TWNW #14

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Good, I'm glad you're here. Get comfortable and we'll get started right away.

No no, I haven't been waiting long at all. It's fine, really.

You've missed a lot, since we last checked in. I left Los Angeles on Saturday and arrived in San Antonio yesterday, ready to conference about some curriculum.

Woohoo! Curriculum!

I've got curriculum fever, and the only cure is more meetings about curriculum.

So the trip was fraught with peril and adventure, and I'd love to tell you about it.

First, on my way out of California there was an incident involving my new iPhone gadget and my own clumsiness. What happened was, I was just east of the Palm Springs exit on I-10, loping down the road at 75 or so in the left lane and bopping along with whatever pirated music Jake had loaded onto the iPhone before I left. There's a lot of turbulence in the cockpit area of a bike, and the headphone cord gets whipped around like crazy, and this time it wrapped itself around my elbow.

That's no problem, I'm well familiar with the untangling protocol. Except this time, as I raised my left arm to free the cord my brand-new doo-dad got pulled out of its little pocket in my tankbag and separated from the cord.

I have a vivid slo-mo memory of the thing flipping elegantly through the air past my helmet.

I mean I got the insurance and everything, but who wants to go through all the nonsense of replacing a new phone? Dang it, I said to myself. Self, you really screwed up this time. Way to go, Self. Dork.

I stopped the bike on the left side of the highway, set the flashers, and began the long walk back to retrieve my shattered new device.

Except it wasn't shattered at all; there's a scuff or two on the metal corners, but the screen is as-new and the thing still works just as it should.

How about that!

True: it was in the cheap-ish little case they made me get at the Verizon store, but that thing was real flimsy. I found it too, but it was shattered into 100,000 little pieces. I guess it did its job though, huh? I'm very impressed with the phone. That joker should have broken on impact, but somehow all of its frame components and the thousand little electro-whatsis inside remain unaffected.

I remain insufferably affected, now even more so because not only do I rock an iPhone but I won't shut up about how great it is. My pretentiousness has reached dazzling new heights, of late.

Another adventure that happened was that I stayed over in Van Horn, Texas, on Sunday night. That was a pretty unremarkable event, because Van Horn, but it paid off for someone there because when I got to San Antonio last night I got an email from my bank saying that my account had been frozen due to some irregular charges - someone spent $150 of my money in Van Horn and it wasn't me so the bank shut down my card.

That's pretty amazing, that they caught it. My spending this past month has been fairly regular - $15 for gas several times a day, the occasional motel charge, and a few internet treats like my new hydration system (it's a bag with water in it). But so they detected fraud where there was indeed fraud and today I popped 'round the corner to a bank location and got a new card no problem. Wheeee predictive algorithms!

And another thing, too: there's a Fina station in west Texas, at the Iraan cutoff between Fort Stockton and Ozona, that I was counting on being not-closed because gas stations are few and far between out there but guess what, it was closed.

Which is how I wound up enjoying a pleasant nap in the shade under an overpass while the Milkbear sat beside me, inert and inoperable and bereft of fuel.

But! When I signed up for Milkbear's insurance I got the roadside protection, so a guy named Jonny showed up after a bit with fresh gas for us and I was on my way, out just $6.50 for the gas.

I know some things about myself, since I'm old and I've had plenty of years to get used to me. One thing about me is, I'm clumsy and careless and maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so I've learned always to get insurance because if there is a thing I will break it and if there is a necessity I will skip it, e.g., phones or refueling. At the bank the other day they offered me a credit card with a surprisingly reasonable rate, and I slapped the poor accounts guy before I torched the place and ran away screaming because I know how the Billy-with-a-credit-card story ends.

More adventure: about ten miles out of San Antonio the Milkbear started feeling funny, sort of pulling unevenly under acceleration. So I pulled over and sure enough the chain was crazy loose, sagging way down past where it should have been sagging. No problem, I know about tightening a chain so I did but when I got to the hotel it was back down where it was before.

Dang it.

So now I'm like the big man at the all-you-can-eat buffet, where the proprietors shudder when he stops in, except the big man is me and the buffet owner is my insurance company.

Because I'm killin' 'em with the roadside assistance.

I mean sure I paid for my new chain but the labor? And the tow to the cycle shop? Why thanks Progressive that's very nice of you! I'll go pick it up tomorrow, and Justin the valet guy said I can park the Milkbear right up front, for free.

What else? Death Valley is astutely named, that's for sure. I don't know the exact temperature when I rode through it but the number I made up at the time was 117 degrees.

Celsius.

About every mile there was a stain on the shoulder that you could tell was a burnt car, and there were CalTrans signs all over the place about Turn Off Your A/C! and Drink Lots Of Water! and The Talking Lizards Are Probably Hallucinations! The rest area was like a dry ice factory, with steam pouring out of everyone's open hoods. It was worth it though, for the looks I got from people double-taking at my bundled-up self. I wanted to strip off my riding gear so bad and mail it the hell home but without it I'd have been dehydrated and burnt to a crisp.

In Arizona the temperature lowered a little but it was still hot. In Tonopah, where I stayed the first night out from L.A., the overnight low was 97. The next day I ran into one of those giant dust storms, which took my visibility down to about 20 feet and heeled the bike over so far I thought I was going to wreck but I didn't. But it only lasted for a few miles and then it rained, which was so nice I wanted to cry. Seriously on a ride like that, after miles and miles of unthinkable heat, a quick shower followed by a good 50 miles of high-speed evaporative cooling is about as close as we can hope to come to nirvana.

So now I'm here, at the conference, and there's not much else to report. All the good-looking teachers have off-putting hardware on their ring fingers, and although I've been getting more than my share of flirty looks from the wives of all the wealthy Mexican industrialists here at the hotel, which wives are uniformly hotter and more dreamy than you can imagine, the thought of what that could lead to is like someone walking on my grave. So I got nothin', sadly.

This isn't the final post, although we're close. I'm not home yet, and plus I'd like to do a quick review of what gear worked and what didn't, and plus I'm sure there are some stray observations I can dredge up, and besides I might take a side-jaunt to Austin on the way back home.

So stay tuned, and thank you as always for reading.

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Photos

Dusty & Stormy
are good names for strippers.

The Milkbear
got a ride on the ambulance.