When I was planning for this trip, I had a rough outline of where we would go, and which roads we would take. The route was about 10,000km which was about right for a month on the road. The rough plan was 1 week heading south to get back to Bryce Canyon, which we'd missed on our 2010 trip due to the weather, and then a week heading north to get to the Canadian border, a weeklong loop through Canada, with various contingency routes to make up lost time or avoid bad weather, and then the last week to tootle around Washington and Oregon.
That night in Ridgecrest, some more searching discovered a bike accessory shop in New Hampshire which dealt in Autocom gear. Because they were a few hours ahead of us on the east coast, I was able to ring them at the crack of dawn California time and see if they had the parts. They did. Now where to send them. The guy on the phone was very helpful. He had access to the USPS postage calculators which would advise how long it would take various classes of mail to get to various places, and a pretty good knowledge of the west coast. It was a Friday morning, and Post offices in the USA open on Saturdays, but even the fastest postage would only get to very major cities overnight. We went down the list of large cities on my planned route.. oh yeah.. there were none... eventually we settled on Provo. A city about 75km south of Salt Lake City, which wasn't on my list, but we could be there on the Monday when the post office opened.
Next point to decide was how to get there. From Ridgecrest there was either 500+km of hwy/fwy to get to the other side of Nevada, or another route via Death Valley. A check of the weather made that decision easier, rain in death valley, sunshine on the I-15. So this day wasn't very spectacular scenery or riding wise.
We passed this massive solar farm just north of Barstow,
an array of sun tracking mirrors as far as they eye could see.
After we passed Barstow it was getting past Breakfast time, and the road we were on took us straight onto the I-15 without passing through Barstow business district. A few km further on, lo and behold, I saw a sign "Peggy Sue's Diner".
Instantly I knew what was for breakfast. We'd stopped at this diner for breakfast on our ride from Las Vegas to LA on our last trip. Nothing had changed. The entrance was the same, the interior was the same, we even sat at the same table that we had the first time, and I think I ordered the same food.
And especially.... the portion sizes had not changed.
Baker CA was our next stop.. for fuel and Jerky
Most of the trip through Nevada looks like this
Another solar farm in the Mojave desert.
and don't forget your gun rack..
This shared accomodation between a church and a payday lender in Mesquite provided some laughs