Somewhere in Arizona, seventeen (?) years ago

It's a beautiful sunny day here in western Massachusetts, and I'm about ready to head out for a short motorcycle ride. Thinking about that put me in mind of this photograph that's been hanging up in my old studio for many years. My friend Ed took this while we were on a break during our cross-country motorcycle trip to San Diego many years ago. I can't remember if this was on the way out or on the way back, but I do recall it was somewhere in Arizona.



I loved riding through the desert -- it was quite beautiful for the most part, and the total antithesis, visually, of the type of terrain I ride through here in this neck of the woods. But the aspect that I wasn't too crazy about was the incessant, baking heat. I was fortunate to be riding the Honda Gold Wing -- years of development had evolved it to the point where the clever engineers who worked on it had devised very ingenious ways to route the engine's heat away from the rider (as long as you were moving, that is).

One of our groups' mottoes on this part of the trip was "Hydrate or die!". We made sure to keep plenty of water with us, and we went through a lot of it (or perhaps more correctly I should say a lot of it went through us). If you look closely, you can see one of my life-saving water bottles strapped to my back seat. -- PL