| Western States 2009 Part II - October 1-18, 2009 |
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From my home in Nashville, TN to my friend's home in Phoenix, AZ is 1,670 miles by the most direct route. It
took us 2,944 miles to get there and I enjoyed virtually every single one of them. We rode in sunshine and
clouds. We rode in warm and cold. We even rode in light snow. Through Arkansas, Oklahoma, and
Texas into New Mexico. Then north through Colorado and Utah back into Arizona. We went from 500' above
sea level to 10,600' above sea level. We stopped at 21 national parks and national monuments. We saw
the mountains of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado and Utah. For 8 days we rode through magnificent
scenery and had an absolute blast doing so. There aren't any very high-mileage days here, 556 was the
longest. We were both more concerned with enjoying the scenery and stopping when we wanted to than just
putting in miles. We watched hot air balloons take off in Albuquerque and we walked around Sedona, AZ for
a couple of hours. We toured the rock formations of Arches National Park and stopped so many times that we
ran the battery on one of the bikes down. We rode Scenic Byways in 6 states and we stopped to take photographs
of a thunderstorm in the distance. For 8 days we purely and simply enjoyed the scenery that the USA has to
offer.
As with my trip to Arizona and California Earlier
This Year I spent a good part of the flight back home trying to decide what I was going to write on these
pages. I came to the same conclusion this time that I did last time: Regardless of what I try to write the words
will fall miserably short. I cannot describe the feeling that I have when I ride. I can write about the heat or
the cold or the rain or the snow or the scenery but it just doesn't do justice to the trip. So once again I
simply decided that I would keep the narrative short and let my photographs speak for themselves. So here they
are. 700 or so photographs documenting a 3,000 mile trip through 8 states. Enjoy the ride!
Update - January, 2010 - Upon returning home I realized that many of the photographs on these pages had extremely harsh
contrast as well as some oversaturation of the colors. I have gone back through virtually all of them and recorrected
the contrast, saturation, and sharpening to more correctly reflect what I saw on my trip. It is a beautiful area of
the country and I want my photographs to reflect that properly. I'm a lot more content with them now and feel that
they are much cleaner than they previously were.
AGirl's trip report is on This Page beginning on October 1. She got a lot of photographs that I missed, and her narrative is much better than mine is, so between the two of us I think we hit most of the highlights. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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