Bluegrass Beemers

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.

As I’m packing up the bike this morning, my neighbor from the next room comes out to leave. He’s a Londoner, with a classic Cockney accent, who tells me that he makes a trip over here at least every other year.  This time he started in Chicago and drove Rt. 66 to here, and will leave for home from Los Angeles today.  He has a place in Devon, he says, and recommends that the next time I come to England, I visit his area (he didn’t offer me his place, though).  The pull of old 66 extends across the Atlantic.

Not heading for England, but I’m starting out from Barstow, following Rt. 66 into the rising sun. Town doesn’t last long and soon I’m out on old Rt. 66, the Mother Road.  Mom needs some maintaining however, as the pavement is rough and broken in many spots.  It occurs to me that back in the day, this perhaps would have been the direction of defeat, in that folks came west for the opportunities in California and when they were headed back east, it may have meant that things didn’t work out so well.  Like that line from Dionne Warwick’s “Do  You Know the Way to San Jose ?”  ” … and all those stars, that never were, are parking cars and pumping gas.”   No such angst for me, though, I’m on a sidecar rig early in the morning in California and riding on 66.  That’s good enough for me.

The desert continues on, as it always does, and before long Needles California, often the hottest place in the country, appears. Brenda and I stayed here one night back in the 90’s when we were herding a rented Harley Electra-Glide (in blue) around these roads.  On that occasion, we took the old road up to Oatman, Arizona, a tiny town up in the mountains famous for movie star honeymoons (Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, if I recall) and free roaming wild burros.  On our last visit, Gable and Lombard had long left town and the burros had done likewise, leaving only their unmistakable calling cards on the streets.  I decided to go back for another look. The mountains up here are stark and dry, with rocks succumbing to gravity everywhere, decorating the flats and often the pavement.  The town just suddenly

The pass above Oatman, AZ

springs up out of the dust, a collection of buildings arranged along one street, with the old mining apparatus rusting at one end.  This time the burros have kept their appointment with me, standing in large groups in the middle of the road as I come into town, waiting patiently (as burros are wont to do) as I ease forward inches at a time to make my way through.  Some come up to me to see if I have loaded the sidecar with burro snacks, but are disappointed.  This is Easter Sunday and the tourists are out in force on the street, petting and feeding the critters and leaving nowhere to park a rig if I wanted to, so I move slowly on through.   On the upside of town, going into the higher mountain pass, the road is worse than I remembered.  I recall wrestling the HD through these curves on a hot summer day with the melting “tar snakes”  causing the tires to wiggle and slip (something of a concern when two-up on a rented bike far from home !)  Today it is not nearly so hot and there’s no difficulty with trying to avoid the snakes….the pavement  seems to be composed almost entirely of the wriggly black lines, as if the DOT had given up on asphalt and decided to just paint the road like a

Some Oatman Residents

Jackson Pollock with these instead. But, no worries on the rig, with three wheels planted on the road, it could slip all it wanted.  The curves have lots of dirt and gravel in them, usually just around the blind side, which would have been seat-clenching on a two wheeler, but not a problem for the outfit.  I’m going very slowly, due to the road and the altitude of the dropoffs, so I can see for miles around me.  The dry mountains and precipitous valleys just go on and on as far as the end of world, it would seem.  I think about what it might have been like to be a miner and his family up here in the 1800’s.  Nothing but hard work and dry, dusty, rock, and the worry about finding water.

The road down from the mountain top into Kingman is a long, straight decline that might make a good landing strip for a 747, should that be required.  It finally reaches bottom at I-40 and I must make up time now, so onto the slab I go.  All good things come at a cost, and for me the cost of several extra days in California, along the coast, is that I have to burn some miles to get home for the work duty that calls early next week.  The four lane numbs the senses so that the land changes slowly, almost imperceptibly as I near Flagstaff, with the flat desert scrub becoming  now high pine forest, without my ever realizing the difference.  I see signs warning me of elk and then bear crossings.  I will keep my eyes open.  The wind is picking up, dropping in temperature and the light is beginning to fade.

Flagstaff appears, and with no trouble at all I find a Motel 6, which has an AARP connection, giving me a nice clean room with wi-fi for $43. There are some perks to being old.

Earlier today, while lubricating the chain, I noticed that the sprockets and chain, which looked serviceable 1,400 miles ago in Washington are now looking pretty thin.  In my experience, sprockets and chains, like tires and rolls of toilet paper, go much quicker toward the end.  I’ll have to see if the dealer in Albuquerque has replacements.  These might get me on home, but best not to chance it if not necessary.