Morning in Tucumcari NM, the light from the sun breaking over the far plains has that reddish-yellow tinge, spreading its color over the prairie grass and sage, bringing the heat that will again start the winds.  On advice from Kevin, I walk down to Kix on 66, the breakfast place in town.  It is in the former Denny’s, built here when 66 was still the main road and I-40 was a project in the works.  Now Denny’s is out on the interstate and Kix is an independent place with a can-do attitude, making the best breakfast for miles, many miles, around.  The perky waitress brings me a house specialty, a ginger spice latte’ (not my usual breakfast drink but she seemed so proud of it, I couldn’t refuse…and she was right) and my eggs & bacon which she says she cooked for me herself.  She’s good at her work.  There are the locals in here, the ones you find in every early morning breakfast place in the US, with the main difference being that many of these are wearing cowboy hats.  Mostly men, of course, it usually is at this hour, older men.

Back at the Blue Swallow, the rig is rolled out of the garage for the loading up and Sidecar Delay Factor strikes again.  A middle aged couple from Pennsylvania walks out of their room and begins quizzing me about the rig.  They are riders, back home, who have just purchased a trike for the wife after she had an unfortunate encounter with a guardrail on her two-wheel motorcycle.  They have an acquaintance, a lady from their town who also bought a rig from DMC, though one with a lot more bells and whistles than mine.  The husband offers that if I will take his place going to visit his kids in Phoenix, he will ride the rig back east for me.  I decline his offer.

Kevin has recommended a locksmith in Tucumcari to make spare keys for the 650.  The bike, a 2006, came with only one when I got it and I’ve been concerned about the prospect of losing it.  In more than 50 years of doing this riding thing, I’ve never lost a motorcycle key….but then, I’ve never had just one.  The locksmith, a pleasant fellow who tells me that he has often visited Kentucky when he lived on the east coast, makes the two keys from the blanks I provided and charges me just $2.00.  He won’t take more.

I take old 66 again for a while, but hit I-40 again to make up some time.

The Midpoint Café – Home of the Ugly Crust Pie

I have a mediation set on the 14th and can’t be late.  There is one detour I have to make, at Adrian, Texas, to stop at the Midpoint Cafe, the halfway mark on the Mother Road.  The specialty there is “ugly crust pie” which the menu tells me is better than it looks.  They are correct.  I eat two pieces, one apple and the other chocolate peanut butter.  That will do for lunch today.

Much of the rest of the day is a drone across the Texas panhandle, watching the brown dusty plains and the cattle pass by.  I came through here in 84 and spent the night in Amarillo, though I can’t recognize anything familiar when I pass through again.

My brother-in-law, Jay Smythe, left Kentucky on Monday, in the rain, to ride out and meet me somewhere on the road.  In Shamrock Texas, we rendezvous  in a Chevron station and go to look for a room for the night at the local Motel 6 across the road.  We’ve both had enough Texas for one day.   I unload the rig and Jay climbs in the car for a tour of Shamrock.  He’s only my third-ever passenger but I don’t hit anything or eject him while flying the car, so I must be getting the hang of  it.  He says it’s fun, though strange to be riding that low to the ground. A stop in the local gas station/ “beer cave” reveals that domestic brews, owned by the giant Imbev corporation are preferred here.  There is one sort of  locally made option, “Third Shift Amber” which says it is from Ft. Worth.  Pretty good, actually.

The motel, a clean and serviceable place, has a “family” restaurant next door.   We arrive a bit early for dinner, while the staff is still discussing last night’s game, the local high school happenings and what somebody did that perhaps they shouldn’t have done.  Eventually the regulars begin to trickle in, greeted each by name, and head for their “own” tables.  Thank goodness we didn’t inadvertently pick one of those.  Dinner is acceptable, though nothing to write home about…though I guess that is exactly what I’m doing.

By 8:00 I’m at Sandia BMW, in Albuquerque for, I hope, a sprocket and chain replacement.  The old dealer, in 1984, was a “mom &  pop” traditional style shop, that handled only the motorcycles and was on a street in town.  This one is a part of the BMW car and Mini dealership, and located in a huge facility out by the freeway.  The staff is very professional and friendly….the service writer, like many out west, is a recent transplant from Indianapolis. They have only the rear sprocket in stock, and can source the chain, they think.

Then on disassembly, the rear sprocket bolts are found to be bent, unable to be reused, so replacements must be sourced.  Still waiting.  One of the staff  dropped me off at a nearby restaurant, LePeeps, for an excellent breakfast.

When I was here in 1984, the dealership was a much smaller affair, on a street in town not far from my apartment.  I was there a few times, to buy high-altitude jets for the old bike, and then a new windshield when the canyon winds tumbled  my bike over and over in the parking lot of my apartment one night. Back in those pre-internet days, shops kept things in stock.  I can’t fault the modern shop for not doing so.  In these days when everyone orders everything on line, it would be prohibitive for shops to keep everything in stock, waiting for the chance customer who needs it now.

By three o’clock, the bike seems to be done and ready for the service manager to take it for a test ride.  He is far braver than I as he flys the car going around the corner of the building.

Blue Swallow Motel

I leave Albuquerque at about 4, headed for Tucumcari.  I’ve reserved a room at the Blue Swallow Inn, the most classic of Rt. 66 motels.  I’ve passed this place by before and thought I would be doing so again, just as a matter of timing, but when this opportunity presented itself, I wasn’t going to let it go.

As the sun begins to drop behind the hills behind me, the light softens on the plains in front of my bike and the wind, no longer driven by the heat, calms down.  Between Albuquerque and Tucumcari is a part of the west I like a lot.  The bluffs on either side of the highway are the classic striated red and white faces one sees on postcards and magazine

The Blue Swallow Motel Courtyard

covers.  The high plains extend forever in the fading daylight.  Critters that have waited patiently for the sun to go down are beginning to stir for their nightly routines.

I pull into the Swallow at dusk, tired and hungry (no lunch today) and immediately am made to feel welcomed and at home.  I’m ushered into my own garage for the bike, adjoining my room.

Kevin and Nancy are the owners and Bessie the golden retriever is the supervisor, or so it seemed when she sat down and offered me a paw for as long as I would sit and pet her.   Kevin once worked for Valvoline in Lexington, Ky and  the family lived in Georgetown.  Small world.

My Room at the Blue Swallow Motel

The Blue Swallow is the perfect Rt 66 motel, exactly as I had pictured it to be. My room is small by modern hotel standards, but just what its era expected.  The decor is wonderful, even down to the working 1939 style heavy black dial telephone on the desk.   The bed is high, with a period-correct chenille spread on top that makes the “home” feel complete.  Yet there is the aura of adventure and travel everywhere within these walls.  I can picture Bogart and Bacall coming into this room on their way out of LA,

Artwork inside one of the Blue Swallow garages

both of them hot and tired from the road, the huge engine in the drop-top Caddy ticking slowly as it cools in the garage next door.  She drops her bag and turns to Bogart, that look, that look that only she can do, in her eyes….. (OK, got to stop there. My keyboard is smoldering and this is a non-smoking room.)

Tucumcari offers a free shuttle service from the motels in town to the restaurants and I accept the offer.  The restaurant offers New Mexican food (not the same a Mexican cuisine, similar, but different) that is just as I remembered it from my days in this state before.  I’m shuttled back to my room and quickly fall asleep.

Left Flagstaff at 7, into the cold air, watching the sun struggle above the snowy mountains.  The temperature is in the 40’s but promises to get better as I drop a bit in altitude.  Fierce cross winds keep me steering to the right, only to be blocked for a moment by a hill and then it’s left pressure until the winds return in a few hundred yards.

As the sun gets high enough to not be right in my eyes, the mountains start to give way to high plains with the endless low sagebrush and tan prairie  grasses.  Only hardy animals, both two and four legged, can survive up here.  Fortunately for me, since I’m not that tough anymore, if ever I was, I’m only passing through on my rig, humming along at 60 mph.  The cowboys and cowgirls who lived here a hundred or so years ago would not have imagined this pace, nor this contraption that allows it.  While some folks wax nostalgic for those “simpler” times, I’ll stick with the decades that include these machines.

The warmth that comes with the drop in altitude “down” to 5,000 or so feet, brings with it even more crosswind, making steering a full-time occupation.  This rig tracks wonderfully, usually requiring only modest input in a straight line, but the wind unsettles it a bit.  Not just this one, however, I see tractor-trailers wobbling and correcting as well.   An old song, “Little Deuce Coupe” comes to mind, “….I get pushed out of shape and it’s hard to steer…”.  I’m not a surfer dude or a hot-rodder, but the sentiment is the same.  Not faulting the rig or its setup, just accepting that in these contests, Mother Nature always has the better hand.

Arizona disappears behind me and New Mexico presents itself for inspection.  I explored a lot of this state, and a fair bit of Arizona back in 1984 when I lived here for 11 weeks while working for a law firm in Albuquerque.  I have fond memories of weekend excursions on the old green bike, camping in the hills and just wandering around to see what I could see.  Surely nothing will have changed much in a mere 31 years ?

Lunchtime finds me near  Gallup, so I cruise in and drive the main street which is also Old 66. There I find Glenns Bakery which provides me with a green chile breakfast burrito for lunch and wonderful apple stick pastries and  an almond-paste filled bear claw for dessert.  I take more apple sticks for tomorrow’s pre-breakfast snack.

The highway crests a rise and there is Albuquerque spread out below, looking to my eyes as if she may have put on some girth in the years since I saw her last.  Not criticizing, mind you,  I have too.  I was young then, 35, and had no qualms about exploring all of this area in the Southwest without any navigation tools other than a paper map.  It was the days before all the technical bike gear we have now, so I rode in jeans and a t-shirt, a thin leather jacket (the same one I’d had since I was 18) and boots and a helmet.  I had a rain suit, but often in the parched summer air, I just let myself get wet, knowing that I’d be dry again in minutes.  Now in the age of ATGATT, I’m layered up, much safer but not as “free”.  I camped everywhere then, but now I need a bed and a shower.

I select a Motel 6, which offers a cheap room to AARP members (something else I couldn’t have imagined considering in 1984).  By chance, since I don’t really recognize much here now, the motel is within blocks of my old apartment and the street names begin to come back to me.  The BMW dealer is about 4 miles away (not the same one that was here back then) and I plan to see them tomorrow.