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Notes: 1 / 2 years ago
A day of a thousand clicks…
… on the odometer.
Monday 28th September
From a small town between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, I have reached Holbrook Arizona, a few miles east of Flagstaff. I’m 100 miles from the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. Holbrook is not a resort; more a last resort, for road warriors. That is no problem for me as it has been a long, successful day. The Triumph was flawless, and has been since I changed the condenser 1,600 miles ago.
“What does a condenser do?”, I asked my Dad. He explained that it reduces the power of the spark momentarily, just at the moment the points open. This means only a small spark is there to jump the points. While enough to trigger the coil to unload, the weaker spark extends the life of points enormously. A full spark, like at a spark plug, would quickly erode the points to the point of failure. The condenser is a Swiss roll of foil and an insulator, rolled up to about the size of the tip of your index finger. It fits inside the distributor. When a condenser fails, the spark is lost to ground, so no ignition could occur. Mine grounded while hot, yet worked when warm to cool.
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Some would curse the Prince of Darkness for my roadside events yesterday. However, I blame the poxy Chinese factory making the junk we buy at great expense to find it doesn’t fit, doesn’t work, or doesn’t look right. Some parts don’t deserve the plastic bag they are shipped in: the bag can be more useful and reliable.Incidentally, Oklahoma has now been reclassified and I thought you should know. Its status is no longer a State. It has been down-graded to a Straight. Henceforth, it will be recognised as the Straight of Oklahoma, Oklahoma Straight University, etc. It’s abbreviation will be ‘NOT OK’. Once out of the Straight today, things became interesting. I regained the will to live. I was in Texas.
In passing, Amarillo local radio news reported: “Today opens the season for bow hunting and muzzle-loading musket hunting of bears”. Bears? Are they mental? Maybe the bears down here are the cuddly, come-and-rub-my-tummy kind that Christopher Robin played with and not the flesh-ripping, man-killing, 35 mph-running, carnivores we have in the North East, the largest predators in the land.
Can you imagine the panic when an angry bear, with your arrow in a hind quarter, starts charging you? He can easily out-run you on a whim, though now he is also really, really mad. Fingers steady on the bowstring?. Never mind trying to load a musket with powder and ball while running backwards. Apparently, the earlier-than-usual open season is because the bear population is expanding. No wonder: they are running out of hunters.
Texas saw the start of my climb. With the road running east-west, the hills ran north-south, with large flat basins in between where wealthy farms irrigated with wheeled, raised watering-systems that rotate like the hand of a clock. One I saw must have been a quarter-mile long. From the sky, the rich circles of vegetation must look like Polka dots against the red iron-rich earth.
As I headed West, each rise took me to a new, higher altitude as I climbed step by step from 2,000’ to 7,000’ to a plateau where it seemed I was driving toward the edge of a large, fertile island.
I took a few opportunities to leave the fast-running I40 for stretches of the old, fabled Route 66. Many sections are left to rot and failed bridges make many stretches unusable. But where usable stretches are near I40, towns are flourishing through ‘Historic’ Route 66 tourism. And why not? Many towns have a Route 66 museum, old gas station and old diner. It really must have been quite an adventure for Chicagoans to follow that route through the wild west to California: Indian Nations, Trading Posts, Cowboys, cattle ranching and bull riding - all a long way from windy-city life.
You also have to love those 75 mph stretches:
Speaking of cattle: near Albuquerque, New Mexico, I saw a stadium, or rather one grandstand, just as you would expect to find at a smallish professional sports club. Instead of a sports field for the grandstand of men to enjoy, they were at an auction, and the sport was cattle, in pens. There were far more men than cattle. Maybe the cattle on display (~100) were samples of greater numbers of stock.
After New Mexico, I was in Arizona, flying through the landscape of Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef. Here, you can be A Man With No Name. As the sun fell, the red rock cliffs and buttes glowed like embers.
Tomorrow, my route takes me past the Mojave reserve and into the desert: I pass south of Las Vegas and Death Valley and on to San Luis Obispo, a trip of some 700 miles.
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