2018 Prefrontal Tour

By now you're not surprised that we rose before dawn, but 2 AM was a bit much. After a few hours of sleep I was awake and already anticipating the ride, and if the adjacent rustling was any indication I could tell that Jim was too. We did a decent job of pretending to sleep until 5-something, which is still stupid o'clock in the morning, and then rose to perform the routine. We've got it down pat now, ironically, on the last day of the tour. It was 49 degrees and had already rained hard, but thankfully wasn't actively raining at the moment. The road spray would be bad, but at least we wouldn't be getting drenched each time we stopped. We'd be warmer and wetter, which beats drier and upside down due to icing. We got on the road at 6:45 to blustery winds and a heavy, leaden sky. The clouds in the east turned a beautiful rose orange, reminiscent of the morning we left on the 2018 Prefrontal Tour, now 18 days past, but this time the clouds were so dense we didn'

It wasn't good. To be kind, it was swollen and the purple of a deep and sullen bruise. To be more accurate, it was *grossly* swollen, and contained the varied shades of blue and purple that shouldn't occur in nature. I wasn't going to touch it, and it ought to be a felony in all fifty states to call that thing a blueberry. There was nothing I could put next to it to provide a sense of scale, but my family will attest that blueberries should be wild, small and sweet - not morbidly obese, mushy and bland like that failure of nuclear medicine that stared back at me from my breakfast bowl. We pushed off at 7:10 AM, well before dawn, and immediately encountered snowplows on the highway getting ready for testy weather that's hopefully more than a day behind us. We hit rush hour traffic south of Chicago but things were still flowing nicely. We got two different kinds of "welcome" to the midwest - the first was an eagle soaring over one of the bridges we crossed and

I learned early on to avoid upside-down boats on the highway, but thankfully there aren't many on this stretch of the Tour. That aversion might be obvious to some, but for me it was a process of learning and comparison. For you see, dear reader, each vehicle creates turbulence in its wake, depending on its size, speed, and shape, also known as "frontal area", "velocity", and "aerodynamics". That turbulence can create an alternating pattern of gusts called "buffeting" that batters a rider's head from left and right. It's more disconcerting than life threatening, but it makes for a stiff neck and a healthy dose of fatigue if it happens all day. We passed the 6,000 mile mark today, and in that distance I've made the following observations on a scale of 1 to 10... Small vehicles are inconsequential, rating a 1 for sedans and a 3 for pickem-ups. Mini Coopers are nasty little buggers though, and they rate a 4 all by themselves. Semi tr

Today's episode is brought to you by the word "prairie", and also by the word "tan". Say them with me now. Prairie... Tan... Now, close your eyes and say them for 7 straight hours. And just like that, it's like you were *there* on Day 15 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour! We started the day late due to some expected repairs, which gave time for the sun to rise above the horizon, then Wyoming gave way to Nebraska within the first hour and a stacatto arrangement of, well, browns. Aside from the grey pavement the fields are tan, the corn is tan, the tumbleweeds are tan, and even the sky is sometimes tan, colored with the chaff from dusty combines harvesting crops of "wuzzat" and "beetsmee". The "Welcome to Nebraska" sign proclaimed it to be the home of Arbor Day, but I couldn't decide if the utter lack of trees we'd seen so far lent urgency or incredulity to the statement. The bobbing oil wells also gave way to fracking sites, w

There really is a rhythm of the road, or should I say a common refrain with accent notes. Rise, pack, eat, ride. Frequent stops for hydration and fuel. Find lodging, eat, unpack, plan tomorrow's route, sleep. It's mostly the same but the accent notes are the weather and the clothing and gear choices you make in response. Day 14 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour was the coldest we've seen yet, and it took us a couple hours to make the right choices. Although it was in the 50's in Salt Lake City, as we rode up the gentle switchbacks to Summit Park it dropped to 35 degrees and faceshield fogging meant cracking the visors to maintain visibility. We made a stop to switch back into the cold weather gear, and to "coffee up" to try to overcome the lethargy of a Brazilian Steakhouse dinner the night before. Truth be told, neither of us was feeling it. We passed through Echo, Utah and the rock formations were impressive, great red dollops of rock with little holes pockmarkin

Did you hear the story about the two peanuts that went for a walk in the park after dark? In a nutshell, one was a salted. If any word describes Day 13 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour, it's "salted". We got on the road a bit later than usual, but not by much. It was enough time, however, for the sun to be showing over the horizon, and it makes for a brutal start to the day to be riding eastward into the rising sun. It was cold enough to see our breath for the first time on the Tour, too. We started seeing salt flats fairly quickly after leaving Reno, just little low-lying depressions in the fields alongside the road, growing larger as we rode east. Eventually, they turned into great salt pans extending in all directions, some dry and some partially filled with mirror-smooth water, glistening white here, and the mottled gray of late spring lake ice there. I was surprised at the smell, sort of a "savory sulfur" as if you left a Thanksgiving turkey on the counter for

I could throw a lot of adjectives at Day 12 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour, but none of them would do justice to the ride. Looking out the window at dawn I saw an enormous cat behind the hotel. Deer grey with a long black-tipped tail, it jumped at least six feet straight up into a tree. I kept looking for things around it to get a sense of scale - it looked to be 30 inches tall at the head, and over 4 feet long, which either makes it an enormous tabby or a tiny mountain lion. We spent some time washing off the week of grit we picked up in the Mojave and industrial sections of California, then happy to put the 7-lane highways behind us we headed out of Stockton on Route 88. Go get something to write with, because Route 88 and 89 out of California are two must-see scenic byways, and you should circle a date on your calendar now. Route 88 rises out of California on the spine of a mountain ridge, undulating up and down and winding back and forth through towering pines and the tallest cedars

Day 11 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour was to finish off the To-Do list and get headed back east. We packed and repacked the bikes, but in the end a couple things had to go - my plastic containers and black sneakers were ready for the dustbin anyway, and I had to toss them out for lack of space. Jim got a pretty cool photo of my bike before dawn, backlit by the hotel's accent lights, but truth be told the desert has put a shameful layer of grit on the old girl. We headed west out of Bakersfield, through that now familiar mixture of grapevines, fruit trees, and oil pumps. That part of California is such a strange mixture of heavy industry and food production! Everywhere it's fumes and dust, and in the process of harvesting the celery, cabbage and green onions they were packing them in cardboard boxes with gaping air holes, loading them on open trucks, and carting them through all of that mess to the processing facility. Another good reminder to wash my food! Part of the heaviest in

Today was supposed to be a down day for the 2018 Prefrontal Tour, in that we would make no forward progress. And while that's true in the cartographic sense, we still managed to move the needle more than any other day of the Tour so far. We spent the morning taking care of incidental issues about town, checking over the bikes, buying souvenirs, and picking up a few clothing items that were more appropriate for this 80-plus degree weather. We're having a lot of navigational snafus in this town, especially related to lane changes, so getting to lunch was a bit of an affair, but with that out of the way we took off for a 185-mile long loop through the Sequoia National Forest. The line on the map looked twisty, but it didn't do justice to the real thing - thousands of turns, twists, and blind hills carved into the side of the mountains with no guard rails, a precipitous drop at the edge of the tarmac, and random cows walking in the road thousands of feet up and tens of miles f

This Tour note has something special for the reader in the form of several quizzes, and an opportunity to get involved in the Tour yourself! Day 9's agenda for the 2018 Prefrontal Tour was an epic sprint across 627 miles of desert, starting in Holbrook, AZ and ending in Bakersfield, CA, the hometown of Buck Owens. The first thing of note on the road was a series of signs for the Jack Rabbit Ranch, and I wondered if they grow them for food or fur. No, we didn't stop... We continued west through towns with interesting names like "Deaf Smith", and "Two Guns". Towns in the east like "Schenectady" and "Niskayuna", although historically significant or interesting to someone, just don't resonate with me. Our first quiz involves the attached photo taken at some point in the morning, and the question is what am I doing, and where? A second quiz is that 44 miles west of there you could say I was a shoplifting actress... Where and what was I th

As the 2018 Prefrontal Tour left Amarillo before sunrise, I learned that cows can smell in two completely different ways, or at least I hope for their sake they can... If you aggregate enough of them in one place, then cows can smell very *badly*. And if I'm right about the big guy upstairs, he would have gifted any animal that poops where it eats the ability to smell very *poorly*. So there you have it. The wide-open flatness of Texas gradually gave way to small gulleys, then large valleys, and finally plateaus and tan buttes rising out of the red soil and the sage green prairies between them. The color reminded me of my wife's decorating advice, "Celery goes with everything". We continued westward as our trackers are by now aware, and passed a lot of coyotes sleeping by the side of the road. We noted that the speed limit gradually increases as you go further west and at this rate we expect the signs in California to say "Bring it". From Amarillo we passed

No collection would be complete without reflection and dedication. As day 7 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour comes to a close, I feel it's long overdue to dedicate this story to someone whose support and concern has been key to its success. My long-suffering wife has been monitoring our progress with a concern and caring that exceeds my own, and I dedicate this story to her. The morning started out in Joplin, Missouri with a fog so thick it would have done DownEast Maine with a coming tide proud. We quickly detoured about a mile off the highway and turned around, just so we could say we rode in Kansas, and then we continued in heavy fog for at least another hour. Oklahoma gave us the first sign that somewhere in America doesn't just have hardwoods and shrubs, as the foliage turned to scrub, tumbleweeds and cotton fields, and the land flattened out. At one point the shrubs smelled like a resin that reminded me of a freshly opened box of Band-Aids. Eventually even those gave way to v

I was surprised to see the light peeking around the curtain, having passed the age a decade ago when a biochemical change makes you pop awake at 5 AM. Every day. Then a whiff of chlorine reminded me it was just the light from the swimming pool that our room overlooked, and it was still 5 AM, dark, and a very cold 32 degrees. But Day 6 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour was a day to make up for lost time, and there was no more to lose. A Canadian invasion was underway to the north, a mass of frigid air 5 states wide with temps well below freezing. As that air mixed with the moist air to the south it would create high winds and torrential rains, and we intended to thread the needle and beat those conditions by skirting to the west just in time to miss the worst of it. Thanks to the support crew in the US and Europe who track our progress and run the weather models, we were able to stop briefly in St. Louis and then turn southwest toward Oklahoma City instead of continuing westward to Kansas. A

How to recount Day 5 of the Prefrontal Tour, dear reader, other than to relate the day's events to an experience you're all familiar with. You arrive at the airport, excited to be traveling on vacation. Your flight is delayed slightly, and then delayed again. After an indeterminate number of delays, your flight is finally cancelled, and you're left to your own devices on how to manage your possessions, lodging, dining, and hopefully an eventual arrival at your ultimate destination. And you're not allowed to know when "the machine" that is the airport might finally lurch back into motion and start moving people again. And so it was with the intrepid team today, as we received one missed deadline after another, and shuffled our possessions between the hotel and the dealer's waiting room. Our seeming high note came early when we walked next door to the Waffle House for a first-time breakfast (for Jim), and I told the waitress I'd have a combo with a coup

Day 4 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour was a melange for the senses. Rising before dawn out of habit, we were anxious for good news about the bike. Any news would have been better than waiting for the shop to open at 9 AM. I made the compulsory check with the service department to make sure I'd actually sweet-talked my way to the front of the line, and headed to the respective parts departments of the Honda, Indian and Harley Davidson dealers in search of spare fuses, having exhausted my supply the day before. Lather, rinse, repeat,... We waited until noon and had to check out of the adjacent hotel in search of more affordable digs. Fortune at least placed the Honda dealer in the midst of a brand new mega-scale shopping and dining complex. The sound aspect of the melange was provided by the friendly staff at Man O' War Harley Davidson, who let us test a half dozen motorcycles and pretend we could or would afford them. That killed a little time, long enough for the shop to call and

5:30 AM came early, the inevitable result of two days of riding, but it wasn't as bad as either of us feared, and time and ride wait for no man. The breakfast was better than the dinner the night before, but neither of them held a candle to the sunrise over the Ohio River. We wiped the worst of the dew off the steeds and powered west to beat the brewing storm front rising out of Texas three days hence. It was cold - the coldest we've felt yet, and we stopped to cinch the straps and collars before turning south. We both considered ourselves lucky to make it out of Ohio without developing a habit for Mail Pouch Tobacco, an Ohio barn curiosity you'll have to research on your own... Happy to put the smell of burning tires behind us we ducked onto the Ohio River Scenic Byway for just a second, then over the bridge into the rolling hills and horse farms of Kentucky. We made good time until noon, pulling over at the Centerville Market, a map dot crossroads country store that any

We were two miles down the single-lane dirt road when I realized that dogs and cows are not alike. Heading across Ohio on Day 2 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour had begun with copious amounts of drizzle that had turned intermittently to torrential amounts of rain during the journey. It was Jim's turn to navigate, and his Harley-Davidson navigational unit thought it would be great fun to send us down several dirt roads in central Ohio. Any decent pack of dogs would have tilted their heads to the side in that universally recognized gaze of "what the hell are you doing", but the cows just stared flatly from the sides of the road as they chewed their cuds. In the end, it was more than worth the detours. Arriving in Zanesville, we stopped briefly at the Harley dealership to replace Jim's throttle palm rest that had leapt into the bushes a few miles back, and I picked up one for myself. Two turns later we were on the legendary "Triple Nickel", or Ohio Route 555 from Z

It was 37 degrees and dark on Day 1 of the 2018 Prefrontal Tour, with reports of snowflakes falling somewhere in the Adirondacks. We put off the launch until after dawn, so as not to be driving at deer-thirty in the morning, and in the hope that it would warm up a bit... Gassing up at Fuller's Store in Edinburgh, we headed south under broken clouds set ablaze by an Autumn sunrise, through Amsterdam and the farm fields of Schoharie county, hooking up with the concrete slab of I-88 to make some time through Oneonta and beyond. We turned south at Horseheads to amble through the Allegheny State Forest and into Pennsylvania, then turned west and made a race into the sunset to reach Youngstown, Ohio. All in all a great day with 525+ miles on the meter.