Rocky Mountain high

It's a typically gorgeous July morning here in Alma, Colo. The temperature is in the high 50s and the sun is blazing down from a cloudless sky casting deep shadows in the pine forest that surrounds my friends' chalet. The ground squirrels are greedily gobbling up the seeds Tim & Linda have put out on the deck. They think it's a squirrel feeder, but it's actually a fox and bear feeder since the squirrels eventually get too fat and too slow to elude predators. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
I had a pleasant 1,300-mile ride Wednesday and Thursday, stopping overnight Wednesday in Topeka, Kans., for dinner with writer/photographer friends. My decision to leave a day later than planned worked out nicely. I got sprinkled on for about a quarter of a mile west of Topeka yesterday morning, with lightning strikes to the right and the left. (My wife said the storm showed up as a very angry-looking red blotch astride I-70 on the Weather Channel radar.)
Other than that, the only weather complaint would be the 90+ degree temperatures yesterday afternoon in eastern Colorado.
The XM satellite radio made Missouri, Kansas and eastern Colorado a pleasure. While I'm sufficiently connected with the riding experience to be a safe rider, I don't think the passing scenery registers as strongly on my awareness. When I opened my journal after breakfast yesterday at the Junction City, Kans. Cracker Barrel, I realized I didn't have very many observations about the previous day's ride to record other than fuel and food stops and the weather.
Now that I'm amid scenery that deserves to be savored, I plan to stow the XM and drink it all in.
The bike performed flawlessly and I rode mostly with restraint, only hitting 110 mph a couple of times while passing other traffic.
While most folks would take I-70 all the way across eastern Colorado to Denver and up into the mountains, my preferred route is to break away from I-70 at Oakley, Kans., picking up U.S. 40 into Colorado, where I turn onto Colo. 94 a few miles west of Kit Carson for a straight run into Colorado Springs. It involves a stretch of about 80 miles where there are no services. Maria and I call it Lonesome Cow Road because that's where we once saw a cow standing in the ditch, outside the fence, looking perplexed and bewildered at finding herself separated from the herd and suddenly free.
I find the short dose of surface street traffic in Colorado Springs preferable to the interstate blast through Denver.
Dinner last night was a bleu cheese and pepperjack hamburger with three glasses of excellent and very murky porter at the South Park Saloon (Tim was driving) - a nice way to celebrate my return to the high country.
I'm carrying my Nikon F5 film camera with the 28-300mm lens and an SB-50DX flash, along with 10 rolls of film. I think I mentioned earlier that I opted for film because I didn't want to subject my D100 to the dust and vibration of a motorcycle trip. But the constraints and sheer bulk of the film camera are making me long for a good digital point-and-shoot for travel work - something like the better Nikon CoolPix cameras. Just what I need - one more thing to spend money on.