Stubbornness and Stupidity

[NSFW]

good job pomo....

very nice.

[Pomo]

So I woke up this morning and realized it was Thanksgiving! Oops. My goal for the day was to hit the Grand Canyon. I had some rather adventurous dirt planned, but in light of the fact it was a holiday, I decided tempering my enthusiasm was in order. I had no idea whether the backroad gas stations would be open and I would have been stretching my mileage. I was in no mood to once again catch sight of my mortality today.

First stop was the Hoover Dam. Kinda underwhelming honestly. Maybe I was dam-saturated by this point. Given all the praise everyone gives it you'd think it was two or three times bigger than any other dam. Maybe it is and the squeeze of the canyon just makes it look slimmer. Definitely an impressive feat of engineering, nonetheless.



There was really no way to get a good shot of it. There is supposedly a foot path under the road bridge above the dam, but I didn't bother to investigate.



Sometimes I have trouble slowing down on these trips. Five days just isn't enough time for me to get into the rhythm, unfortunately. My enthusiastic mileage estimates and the short days weren't helping either.

At least it is easy to find your way around the dam. They even have super helpful signs!



Erm, yeah.

I didn't get a chance to check out the dam lake. Not sure if I missed the exit or it was closed. I did catch the Colorado sneaking away.



Just a boring old pile o' rocks.



One quick blast down the 4 lane to Kingman and I found myself back on Route 66. Now this is more like it.



Perfect for a little DarthPeach-ing.



And of course there are the occasional oddities on the roadside. Don't worry, he is as afraid of you as you are of him.



Herbie!



Check it out, a gas price with only two digits!



I saw some strange signs:











Some of them were very self-referential. Like this one:









Or this one (not pictured, it's actually a pain in the rear to capture them all given their spacing):

Slow down Pa
Sakes alive
Ma missed signs
Four and five

Out here in the west, 66 criss-crosses I-40, and sometimes disappears into it. I was forced back on for a few miles until the exit for the AZ64. Thankfully there were few more interesting sights on the ride north to break up the monotony of an arrow-straight road.



'Murica.



I discovered there is a McDonalds less than 5 miles from the Grand Canyon. C'mon, really?

It can be a little hard to grasp the scale of thing standing at the precipice. I think a heli-tour would be a pretty cool way to see it.



I grabbed a picture and jetted. There were at least a thousand people clamoring for a shot from the vista point I stopped at. Just check out the left side of the picture to get an idea. The Grand Canyon was cool, but I was very much not in the mood for dealing with so much human traffic.

A motorcycle ride is when I get to escape from this sort of bustle. Find my inner self, in the middle of the desert, scouting a line with a bum leg. Nearly passing out from oxygen deprivation while I wrestle a five hundred pound bike up from the grasping sands. Pausing a moment to feel that cool breeze wick the sweat from my neck. And knowing that I am truly alive.

Then taking silly pictures to post on the internet.



You have no idea how badly I wanted to mount this thing, Tex-style. I wasn't able to scramble up it in full gear fast enough for the self timer.



I made my way back to Williams so I would be poised to hit some dirt first thing in the morning. I was too lazy to put enough clothing back on to ride anywhere for dinner, so I hit the Denny's right next to the hotel. Make all the gagging motions you want, I actually don't mind their food. The service really sucked though, and they weren't even crowded. I suppose I can sympathize a little since they had to work a holiday.

The close of another uneventful day. Maybe the worst was past?

[RedRockRider]

Way to go, Pomo. Nice RR. Thanks!

[UpST8]

think I rode with you a couple years ago around Blooch's place in VA?

Thanks for the report!! Hope to be some of my own F800 reports soon

[XC Rider]

Originally Posted by Pomo

Or this one (not pictured, it's actually a pain in the rear to capture them all given their spacing):

Slow down Pa
Sakes alive
Ma missed signs
Four and five

Lovin' it Pomo; ain't Route 66 grand! Here's that Burma Shave sign you missed and a few others from when I came back east on Route 66 some years back.

Originally Posted by XC Rider

#3







Burma Shave #4







#5







#6!

[The Gobbler]

Good job Pomo, good read and good pics.

[Pomo]

Thanks for the nice comments. I'm just trying to make the boring parts slightly less boring.

Originally Posted by XC Rider

Lovin' it Pomo; ain't Route 66 grand! Here's that Burma Shave sign you missed and a few others from when I came back east on Route 66 some years back.

Thanks XC. I remember seeing those now that you posted them. I couldn't memorize them all though.

If you want to feel the full brunt of their brilliant marketing, here is a near-as-comprehensive-as-it-gets list of the slogans organized by year. It is neat to see how they evolved. The first few slogans were more marketing and less fluff, not much rhyming.

[XC Rider]

Originally Posted by Pomo

If you want to feel the full brunt of their brilliant marketing, here is a near-as-comprehensive-as-it-gets list of the slogans organized by year. It is neat to see how they evolved. The first few slogans were more marketing and less fluff, not much rhyming.

Thanks for the link Pomo, learned a bit. Didn't know they'd started as early as they did, and...

At the height of their popularity there were 7,000 Burma-Shave signs stretching across America. The familiar white on red signs, grouped by four, fives and sixes, were as much a part of a family trip as irritating your kid brother in the back seat of the car. You'd read first one, then another, anticipating the punch line on number five and the familiar Burma-Shave on the sixth.

7000!?!?!? That's a lot of signs!