A sign of the days to come.

Dr. Hamster was the first on the scene, then me, then Micah McCloskey and his new lovely bride Carmela Burke and his riding partner Greg O'Neill and his wife Trish who smiled broadly, anxious to be interviewed. Trish immediately spelled out their last name "O'Neill". Greg was layered with O'Neill clothing for obvious reasons. He's half Hispanic but his family comes from a long line of Irish who celebrate annually. The last time the family tore up an old hotel in Prescott, Arizona.

We rolled almost to the border but stopped for gas at about 60 miles out where we first ran into rain. We caught light showers into Blythe. We had clocked about 250 miles from L.A. to the border. Micah chose the gas station just over the line so he could ride helmet free and it was as if all the other travelers on the road were honoring the freedom by supporting the Arizona travel spot, even though they weren't on motorcycles. The place was jammed with trailers, RVs and vehicles packed down with luggage, camping gear and bicycles.

We couldn't stand all the plastic and SUVs and kept rolling on the 10 until, relieved, we pulled off the freeway on highway 60 heading toward Wickenburg. The road is a delight through the desert with vast mountains in the distance and rolling sand hills peppered with creosote bushes and cactus. We had reached the remnants of the great outdoors. I've read recent reports in National Geographic about the population growth and urban sprawl attacking our nation and we felt the impact from time to time. By 2025 the population of this country will grow by 63 million. We are loosing 2 million acres of unpopulated land a year. Scary. We roamed up and over rolling swells in the narrow highway and gazed out over the landscape, and I watched the ominous threatening cloud cover that lay ahead. At times the sky was a dark mat of battleship gray clouds packed with precipitation.

As we rolled on at 80-90 mph through Salome, Wenden and Aguila we passed several junctions that indicated left turns to Prescott, but our road indicated a direct line to Phoenix. I was confused, but the closer we got to Wickenburg the brighter the sky became until the mass of clouds were broken and clouds like masses of cotton balls sewn together parted to allow the sun through. Floating lightly in the warm sky the puffs of clouds were backed by bright blue skies. At times when the gray mixed with the fluffy white, it reminded me of a white Russian drink, as the milk swirls into the glass with the dark Kahlua and Vodka mixture.

When we rolled into the old western town of Wickenburg, we were smacked with the flood of population and tourism. Some 42 miles out of downtown Phoenix we were feeling the swarming of suburbia. According to National Geographic,"Phoenix, Arizona, one of the Sunbelt's fastest growing communities, has been spreading outward at the rate of an acre an hour." New hip gift shops were opening on streets that were most likely deserted three years ago. There was one restaurant after another. Out of the blue we hung a left in the sun on a side street and parked our bikes.

One surprise after another lay ahead

While shooting the shit about the ride I spotted Anita's, a little side street Mexican joint built in true adobe fashion. I didn't pay much attention until I noticed the Harley sticker in the window on the side of the building. I looked again and another decal was affixed to the front pane under the plaster awning, then another in the next window. We had to support our riding brethren. They gave us a big table in the center of the building and we stacked our leather gear on spare chairs and stretched out. Unlike most Mexican restaurants, when the young man arrived with chips, the salsa was delivered in dual-sized miniature carafes. The smaller for the stout salsa and the larger for the mild red sauce. We dug in and scanned the bland tacos and tostadas menu. We had just ridden through 300 miles of various shapes and colored clouds so I asked the clan to describe them to me in their words. I find that clouds are fantastic elements of nature especially to bikers. They're vast, beautiful, rolling, stringy and they can be puffs of smoke in an open sky. They can drown out the sun to a blistering biker in the heat or detach the only warmth from a rider in the cold who is desperately reaching for the sun. Finally, they can be ominous containers of treachery when they slip into our paths and release their watery shipment.

Trish, with bright smiling eyes, saw the romantic aspects of the soft clouds in the shapes of hearts from the back seat of Greg's full dresser. Micah, the master mechanic and shop owner said with a crooked smile, "I found them very threatening but generous with their lack or precipitation."

Dr. Hamster said, "They darkened the morning light and set us free at noon."

Carmela, a lovely woman who has devoted her life to a children's' charity, surprised me, pondering the gloom ahead, "I could see daylight on either side, but only darkness down the middle of the road."

A chill ran up my spine and I put my pen down, but Greg perked up with various types of cloud names from Cumulus to Cirrus and Stratus. He wasn't sure of the configuration that loomed outside, but he liked the scientific approach.

Dr. Hamster had enough as he sipped his beer, "You want to know about the clouds, watch a weather report."

The interior of the eatery was typical ceramic and Mexican motif except for the framed photos and paintings. The frames were rough ornate wood that smacked of south of the border, but the images were all biker. Unlike photos of Juan Valdez and a band of sepia toned, sombrero totting outlaws, there were photos of bikes and Harley painting prints from Scott Jacobs.

The menu was a drag so I asked the waitress for a recommendation and she advised that I order a Quesadilla, so I did. This turned out to be a restaurant with a shitty, boring menu, but fantastic food. The entrees were anything but boring and we stuff ourselves then headed to Prescott. We took a back street toward Congress then Yarnell and caught 89 north heading up a wild ride almost a mile high into Prescott. In Kirkland I wondered why we didn't head into Skull Valley, just for the kicks.

A road side building with that Alamo flair.

The road was open and un-congested but rain threatened and as we began the wild switch back up the mountain we passed a sign warning of Icy Pavement. About the same time we noticed wetness in the road where it had recently poured. It was cold but we were all bundled, a couple with electric vests, and reasonably comfortable. It was in the low 50s in the sun and the mid 40's behind the mountains or under clouds. This stretch of 89 should be a mandatory run for all bikers and the King handled it well. The bike was roaming up the mountain with ease. I swear that the length of highbars afford me more leverage and the King felt lighter under the 16-inch touch. We were concentrating hard on the slick spots in the pavement, which actually weren't that slick, but the warning sign held us to the edge.

Micah was riding a customized 2001 Road Glide with 30,000 miles on it. Greg was aboard a full 2001 FLHTC with 27,000 miles on it and the good Doctor was aboard an '89 FLHC with 136,000 miles on the clock. He called it Bessie. Micah and Greg are both the type of riders who enjoy packing miles, 700 plus in a day is good sport to them. Stopping is a drag, except for gas, and speeds are constantly pushed close to 100 mph. I like to ride fast, especially to get the hell out of town, but I love the desert, and I don't mind stopping once in a while to see if a pretty senorita is willing to talk to a gruff biker.

Micah has been a biker since he could climb aboard a bicycle. I wrote about him in Easyriders two decades ago. He gave up drinking after two horrendous accidents and a handful of marriages, but loves to gamble and will race anyone to Beatty, Nevada twice a year for a weekend at the blackjack tables. While in Wickenburg he told of riding to Yuma in the '70s, drinking and raising hell. Another biker in a bar in Yuma pointed out an old wrinkled Indian man sitting in the corner. "That man remembers everything," the scooter tramp spouted over a warm beer.

Micah being a pushy bastard challenged the rider and approached the quiet old man. "How?" he said, but the Indian didn't respond. "What did you have for breakfast on the 23 of November 1953?"

"Eggs," the Indian said and nothing more.

Micah drunk and unruly turned away, "What bullshit. He probably eats eggs everyday."

A year later Micah rode into the same sun-worn town once again for the Yuma Run and slid his rigid Indian up to the same Saloon. As soon as he walked in he spied the same old crusty Indian sitting in the corner and he confronted the old delicate man, "How?" Micah said.

"Scrambled," said the Indian and nothing more.

We saw the most rain in Prescott.

At 3:00 p.m. we rolled into wet Prescott and hung an illegal U-turn when I pointed out to Micah that we had passed Whiskey Row. Micah's trip gauge point out that we had covered 436 miles. Not bad. As we lifted our legs off the footboard in downtown it began to rain. I didn't know whether I wanted Whiskey or a hotel. While we had a couple of drinks in the old saloon section of town, Greg made motel calls until we were hooked up.

As we left the bar we ran into our only mechanical glitch the entire weekend. Micah's Road Glide had a loose wire somewhere. The Glide started but made a wild squealing noise for a few seconds and his dash wouldn't light up or his radio work, but it ran. Within 30 seconds the radio came on, the dash lit up and the evil noise quit. We rolled around town, found our motel and cleaned up for dinner.

It was raining hard as we left the motel for downtown. It's a bitch trying to find good food in a strange town. I had tried to hook up with Dawne Holmes, to no avail. I first spotted her work in Daytona in 1989. She paints most of Paul Yaffe's customs. She wasn't available for restaurant connection.

Painted on the side of a brick building was an ad for Murphy's Cafe. It was lettered as if it was built in the '20s so we thought we'd go for it but mistakenly parked a couple of blocks away in the rain. As we walked toward the restaurant, a couple passed and said, "Howdy." They seemed to be human beings, so I turned and went after them while they waited for a light under a canvas awning to avoid the rain. I asked about Murphy's and received a resounding thumbs down from both of them, so I inquired further. They recommended an Italian restaurant across the street, but for steaks (a biker's menu) they heartily endorsed a hotel restaurant next to where our bikes were locked and chained, the Hassayampa, which was established in 1927. The chow was exceptional and Greg joked about another hotel his family reunion destroyed.

He also told a story about riding in the northern part of Arizona. "After the party I returned to my bike. There was only one glove left on my seat. I looked around the bike, got a flash light and searched some more and finally got my brothers to point their headlights in the vicinity of my bike. No glove. Then I spotted something on the hill and shinned my flashlight into the face of a grinning coyote." Greg looked at us all with a dead serious gaze in his dark eyes, "The sonuvabitch was grinning at me. He had my glove and my scent." Greg never retrieved the glove.

Dr. Hamster ran into another riding couple in the restaurant who he was familiar with. That couple had rented a bike in Phoenix and ridden in, mostly through the rain. They weren't too happy.

It was a rainy evening in Prescott, Arizona the day after Thanksgiving and the streets were teaming with tourists. Prescott is a bitchin' old western town, but now galleries are storming the streets. Gift shops and high style boutiques are taking over. Although, there were no shortage of hot young women roaming the sidewalks coupled with cowboys and drunk young punks stumbling into the streets.

A lawman in a 10-gallon hat and western attire approached me and Dr. Hamster as we smoked cigars on the street under a canopy. "Smoke all the dope you want, men," he said shaking my hand and staring directly into my eyes as if searching for the truth, "But don't beat up the citizens." He said it as if asking and prying for whether I was sharpening my knife for a kill or not.

Carmela loading the Road Glide to escape the Prescott rain.

The next morning we met at the bikes at 8:00 a.m. The sun was out and the sky was clear to the north. It was fuckin' beautiful with gentle wisps of clouds, and our stomachs growled for breakfast and our brains calling for coffee. The streets were wet but we quickly rolled back to Whiskey Row to the coffee shop on the corner in the hotel that the O'Neill family trashed. I turned and looked to the south and the skyline behind us was tipped with a wall of dark battlewagon gray clouds. The wave was cresting the mountain and heading quickly in our direction. I almost hesitated as I pointed and said, "We should move. That shit's heading our way." The men of the bunch nodded but the women looked longingly at the door to the cafe where the Cafe Mocha smells lingered. We decided to duck breakfast, grab coffee and a muffin and hit the road.

The night before while sipping a night cap, I asked the bartender how far it was to interstate 40. "It's no more than an hour," the big man said while pouring drinks. While we sipped hot Java the moist billows stormed the Prescott plateau and it began to rain, then let up. As we pulled out of town, the sky cut us a break and we rode past the sign that said, "Ash Fork 53 miles," in the sunlight. As we headed north through one small town after another a massive rainbow formed dead ahead and arched with its colorful arrangement over the highway. At times we were headed directly at the pot of gold at the end. It was magnificent to see the rainbow's colorful hues dance in the trees ahead. Then the sky darkened and it began to pour for 43 miles into Ash Fork and on the 40 where we stopped for breakfast and hauled our soaking gear into the Ranch House Cafe near the highway. No franchise joint here.

Our down home breakfast break in Ash Fork.

From Ash Fork we rode hard. It wasn't raining but the interstate was wet and we headed 20 miles west to Seligman where we turned in and caught famous Route 66 which at junctions was lined with antique shops and Route 66 memorabilia joints. James Dean, Marilyn and cars from the '50 were highly represented, including Harleys, but much of Route 66 was open road along rolling hillsides and open spaces. We turned West on Route 66 and roamed into the hills. We had ridden under mostly gray skies that day and when I reached a valley with clear skies ahead, I pulled off to the side of the road to get a photograph showing the variation from clear roads ahead to the tough sky above. I lost the pack for a while while I dug out my camera and messed with my chaps.

A slice of the open road I cherish.

The cheap bastards had worked fine, but I discovered that my left boot was vibrating towards the polished edge of the footboard incessantly. I couldn't figure it out until I arrived at a gas stop and noticed that a couple of snaps had gone to shit, then the zipper crept open so the chaps were flapping violently. I finally stopped and drove a knife through the hem of the leather chaps adjacent to the broken snap and dug out a tie wrap. That cured that problem, but the stainless snaps continued to disintegrate until I needed another wire tie. I patched them again with my trusty blade.

The zipper continued to inch upward. I pulled it down, took a couple of majestic shots and got back on the road. The distance to Seligman and the Grand Canyon Caverns and Motel on the edge of the Hualapai Indian Reservation was approximately 50 miles of open road--fuckin' beautiful, untainted hills and mountains in the distance.

Once a gas station on the property, now just a Laundromat.

We clicked off a number of miles from Ash Fork and noticed as we pulled into the gravel parking lot that the gas station was long shutdown and we had no notion of where the next station was. We had arrived and the proposed location of Beach Ride II for the Exceptional Children's Foundation on 800 acres of land. The motel was built next to the famous Grand Canyon Caverns which were discovered in 1937 by Walter Peck who was riding a horse to a poker game and discovered a hole in the ground. The caverns are 21 stories below the surface. They lowered a local boy with a lantern into the black depths. When he lit the kerosene lantern he discovered sparkling crystals and streaks of a metallic hue. When he was pulled to safety he reported diamonds and gold. Old Peck thought he had discovered the mother lode. Actually the metallic appearance was rusting iron in the rocks and the diamonds were waves of crystals against the walls, but the cavern has been in business ever since and is only closed one day a year, on Christmas.

This was supposed to be home for a couple of days.

The motel was built in the '50s and it was recently purchased by an ECF donor in disarray. After quick scrutiny we discovered no bar or restaurant but a shallow gift shop for campers who needed chips, soft drinks and Route 66 key rings. The new owner repainted, installed new heaters and phones in some rooms. We pulled our bikes under the awnings and made ourselves as comfortable as possible, but there wasn't a damn thing to do while we waited for the owner to arrive to take us to dinner, but the question of the hour was, where?

Ah, but we could take a tour of the largest underground caverns in the US. Micah, Greg and the girls rode up the road a mile to the Cavern and the good doctor and I walked. We ate chicken soup in the cafeteria and waited for the next tour. The joint, buried in the tree covered hills wasn't bad and the tour, 150 feet below the surface, was a trip through three football fields of crystals, stalactites and oddly shaped stones. The first people allowed in, during the '40s, were lowered by a rope tied around their middle 210 feet to the bottom with a kerosene lantern in one hand and stick matches in the other.

No dinosaurs located in the area. Just something to freak the kids with.

Marsh Goldblad was our tour guide. A man who had come out to the caverns 20 years earlier before the elevator was installed and fell in love with the joint. Nothing grows down there. The air is dry and lifeless. A bobcat's remains are still alongside the concrete path for viewers to ponder. It fell down one of the holes leading to the cavern breaking its hip and could never crawl back out. A mammoth sloth was stuffed and returned to the cave. It fell in and tried desperately to claw up the limestone walls. The tour was 3/4 of a mile of uneven narrow concrete that had been hand poured 15 years ago. After the tour, we hung out with our guide, had a piece of forest pie and sauntered back to the motel.

I was about to kick back when Carmela received word from the owner and Micah looked at a map. The owner wasn't going to make it for dinner, besides there was no dining room in 25 miles and here's the kicker. Micah is a clean and sober rider but he has yet to curb his gambling ways. The map indicated that we were a mere 75 miles from Kingman. Micah suggested we ride to Kingman for dinner and only, and I repeat "only", 29 miles to "Laughlin" from Kingman. We packed and were on the road in minutes.

The road leading to the caverns.

The highway was darkening as the light dissipated as we headed along Route 66, but a problem was beginning to surface. We initially thought it was 75 miles to Kingman and we'd all be on reserve before we hit town, but surely there would be a gas station or two. Nope. There were gas pumps all right, and we slowed time after time only to discover that the pumps were only antique reminders of a Route 66 era gone by. Micah finally pulled over at one raw wooden joint covered in enameled street signs, peppered with bullet holes, with two pumps out front. Lights were on and Micah swung into the wet gravel parking lot. Like the movie Easy Rider the lights flickered and went out. He knocked on the door and rang the rusting cow bell hanging next to the entrance but there was no response. But we passed a highway sign that indicated that the distance wasn't 75 miles but closer to 50. Micah had recently turned his petcock to reserve.

We kept moving until, with the lights of Kingman flickering against the hillside in the distance, we spotted a truck stop and refueled. We looked at one another. No one knew of a decent burger joint in Kingman, the dice were itching in Micah's pockets. I could see aces and face cards in his eyes, and we knew the chow would be fine in the casinos overlooking the Colorado River. We hit the road, rolled through Kingman and caught 68, a straight shot across the desert to the Davis Dam in Bullhead.

Laughlin the next morning in the sun. Note all the RVs.

We stayed in the Flamingo, ate in their steak joint then Carmela and Trish attacked the new mall and shopped past closing. The authorities had to let them out of the building. Micah worked a blackjack table into the wee hours while Greg moved from the tables to the slots and back again. Dr. Hamster and I had a couple of drinks at the Rainbow bar and watched the girls walk by.

The next morning we suited up, had breakfast at 8:00 a.m. and headed for home. We fought some Thanksgiving holiday traffic, but it was a generally smooth ride into Los Angeles and I pulled into the Bikernet headquarters about 3:15 in the afternoon.

Sometime you need to hit the road just to clear and wash down the brain cells so you fully appreciate home when you return. After fighting rain and wet roads for 950 miles, the lovely Layla heard the King rumbling up the streets. She ran to and opened the creaking gate as I bounced onto the sidewalk and slithered past her. The homested was filled with the warm smells of turkey soup to welcome her chilled, lone rider home. A frosty glass of Jack-on-the-rocks waited beside the bed and she peeled out of a silk robe and slipped under the covers. Makes a guy wonder why he rides at all.

Ah, home at last.