TWNW #3; Luck Fubbock

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Well hello there.

I'm in Lubbock now, at the most depressing Starbucks in the whole wide world. All this afternoon I was excited about settling into the best, seediest motel that $35 would buy and showering and writing this from there, while challenging myself not to think about what the linens would look like under a blacklight.

Fancy motels are fun too, but there's something in me that really enjoys rented rooms that are also in-process crime scenes.

Yeah yeah, this trip was supposed to be all about the camping, just me and my hammock and two stout trees and maybe a round or two of "Kumbayah" with some wandering folk singers, but the way of my people is to talk a big game about camping and then never do it, ever.

Anyway at about 5:00 this evening the weather turned pleasant and the ride was going well and I checked my bank account and saw a larger number than I thought I'd see, so in the spirit of avoiding folk singers I decided to celebrate a fine first day of riding with a cheap crappy motel.

The horror began when I rolled into Lubbock an hour ago.

Ninety dollars.

Ninety dollars for 10 hours at the Super 8.

In Lubbock.

Look, I understand that Lubbock is perhaps the very finest cowshit repository in the Lower 48, but ZOMFGWTFFFFS??!?!!!1one1!

I'm so pissed. In a real city, with stuff do do and non-bovine females to look at and any semblance of charm or interest, okay. Ninety dollars is understandable for a motel room, in cities like that. But in this stinky featureless accident of cartography? No thank you, Mr. Patel (shut up, that was the clerk's name); no thank you, Lubbock Chamber of Commerce; no thank you, giant Buddy Holly statue...

This evening and ever after, I shall take my low standards elsewhere.

So what I'm thinking I might do is, I might just push on through the inky nighttime gloaming and see if I mightn't make it an all-nighter to Santa Fe. It's only five little one-hour sections from here so, if I take it easy and have a picnic table nap or two along the way, I'm looking at a dawn entry to La Ciudad Diferente (loosely translated: The Big Apple).

Sure, yes, true, you've raised a valid point: why not the hammock idea? Well, even if such a thing were permitted by the mores of my culture (it's not, see above), I've missed the window of tantrum-free hammock rigging. There's got to be daylight, so I can figure out which rope does what. Someday, maybe.

At any rate, today's ride was fantastic. It's been a few years since I've done any real distance on a moto so there was going to be an adjustment period, but I was glad that after the first three hours it began to feel comfy and natural. I stopped every hour or so to pee and drink water like a professional camel and experiment with tobacco, and then back on the road for another stretch.

This bike isn't as comfortable as my old one, the giant KLR enduro thing, but what it lacks in room to stretch out it makes up for in its Frogger-like quickness. It's not even that fast - the internet says it'll see 130mph, which is slow for a sporty-moto; I think I got above 90mph just once today - but it slices through traffic like something sharp through something that's easy to slice. Like a judo chop through a watermelon, perhaps. Anyway I had a lot of fun meting out highway justice to jerks who don't know what the left lane is for.

Things got really pretty around the town of Post (motto: "More Enticingly Trashy-Looking Women per Capita Than You'd Think!") and I took some photos near the train tracks. I also took like 200 photos along the way, with the little handlebar mount, for a project I'm thinking about - like a stop-motion movie, 7000 miles of pics in rapid sucession - but the blurriness is unacceptable. Jury's still out on whether I've done any lasting damage to the camera, from the vibrations. We'll see. Anyway it's handheld from now on. Need to figure out some sort of ghetto cruise control so I can snap pics with my throttle hand.

Gonna wrap this up now, for tonight; the good people at Starbucks have important things to do later - those cows aren't going to tip themselves, after all - and I've got some spite-riding to do. I'll report back tomorrow on how the midnight ride to Adobe Disneyland went; wish me luck pls, kthx.

Thank you for reading.

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Photos

nearPost
Train tracks = "art"

City of Lights
Ah, that's why the motels are $90 a night

Comments

[Jill]

Just as well ...
You'd probably have come away with bed-bug eggs for your 90 bucks worth of trouble. BTW ... how is sleeping for an hour on a picnic table all that different from camping? Be careful, bro!