as knackered as we both were, we felt it would just be too rude not to have a couple of beers, really just as a justifiable anaesthetic against the traffic and the trains. Carlos was a pretty cool guy. He'd done a lot of miles yesterday too, and we decided we both needed alcoholic beverage refreshment. Its BLOODY hot here. REAL hot. "Hotter 'n Hades", as someone said last night. Over the last few days I've been drinking several litres of water each day, to replace what the sun and wind take out of my body. The hot wind, in particular, is a hazard because its hard to know how much moisture your body is leeching out when the wind dries you before you even know you've broken into a sweat. Motorcycling creates its own wind, of course, in addition to that around you in the air across the desert plains, and it can funnel through in peculiar weather patterns shaped by the landscape at the plains' edges, bringing dry dust with it. Dehydration is a serious hazard under these conditions, and its really critical to replenish the moisture the body loses that it really needs to function efficiently. Water alone doesn't replace the electrolytes, sodium, and other critical minerals you lose through sweat. I'm having at least three high-energy drinks each day too, in addition to the water, so my mineral content doesn't suffer. I've also been wearing a cotton bandana under my helmet, and have been soaking it in cold water at each stop and putting it on dripping wet, to keep my head cool, but within ten or fifteen minutes back on the road, its dry again. Its over a hundred degrees farenheit out here in the desert. The whole country seems to be in the grip of a heatwave, actually, that sees some places, like Atlanta and southern Texas, with extreme heat warnings advising people not to go out, except to check on vulnerable people in their area. Apparently these conditions are not unusual for this time of year, but its hard work at times. Between the baking heat and the thunderstorms, it makes for interesting travelling, especially through the plains across the desert where you can actually see the storms and where they are located...

They show up on the horizon as narrow black vertical streams pouring down from dark clouds, with lightning all around them. Its very surreal to watch, and it kind of reminds me of when I lived in Queenstown in the South Island. My apartment overlooked Lake Wakatipu, and I could stand at the panoramic window, fascinated, watching the bad weather slowly rolling in from behind Mount Nicholas and Walter Peak, and up across the lake to close in on the whole town.
On one stretch of the freeway heading west, I looked around me and saw four separate storms, in different locations, all miles away in the distance. They seemed to be pretty intense, with a lot of forked lightning all around the streams of water. It was an awesome thing to look at!!! Not so great to get caught in, though, even though its usually a short-lived experience. You can see them sweeping along in their given direction, and when they come towards you, always a lot wider and faster than you thought they were when you saw them farther away, there's absolutely nothing you can do except keep moving, and think about how nice it feels to be cool for the brief few minutes they hit and drench you for, before they move on and you get cooked again. You don't stay wet for long enough, before the desert heat engulfs you again, with its hot, dusty wind, and intense heat rising up out of the asphalt. Ah well, at this time of year its all part of the adventure. Its only a hazard if you choose to see it that way. I prefer to think of it as an interesting experience I don't get many opportunities to have. Not that I'd queue up to continue having them, but it certainly is an unusual thing to be caught up in.