2023 TOUR - PART 2

About 6:30 pm while eating dinner at the Subway I got a call from Yancey wanting to know where I was. I had laid out all the journey’s details on a spreadsheet, made a copy of the three days relevant to Yancey’s part, and sent it to him. In pasting the dates in his copy I had gotten off a line. We had talked about a week before and I sensed some confusion, but I thought I had cleared it up by saying we would be in Grand Junction on Monday, his brother Murray’s birthday. He didn’t remember that and maybe I just thought I did. At any rate, there he was a day early. You can imagine how I felt. Yancey had only a little time for this trip as it was. He owns a temp service business that had recently landed a big client that required him to be back, plus he had out-of-town guests arriving. He didn’t know what to do and said he’d let me know what he could work out. 

The next morning after an early breakfast we headed south and then east over to Little America where we stopped for a break. It had already begun to get warm. After leaving Little America we traveled a little farther east to Green River before turning south to skirt the west side of Flaming Gorge Reservoir and on down to Vernal, Utah. By now it was really hot. Then we turned southeast down through Dinosaur and Rangely and then due south to Grand Junction where it was 97 degrees. We had traveled 398 mostly hot miles this day. 

A geocache picked up along the way

We met Yancey at the motel. He related that he had gone over to Starbucks that morning to do some work and when he was ready to leave he couldn’t find his motorcycle key. Naturally he had looked every place he could possibly imagine. So his wife, Kelly, drove all the way over from Denver with a spare key and then turned around immediately to go back to pick up their daughter from basketball practice. Wow, what a day! Hopefully, the bad times were over for Yancey. After all his problems Yancey treated to a great dinner. 

After the motel breakfast we got an early start on the road the next morning heading southwest on Hwy 141 down to Gateway. The country was pretty open and green to this point. Shortly past Gateway we turned due south along the Dolores River and were soon in the Red Canyon. This stretch of road was some of the most fun and beautiful of the whole tour. Unless you were on a motorcycle or convertible you could not get the full grandeur of this road. There were towering red cliffs and mountains that were so close you had to look almost straight up to see the tops. And, of course, the sharply curving highway was a delight to motorcyclists. By the time we got to the small berg of Naturita where we stopped for a break and an unsuccessful attempt for a geocache, my neck was sore from looking up. 

View from Naturita

 At Naturita we turned southeast on Hwy 145 over to Telluride. The beautiful riding continued. At Telluride we stayed on Hwy 145 which turned south through the San Juan National Forest. This route gradually drifts west till we exit the national forest and end up at Cortez. In order to avoid the main roads as much as possible, I had routed us west on County Road G which goes along the southern border of the

Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. Shortly after entering Utah and leaving the national monument we came to an intersection with the Cajon Mesa road which according Sam’s GPS would save us 30 or 40 miles. By this time it had gotten really hot in desert country. He had set his GPS to filter out any roads that weren’t paved. In spite of the previous experience where we had briefly tried one of Sam’s roads near Springfield that immediately turned to gravel and as Sam is rarely wrong, we took the road he favored. Guess what? After about 10 miles or so it turned to gravel. There is no way Yancey’s Honda Interceptor could handle gravel so we back tracked to County Road G. Eventually we arrived at the very hot Blanding, Utah, having traveled 342 miles for the day. This was in total contrast to a couple of years before when Sam and I had arrived at this same motel in a blinding snow storm half frozen to death. After a good dinner we had a great time visiting in the motel that evening. (To be continued) M/W