When riding motorcycle, you’re always looking for twisty roads to test your skills, and just generally have a really good time: you, the bike, the road, the great outdoors, and incredible scenery. If you can put all those elements together, it makes for a great time — today was a great time.
Riding through, or past a national park seems to always find you a great road. This 82 HWY not only got us on the way to where we needed to go next, Texas. But it also gave us a fun route. Twisty, but not too technical. Long sweeping turns, and tons of great scenery. Cows and pastures at first, then all of a sudden we were in a forest, thick with trees and glowing green fauna. Gorgeous spruces just sprang up and out from the sides of the mountainous road. And the only accessible turnouts were small gravely patches of roads.
The turns kept on coming, and since there wasn’t much traffic on these roads, we took them at speed and leaned deep and hard in to each turn.
The only bummer was when the wind kicked up and we began to get really buffeted on all sides. I mean this wind was extremely strong. We found ourselves turning in to the wind even when there was no turns, and found ourselves turning opposite deep turns at times, just to stay upright from the push of the wind. New Mexico winds are no slouches. When we walked in to grab lunch, I asked the hostess about the strong winds, and how often that occurs. She said, “Oh this? This is just a breeze. You shoulda been here last week.” Crazy! I can’t even imagine that. At a few different points, I thought we were going to get pushed right off our moto’s.
End of the road today was Big Spring, TX. First taste of Texas. Hampton Inn, lotsa oil worker guys spilling out of vans from a long hard days work. We felt as beat up as them after riding in strong winds all day, but I’m sure they had a much rougher day. We met a guy who works on the big wind turbines being set up across the country to generate power. We sort of chatted his ear off, we were so curious. Very cool genteel Texan gentleman. Then we headed over to KC Steakhouse for steaks. Not a bad day.
—ish.
