Needs a life
Full throttle!
Posts: One MEEEEEELLION
posted December 21, 2003 10:38 AM
Something to look forward to? Just read a recent journal:
Motorcycling the AlCan Highway
Somewhere west of Whitehorse, Yukon to Mentasta Lake, Alaska
Racing Daylight - A Motorcyclist's Journal
Saturday, July 23 Day 7
The sound of a car rushing by awakens me. Time to go. I roll up the sleeping bag and don my boots. Yow, that's cold! I break out an MRE and have a tasty breakfast of cold omelet and ham, two applesauce packs and a cookie bar. The omelet tastes absolutely terrible but it's scarfed down anyway. Sleeping on the ground in a ditch just to save a buck and eating MRE's, this is a great trip!
The road calls and I push the motorcycle through the twists and turns leaning into the corners. Someday I will have to retire from this luxo-tourer and buy a sportbike. I can feel the craving for more speed, more horsepower, more torque, and even better cornering clearances as I scrape the pegs in the turns. Plus this thing must weigh 700 lbs. all loaded up like this. Around slow elephantine campers and past adventure bicyclists all loaded up with gear I go rocketing westward. My short-lived joy ride in rudely interrupted though.
I roll through Destruction Bay, which got its name from a storm that leveled many of the buildings when it was just a relay station. During the building of the highway, every 100 miles or so, relay stations were built to allow a place for truck drivers to rest and repair their vehicles. After the storm, the name Destruction Bay stuck. Today less than 100 people live there. It lies on the shore in the middle of the lake and the view is amazing.
To my dismay, just outside of town, the construction begins. It stretches for as far as the eye can see. The pavement ends and gravel it is.
Huge dump trucks with tires taller than I, even with arms outstretched above me, rumble by along side the road. Some are full, some are empty. The empty ones travel in one direction one after the other. They fly by moving even faster than the flow of traffic. The huge trucks rumble and bounce down the side of the road belching black diesel smoke and tons of dust. The loaded ones come back the other way, filled with house size loads of dirt.
Dust fills the air making it hard to see. It begins to coat everything. Clouds bellow from beneath the huge dump trucks each time they drive by robbing me the ability to see anything until they pass by. Then another one approaches and overtakes traffic.
The windshield is soon coated in a thick layer of dust. I sit up high in the seat peering over the top edge of the windshield. Cars, trucks, campers drive the other way on the other side of the makeshift road kicking up even more dust. Each vehicle I come to kicks up a cloud of dust so thick, I can barely see around it. When the coast is clear and it is safe, I slowly pull out and pass by the RV's.
I steer around rocks, potholes, even a little boulder once in a while that must have fell out of a truck or something. How did a 6-inch stone get into the middle of the road I have to wonder? I ride up on a group of campers lumbering along. I cannot stay back here. I wait until there is room to pass. Riding behind these campers is worse than the cars. Occasionally, I even come up on one of those super luxo motorhomes, the Greyhound bus chassis converted to a camper. They pull boats, pickups, ATV's on trailers, the kitchen sink. They even travel in packs and form a sort of luxo-camper caravan.
The road becomes wet as the water truck passes by. Now added to the dust is a coating of gray film that quickly changes the color of my chaps, boots, and face shield. It coats every surface of the motorcycle. The vehicles in front of me are kicking up a soup of wet gravel. Then the water truck runs out of water and pulls around into the returning dump truck path the other way. The road turns back to clouds of dust now crusting the wet film. It's calm for a short time, not too much dust, and then a group of huge dump trucks roar by kicking up clouds.
The bike shakes and shimmies, the plastic protests, and every bolt is slowly coming loose. I hit a couple potholes bottoming out the front fork. Each time it feels as though the motorcycle is going to split in half. The crunch is so extreme and so sudden; it makes it feel as if I'm the one taking the punishment, not just the bike. Each one hurts more than the last.
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posted December 21, 2003 10:38 AM
