Day 27, Wednesday, July 13

Picked up my motorcycle today at Salt Lake BMW. They’d completed the job no problem. Problem, was that the temperature was about 105 F. I’ve never ridden in weather that hot before. It’s absolutely miserable. Even wearing my fully ventilated hot weather suit, I felt like I was going to die. Usually in moderately hot weather, I ride with my helmet’s visor partially or fully open to increase air flow to my head. However, when the temp’s 105 you have to keep the visor fully closed because 105 deg air hitting your face at 70 mph feels like you’re sticking your face into the door of a blast furnace. It burns badly. But then with the helmet closed, the sweat was coming pouring down like a river and stinging my eyes. I’m definitely not cut out to live in the desert South West. I’d pretty much made that conclusion a year ago when I took a trip to Moab with Asad Khan, Joe Ruthenberg, Kevin Mitchell, and Andreas Schulne, but now I’m 100% sure of it. That said, I had to completely change my plans of leaving this afternoon. There’s no way I’d ever be able to survive the 115 deg heat of riding across Nevada during the day time. So I packed my trailer and got my stuff all ready to go and took a nap in the afternoon. I woke back up at 9:00pm, said goodbye and thank you to TJ and headed out at 10pm. I rode the 700 miles to Sacramento straight through the night. Very tiring but absolutely the right decision. I had somewhere between zero and no desire to see Nevada during the day and the night temperatures were quite comfortable. The other thing I did while on my through-the-night trek was to come to the realization that I needed to replan my trip. Originally I’d planned this leg of my trip to CA as an out and back venture with the intent of heading down into CO to visit Jim and Suzanne Roelof followed by heading down into the real desert South West. I quickly came to the conclusion that that part of my trip will have to wait. Instead I’ll head straight North after this weekend to enjoy the milder climes of Oregon, Washington, and Canada.