Thursday,
March 17
Kim was up at 7 a.m., so he could get breakfast
before heading back to the dealership. I
stayed snuggled in that king size bed a bit longer, enjoying the warmth.
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9 a.m…..Update
on truck: Apparently it started
right up for the mechanics this morning, but the alternator is bad. That’s the first thing on the repair
list. It’s probably too much to hope
that the fix to all the electrical weirdness happening yesterday is as easy as
replacing the alternator. Not that the
actual replacing will be easy…that’s not what I’m saying. I just hope that’s the only thing wrong. Meantime, I’m sitting in the hotel room playing
with the pictures I’ve taken so far.
Can’t really go anywhere because my bike is locked and Kim has the
key.
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10:40
a.m….Update on truck: I called Kim
to get an update because, well, I was curious about the truck but also bored
with my current surroundings. When he
answered, he said he was just hooking the trailer back on…wait! you mean the truck is fixed already? Why, yes it is! Yippee Yaahoo!!! Still have to load the bikes when he gets
back but we’re gonna get this show back on the road again soon!
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Kim is back in the room about 11:05….bikes already
loaded. Gathered our stuff up and ready
to hit the road by 11:30 a.m.
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Small hiccup to our getting back on the road….as we
hit highway speed, the battery light came on.
Gauges all looked good, but had to turn back to get it checked out. Thankfully we were less than 5 miles away…and
it turned out to be a contact that had wiggled loose. Mechanic apologized, made sure it was secure
and away we go!!
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About 150 miles north of Las Vegas, we started seeing
green… as in the trees and ground bushes had leaves. Not the muted desert green but vibrant spring
green.
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When looking at the map and planning this trip, I was
taken with the idea of including a trip to Death Valley National Park. Our main focus has always been to explore
Arizona on our bikes. But Death Valley
seemed so close (closer to Arizona than to Michigan) and Kim has never been
there, so we decided to make that our beginning point. Then we’ll head to Arizona and explore it
from west to east, which will also have us heading in the right direction when
it’s time to head home. I didn’t make
any hotel or camping reservations because we weren’t sure exactly when we were
leaving Grand Rapids or how long it would take us to get there. Today, leaving Cedar City, we realized we were
within a day’s travel to Death Valley so it was time to do something about it. Death Valley Plan A had been to
camp in the park. There were no
vacancies for either camping or the hotel, so Plan B was to find accommodations
within a 50-60 mile range. Didn’t want
to be too far away, as we’d be riding to and from the park on our bikes. After much searching and calling, I finally
found a hotel in Pahrump, NV, that had a vacancy for tonight only and is about 50 miles from the park. Very doable.
Then we had to decide when we were going to the park. Two options: we could go there this afternoon
as we had hours of daylight left when we checked into the hotel OR we could
ride there tomorrow. Kim favored
tomorrow as it would be less hurried. That decision made, we then had to look at how
tomorrow should play out….we need to leave the truck/trailer somewhere for the
day and gee, wouldn’t it be nice to have somewhere to sleep tomorrow night? For whatever reason, this is a very busy
little town as far as the hotels are concerned.
It took a few calls and further discussion between us, but we have a
room secured at a different hotel for tomorrow night AND we can leave the truck
in the parking lot for the day. So we’ll
have the day free to ride and have a place to lay our weary heads tomorrow
night. Cost of the room is a bit more
than we anticipated but that might be the price paid for flying by the seat of
our pants. J
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Pahrump is an unusual name; Kim wondered about its origin. Time for another
Google search and Wikipedia has this to say:
Pahrump was originally inhabited by the Shoshone. It was slowly inhabited by American
settlers in the late 19th century. They reportedly chose the name for Pahrump
after the original indigenous name Pah-Rimpi, or "Water
Rock," so named because of the abundant artesian wells in the valley.
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Kim thought the drive through Utah on I-70 looked familiar, but didn’t
know when he would have been through there except on the HoneyRide, almost 5
years ago. I was skeptical about that; I
thought we took a different route.
However, seeing a sign for a little town with an unusual name and then taking
close look at the map brought it back to me.
We had ridden it on the HoneyRide... rode through Zion National
Park, then took a scenic route up to Salina to pick up I-70, heading east to Green
River. Because we did it in reverse this
time, I didn’t key into the landscape, but I do remember the ‘no services’
issue and the name of a little town on the scenic route….Panguitch, pronounced Pang-which.
Saw a sign for it yesterday and a bell went off in my head.
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On the HoneyRide, I meant to take Kim down the Las Vegas strip, but I
got confused and actually took us on a route that paralleled the strip. So he didn’t get to experience the craziness that is Las Vegas. We’ve been relying on Rapunzel (my phone’s
GPS) for direction and today it looked like she was going to take us down the
strip…finally Kim would get the opportunity to see Las Vegas. Wrong!
Rapunzel’s route took us on US 15, which, as it turns out, is the route that I took 5 years ago. When I realized
that we were bypassing the Strip again, I offered to navigate us over to it,
although earlier we had discussed how it might not be the best route when
pulling a trailer. Kim passed on my
offer, being satisfied with seeing it from behind again.
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Washed the bikes this afternoon and took a short ride (60 miles). It felt good and I’m looking forward to doing more of it! J
TY !!!
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