Day 195, Thursday, December 15

Last night it was just too bitterly cold for me to try to set up my tent. I’d intended to camp at the Carlsbad KOA but because it was so bitterly cold and windy (at least as cold by the Britton-meter as it was at the Grand Canyon and definitely colder than it was at Sequoia Nat’l forest) I simply couldn’t stomach trying to set up my tent. In fact, even with the heated hand grips of the motorcycle, my fingers were completely numb when I pulled into the parking lot. Instead of pitching my tent, I simply unrolled my air mattress in the laundry room of the KOA and slept inside. There’s no way my 40 deg sleeping bag and breezy tent would have kept me warm outside. I was up this morning by 5am because I was incredibly uncomfortable on the super hard surface of the floor and because noises of the building kept waking me up over and over throughout the night.
I had the severity of the cold temps reconfirmed for me again this morning. It was the first time on this entire trip that it was too cold to start my motorcycle. It took several minutes of coaxing and begging to get it started. My plans were to roll back through Roswell before heading to Carlsbad Caverns and then on South towards San Antonio. I was looking forward to going to Roswell to see some of the alien stuff and with the hope of getting an Alien head for my motorcycle dash board. I retraced my steps 60 miles North to Roswell and got there at breakfast. After breakfast I headed down town and realized quickly what a mistake I’d made in coming back to the town. Roswell is a complete waste of time. There are only a few stores/businesses down town dealing with the alien stuff and all of the memorabilia sold in those businesses is complete junk. Never again will I come back to this town. It was a complete waste of my time.
Leaving Roswell I headed down to Carlsbad Caverns. When I got there I decided I wanted to make some lunch prior to setting off into the cave. I remembered I’d purchased some apples and bananas yesterday and figured that those would both make fantastic additions to my lunch. Not so. When I dug them out of the top bag on my bike, I found that both the nanners and the apples were frozen solid. The ‘nanners had turned a nasty, slimy black color and the once red apples were now a mottled brown. I tried eating one of each but gave up. About the only thing the bananas would have been good for was banana bread and the apples now had a consistency closer to apple sauce than to a fresh apple.


Carlsbad Caverns were absolutely beautiful. I’ve only been down in caves on a couple of occasions in my life and none of the previous jaunts was even in the same ball park as this one. I went for the walk that takes visitors in through the natural entrance, around the “big room” and then back out through an elevator. Walking down into the maw of the natural opening was an amazing experience. The cave is incomprehensibly large. In fact it’s so large that it feels more like the inside of a covered stadium than a cave under ground. One of the reasons I was looking forward to seeing this cave was because it would give me the chance to play around with long exposure night photography with my camera. I don’t think I took a single picture with an exposure shorter than 10 seconds. Thank goodness I had my tripod with me. What’s fun about long exposure pictures is that while the human eye sees largely in gray scale in dark conditions, a long exposure picture brings out all sorts of colors that the human eye doesn’t see. I was pleased to see lots of blues and greens showing up in my pictures!

Prior to going down into the cave, I called Larry Kachadourian (whom I met in Banff on August 25) to talk with him about visiting him and Louise, his wife, down in San Antonio. I’d initially planned on making the drive to San Antonio in two stages, staying the first night at a really interesting state park called Balmorhea State Park. It’s got a two acre, spring fed natural pool that’s something like 25 feet deep, crystal clear, a constant 75 degrees, and full of aquatic life. I’d selected it as a stop over while I was back in San Diego, thinking that going for a dip would be a nice way to end the day. I’d not counted on temps in the 20’s! Larry suggested that I ought to consider riding straight to San Antonio in one stage instead of two because the weather tomorrow (Friday) is supposed to get nasty, rainy, windy, and VERY cold. No need to make that suggestion twice to me. I’ve ridden through enough inclement weather on this trip that I don’t feel the need to experience it if avoidable. He suggested taking 285 to I10 instead of going by Balmorhea. He also told me that I needed to be absolutely sure to fill up the gas tank at Ft. Stockton (where 285 and I10 intersect) because there’s no gas for the next 150 miles! Where am I going with this little tangent? Well, leaving the cavern I noticed two other sport-touring motorcycles had pulled up a space over from my rig in the parking lot. While I was getting ready to leave, the owners came out and I waved to them as I was heading out towards Ft. Stockton. After arriving and filling up in Ft Stockton, I decided to get some dinner and for some reason, I had Mexican food on my mind. Riding through town, a little hole in the wall place caught my eye as I was passing it, so I swung around and pulled back into the parking lot. As I was getting out of my riding suit, I noticed the same two motorcycles from Carlsbad were parked just across the lot! When I walked into the restaurant, I figured I’d look around to see if I saw them in order to say hello. They ended up inviting me to join them for dinner and we sat and talked for probably the better part of an hour. I was curious how they’d left Carlsbad after me but had still managed to get to the restaurant before me, without passing me. Turns the reason was two fold. First, the route they’d used to get over to 285 was nearly 30 miles shorter than the one I’d taken. Reason two? They’d been traveling at as much as 140mph at times! My motorcycle won’t even go that fast!
One of them, Giancarlo Zanolini, had done a ride with his son from their home in Daytona Beach, up the East coast to Canada, then across Canada and down to Los Angeles where they’d left the bikes in storage, flying home to avoid over-running their vacation time. Giancarlo had then contacted one of his friends, Paul Skinner, and the two of them flew out to LA to get the bikes and ferry them back to Florida. Cool story! We shared a great, entertaining dinner and parted company. I’m sure I’ll drop South to visit with them some time down in FL.
Leaving Ft. Stockton, I headed East on I10 to San Antonio. It was a hair-raising ride! Not because the roads were poor, they were impeccably clean and smooth, but because there were literally thousands of deer wandering up alongside the highway for the entire ride. I’ve never in my life, probably cumulatively, seen as many deer as I did on that section of I10. Having already hit a deer earlier on this trip, I wasn’t quite white knuckled on the handle bars, but I *definitely* had a knot in my stomach. I ended up pulling into Larry and Louise’s house around 2am and Larry and I stayed up and talked until about 3am. He’s an extremely interesting guy to talk with. He shares many of the same views on society, politics, and science as I do and is a self made successful entrepreneur, having started well over a dozen businesses in his career, most of which are still in operation.