The Rest Of The Story

My last report on the Alaska trip was two weeks ago. We are home now. The trip is over. My long time dream is now a memory. Unfortunately, the last few days of the odyssey turned sad. Dave W’s ailing brother, Jesse, passed away. We were making our way home, and had just gassed-up in Vernal, Utah on Thursday 6/30 on our way down to Rifle, CO and I-70 when Dave got the news. (Gadget has a Bluetooth com system in his helmet that allows him to make and receive I-Phone calls on the go). He rode for 2 ½ hours, staying from one to two hundred yards behind me, thinking about his brothers, the two that are now both gone, and Jo, his still vibrant and sharp-as-a-tack mom.

When we finally reached Rifle around 5:30 pm and pulled into a gas station, he quietly said, “Jess died, I have to get home.” We sat down and talked about it awhile. I knew I wasn’t up to the kind of hours he was going to put in to get back to Louisville as quickly as possible, so we decided to split up. Gadget headed east on I-70, hoping to make it beyond Denver before stopping for the night, and I started looking for a motel in Rifle. Dave made it home to Louisville two days later on Saturday evening July 2, while I arrived home in Lake Lure to fireworks on the 4th of July.

Now I need to back up and fill in the gap between arriving by ferry on the north end of Vancouver Island and receiving the bad news about Jesse in Vernal, UT.

It took about 7 hr to ride the 300 miles from Port Hardy at the north end of the island down to Victoria on the southern tip of the island. The only wildlife of note that we saw along the way were a couple of eagles. Victoria is a beautiful city and the capital of British Columbia. We spent two nights at Marketa’s B&B on Superior St, a couple of blocks from the harbor, the Parliament Building, and the ferry docks. That’s the Parliament Building behind us.


If you turn around and snap another picture you see the harbor and the Empress Hotel.


The breakfasts at Marketa’s were delicioso. I had eggs benedict two mornings in a row because I enjoyed it so much…high cholesterol be damned…I’m on vacation. I hope my cardiologist doesn’t read this.


You can read all about the great food we consumed on this trip on Penny’s food blog if you are interested.

One of the highlights of our stay in Victoria was a visit to one of Penny’s blogging friends who lives in the Highlands on the outskirts of Victoria on several acres with a couple of ponds, some ducks, chickens, goats, an unwanted American Bullfrog, and a loveable Cairn Terrier named Rory. Her blog, Pondside, is beautifully written and heartfelt. She and her husband, The Great Dane, a retired Canadian Air Force Officer, invited us for lunch on Friday 6/24 and it was a pleasure getting to know them. She chronicled our visit in a post, from which I borrowed this shot of us departing through their gate on our way back to Victoria.



The next morning it was time to board our fourth and final ferry for the 2 ½ hr ride to Port Angeles, WA and bid adieu to the fair city of Victoria.


After disembarking in Port Angeles at noon, we headed west past the very scenic Crescent Lake in the Olympic National Park, to the Pacific coast of Washington and down the coastline on WA 101. For some reason, all the pictures I took along the way have disappeared into the ether. Our destination was The Inn At Crippen Creek Farm, a two-guestroom B&B in a very rural setting a couple of miles north of the tiny burg of Skamokawa, WA.

Penny has written beautifully about our evening and morning at Crippen Creek in a post on her blog here, so I won’t try to compete with her except to say that both the dinner and breakfast that we were treated to were true feasts. And, the dinner guests around the table that Saturday night, 6/25, were a varied and interesting group that included the author of Hold Me Tight And Tango Me Home who has also been a spotter pilot for commercial fishing fleets in Alaska.


Also at the table were a semi-retired commercial Alaskan fisherman who is now doing fish research on the Columbia River on a government contract, a civil rights attorney who founded the ACLU Chapter in Washington, and a commercial free-lance photographer who has worked as a commercial crabber in Alaska with the Deadliest Catch fleet. The dinner conversation was interesting to say the least.

Here we are with the Inn Keepers, Don and Kitty Speranza.


Our final scheduled stop was Sun River, OR where Dave and Tulin have good friends from Louisville, Michael and Deborah Diven, who moved to Oregon several years ago and own the Village Bar And Grill (VBAG for short) in Sun River. While Dave and Tulin stayed with Michael and Deborah, Penny and I were graciously hosted by their good friends, Gary and Kate Brooks. We stayed a total of three nights in Sun River and had a great time sightseeing and hanging out at the VBAG with a large group of friendly and funny folks. The VBAG has a definite Cheers vibe to it.


We drove some and hiked some to see an obsidian lava flow field near Paulina Lake, south of Sun River. Here Kate, Deborah, and Tulin show-off their high tech hiking footwear especially designed for trekking in snow.


On our last night in Sun River we all gathered at Gary and Kate’s house for dinner.


Michael made his famous Oysters Rockefeller.


I must have eaten a couple of dozen of them. Early the next morning, Wed June 29, Kate and Deborah drove Penny and Tulin to the airport in Redmond to fly home. Penny said the girls wanted to know if the oysters worked...she wasn’t telling.

Meanwhile, Gadget and I took off for home heading down OR 31. At that point of the journey, California remained as the only state that I hadn’t ridden in, and our route was taking us within 20 miles of the OR/CA border. So, instead of turning left on OR 140, the only route eastward, we continued south to Goose Lake and the California state line. We stopped at the first “Welcome To California” sign, took a picture, and turned around and rode back to the junction with 140, then headed east. I can now color in all of the remaining lower 48 states on my riding map in addition to Alaska and all remaining Canadian Provinces except Northwest Territories, The Maritime Provinces, and Nunavut which isn’t accessible by land. The continental US map will be all red as a result of this ride….woo hoo!

That day we made it to Wendover, UT where we found the light on at Motel 6. For dinner, we rode back two blocks to the west to West Wendover , NV to eat at the Montego Bay Casino. There is a line painted on the street with NV printed on one side and UT on the other. The string of casinos on the Nevada side abruptly stops at the line.

On the way to Wendover, we passed through Winnemucca, NV. I’ve now been just about everywhere…you got nothing on me Johnny Cash.


On Thursday, 6/30, we continued eastward across the Bonneville Salt Flats and past the Great Salt Lake. It was strange to inhale air that smelled like the ocean in the middle of a desert. I am hereby adding to my bucket list a return ride to the Salt Flats during Speed Week. Another minor bucket list item was about to be checked off as we rode into Salt Lake City. I have been wanting to see the Morman Tabernacle and Salt Lake LDS Temple for many years. We took the time to exit I-80 and seek out the Temple. I was disappointed that non-Mormans are not allowed inside the Temple, but it is still impressive from the outside, and they have a cut-away model in the visitors center to show you what it looks like on the inside.


Here’s the Temple as viewed from the 10th floor of the Joseph Smith Building across the street.


Here’s the cut-away model. It’s as close as we non-Mormans will come to seeing the inside of the Temple.


Later on that day, we made our way on down to Rifle, CO, passing through Vernal, UT where Dave got the news of his brother’s death. I spent the night in Rifle while Dave rode hard for Louisville. The next day, July 1, I bailed off of I-70 at Glenwood Springs and headed south on CO 82 through Aspen and across Independence Pass. This is a beautiful and challenging road. In some sections, it is very narrow with shear rock faces on the left (going south) and steep drop-offs on the right with no guard rail. Several mini waterfalls were flowing down the rock faces and contining across the road, presumably from melting snow above. At 12,095 ft, Independence Pass is the second highest in Colorado after Cottonwood Pass which only exceeds it by 31 ft. It was pretty cold at the top of the pass with lots of snow still on the ground.


As I descended the south slope, the temperature increased quickly, and I would soon come to cherish the cooler temps higher up as the temperature eventually climbed into the low 100’s. I spent that night in Dalworth, TX, a small cattle and oil town north of Amarillo. I was in Amarillo by 9 am the next morning (Saturday) and called the Suzuki dealer about installing a new chain on the bike because mine was making ominous noises and I was worried about it lasting until I got home. They said to come on in and they would install a new one, and they did, which only took about an hour. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it out of the parking lot before the new chain jumped the front sprocket and broke the clutch control rod that passes in front of it. This little mishap took another three hours to repair. I was finally on the road again by 2:30 pm….too late to reach my initial goal of Fort Smith, AK, so I settled for Oklahoma City. After spending another night as Tom Bodett’s guest, I managed 650 miles on Sunday with the temperature stuck at 102 F. This put me in Dickson, TN about 35 mi short of Nashville, for another night at Tom’s place. It was an easy 5 ½ hr ride home on Monday, arriving to the aforementioned fireworks in Lake Lure.

In summary, it was a heck of a ride and the topmost item on my bucket list, but not the last. There are still all those Maritime Provinces to see, the Lake Superior circle tour to do, not to mention the four-corners tour. But those will have to take a backseat to Penny’s top list item…France. Next year it will be France Or Bust, but not by motorcycle.

Been there, done that.