Well, I guess it is my turn to do some writing. I am sitting beside our tent on a beautiful sunny day in Bryce Canyon National Park listing to Jimmy Buffet while Deb has an afternoon nap. There is an occasional waft of smoke drifting through the campground. On our ride back to the campground we saw more than a little smoke from a fire a few miles to the south-west. I'm sure that the park rangers will let us know if we need to leave the area!

After leaving Portland, Deb & I rode to Lincoln City and stopped for coffee and donuts to warm-up, and saw some beautiful photos of the coast. This would turn out to be the best view we saw all day. After the chill had left us and the rain stopped we headed south on US 101 along the coast of Oregon. The highway passed through some beautiful little towns, hugged the cliffs and skirted the beaches. After more rain and fog we stopped at Seal Cave - advertised as the largest sea cave in the world. Since we were getting chilly again we decide to stop and take a look. Seal Cave is an area where sea lions seek shelter from the winter weather. There is a video we watched in the cave showing hundereds of seals, lounging, barking and generally doing seal type stuff in the cave. After watching the video, I got the camera ready for some great photo ops. Well - there was one seal in the cave sleeping on a rock. At least they told us it was a seal - at the distance we were from it, it may have been an old coat or a pile of kelp. With all the rain, camping was out for the night, so we checked into a motel late in the afternoon and hoped for better weather the next day.

We waited for the fog to lift before heading out the next morning. It did lift about 50 feet by 10:00 am and four miles south we went up a hill and right back into the fog. At least there was no rain that day! Just as we were to turn inland we broke into sunny skies and got a beautiful view of sand dunes south of Dunes City. Even with the rain and fog this was a beautiful trip which I would gladly do again. Riding east we crossed several mountain ridges, then turned south to Medford to see our old neighbors from Indianapolis. Jay & Ginny put us up at their home for a week. I did some shopping for spare parts for our trip south and we both helped Jay & Ginny get set up for an art show. Ginny is an artist and had a show the Saturday we arrived and another the following Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Medford seams to be a city in transition. Once considered industrial and not very attractive, it is now a rapidly growing city with property values increasing at more 20% in the last year. There is a lot of new home construction adding to the growth. Located in a valley, the climate has mild winters and very little precipitation year round. Who knows, maybe we'll be neighbors with Jay & Ginny again some day.

Heading east out of Medford, we climbed to higher altitudes through some twisty mountain passes then turned south from Klamath Falls to California. As we were getting ready to decide on a stopping point for the day, we crested a hill a saw a breathtaking jade-green lake. There were several campgrounds in the Lassen National Forest on the east side of the lake. After setting up our tent, we went for a walk down to the shore and saw several white pelicans.

The next day as we passed through the city of Reno a truck got between us and, because our radios were working intermittently, Deb heard me say I was getting of at the next ramp and I heard her say she was still on the interstate. As I passed the exit while turning back onto the interstate I looked back over my shoulder and saw Deb going down the off-ramp. I noted some of the surrounding landmarks, got to the next exit and headed back on side streets to look for her. The radios at that point seemed to have quit altogether. I passed a Denny's restaurant and thought it was also a good time to have lunch, but felt that finding Deb before lunch would be better than searching for her on a full stomach, so putting my personal comfort aside I went on the search. Fortunately we found each other and I got my Denny's meal shortly thereafter.

Interstate 80 just east of Reno has beautiful scenery. In an arid area where the sagebrush is hardly able to survive, we were rained on. We decided that we should promote ourselves to drought stricken areas because so far one of the most common things we've heard is, "this is the first rain we've had in over a month".

"The Loneliest Highway in America", highway 50 in Nevada was our next route. It really wasn't very lonely after all with traffic passing by every couple of minutes. We spent a night in Austin, an old mining town with a wild west feel to it. It seemed like at least half of the buildings were either bars or churches. The next morning we headed south toward the Extraterrestrial Highway. This was much more lonely than highway 50. In Nevada, the state is striped with mountain ranges that run north/south with wide flat valleys in between. When you come down out of the mountain, you see a straight road in front of you that continues for 30 miles or so to the next mountain range. This continues over and over again for many miles.

The Extraterrestrial Highway seemed like a marketing gimmick that worked because it got us to ride it. We stopped in the town of Rachel to buy a postcard at the Little A'LE'INN, a one-room restaurant/bar/casino/souvenier shop. With a population of about 72, the few we met were "interesting". The cook was playing video poker while we were there.

We wound up spending the night in the town of Caliente in eastern Nevada at a cozy little motel with hot springs.

Our next stop was Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah for two nights. The scenery was spectacular with red pillar-like rocks called hoodoos. The altitude was between 8,000 and 9,000 feet so it was very cold at night in our tent. Once again, in an arid climate, it rained and hailed as we attempted to cook our dinner. We stretched a motorcycle cover between our bikes and sat on the ground underneath to eat. The second evening we were at the rim of the canyon and watched in amazement as the rocks changed colors in the fading light.

Zion National Park was our next stop. More red rocks and canyons but the perspective was different because we rode down into the canyon and the sandstone walls rose precipitously beside us.

Looking for a warm place to spend the night turned out to be more of a challenge than we anticipated. We arrived at our destination, Hurricane, Utah only to find all of the hotel rooms booked up so we continued on to the next town on the map, Hilldale. We saw a motel sign on a building only to discover it was now a beauty shop and dentist's office. The next town on the Arizona border, Colorado City, was one of the most bizarre things we had ever seen. This town appeared to have no businesses, just large houses. There was no main street, no restaurants, no gas stations, no motels, no grocery stores. We figured it must have been a Mormon polygamist community where visits from outsiders were not encouraged. Our only choice was to continue on to the next town of Fredonia, Arizona.

The ride was phenomenal because we rode east with the setting sun at our backs that lit up the hills. We finally found a run-down looking place for $30 per night. It was a large room with cable TV and full kitchen and lots of cats, quite luxurious compared to the tent.

We camped one night at Grand Canyon National Park. The canyon is awe inspiring. It exhibits four dimensions - length, width, depth and time. Some of the exposed rock is over a billion years old. The original name for the canyon was Kaibab, the Paiute word meaning "mountain upside down".

From the Grand Canyon, we rode south through the Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona. We spent the night at a hippy campground. It appeared that most people lived here year-round in an odd assortment of converted school buses, vans and trailers. One of the residents had a place called Dug's Tiki Bar. It was area under a canopy behind a box trailer with Christmas lights strung around the perimeter, a couple of tables, a couch and plastic patio chairs. We stopped by for a drink and felt like we were transported into another world. There was a balmy breeze blowing and several of the customers could have been stand-ins for Cheech and Chong, in fact we had fun watching them play a video trivia game called BuzzTimes.

We are currently baking under the sun Tucson getting service done on the bikes before heading in to Mexico.