On the Road Again?

Night falls on a ride from Cañon City, Colo., to Ely, Nev. during my July, 2001, Mid-Life Crisis Tour. The scene is the Border Inn, just west of the Nevada-Utah border.

It looks like my 20th Annual Mid-Life Crisis Tour may happen after all.
Money and time have been in short supply this summer and I had pretty much given up on being able to take my usual three-week motorcycle ride through the West, including a visit to my son in Portland, Ore.
Then my wife got a promotion and a raise and it looks like we're going to get some justice and some payback with her deadbeat ex.
I've been riding my BMW K1200GT sparingly this year, trying to make the current set of tires last as long as possible in case the opportunity for a long ride showed up.
Some of the riding I've done has been on my wife's '94 K75S, which is a good thing since she hasn't felt comfortable about riding a motorcycle in the wake of her car crash in March, 2004. The K75S only has about 5,400 miles on it, despite its age.
I made the costly mistake of letting it sit without fuel stabilizer in the tank over the winter and spring of 2003-04 and ended up having to spend $755.39 to replace corroded fuel injectors.
Both bikes got the standard BMW 6k service just before my local dealer went out of business last December and the K75S has a set of low-profile tires that are less costly to replace than the ones on the K1200GT.
But my combined mileage on both bikes this year is only 2,260 miles - pretty pathetic for this late in the year and a considerable distance from the 10,000 I need by midnight Dec. 31 to qualify for one of my local club's annual 10,000 mile awards. I've earned one every year since 1993 and need a big tour to get to 10k this year.
So when it became apparent that I could be spared for a few weeks, I started thinking about the local BMW club's annual Chalet Week and beyond.
The club has rented lodging in the Colorado Rocky Mountains for a week every summer since the late 1980s. For a lot of years, it was a chalet in Breckenridge that slept about 20. The cost was about $65 per person for a week's lodging, which meant you could hardly afford to stay home.
About four years ago, the Breckenridge chalet's owners decided to make it their permanent home and take it off the vacation market. Happily, that coincided with the retirement of club members Tim and Linda who had purchased a similar retirement home a few miles south in Alma.
Tim and Linda are supremely good hosts and eagerly offered their spacious A-frame home as a base of operations for Chalet Week.
As luck would have it, my change in circumstances this month coincided with the opening of some vacancies in the Chalet Week roster, so I've arranged to buy one of the now-$75 spots from a guy whose wife has developed health problems and plan to spend the week before Labor Day riding in the high country with my BMW friends.
The plan that's coalescing in the back of my mind calls for staying at Tim and Linda's through Labor Day, then making a two-day bullet run for Portland to spend some time with my son and his wife.
Then, time and money permitting, I'd like to swing down through Big Sur before heading east for home.
It's only fitting that Tim and Linda have a role to play in this 20th annual tour, since they were my traveling companions on the first such adventure back in July 1986. I had bought my first serious touring bike - a 1981 BMW R100RS - the previous autumn and was ready to ride to Monterey, Calif. for my first BMW Motorcycle Owners of America national rally.
Tim and Linda were old hands at touring and I was the attentive apprentice. We were all Motorcycle Safety Foundation instructors, so we had the same theoretical understanding of riding, but they had the experience – the Wisdom of the Road – and I determined to learn all I could from them.
The first important thing I learned was how much more comfortable a bike can be at highway speeds when you're wearing earplugs. I rode the first day without earplugs, thinking they were a little silly.
The next day, sometime after lunch and somewhere west of Kansas City, I accepted a pair from Tim and gave them a try. After a first few moments of awkwardness – I worried my balance would be affected, but it wasn't – I realized I could still hear speech and the engine. But the roar of the river of wind around my full-face helmet was muted and subdued and I could hear myself think. I became a convert over the next few hours that afternoon and have carried and used earplugs on every long or fast ride since.
That three-week ride to the BMW MOA national rally at Laguna Seca Racetrack and home again changed my life. Nearly 20 years later, I can still recall every place we stopped and every road we followed.
I remember the thrill of riding up into the mountains west of Denver the afternoon of the third day, effortlessly weaving our way up steep inclines past laboring trucks and cars. My mind flashed back to the line from the Hindu scripture, the Rig Veda: “He moves rapidly following the path of him the much-praised, other goers cannot overtake him though he is moving easily...”
That evening, after settling into motel rooms in Idaho Springs, we rode up to Echo Lake, the jumping-off point for the road up Mount Evans – the highest paved road in the United States. It was my first real taste of mountain riding and I was simultaneously exhilarated and intimidated. I got over being scared, but the exhilaration has never left me.
Lots of moments on that trip became templates for later adventures and benchmarks against which other trips would be measured.
There was the thrill of riding our BMWs as they were meant to be ridden: at autobahn speeds, swallowing up 110 miles of Nevada's U.S. 50 in an hour's time. There was the excitement of racing a thunderstorm across the central Utah desert. And there was the image of a fawn flashing across a forest road in the Sierras behind its mother, pausing to glance at me, then vanishing into the brush. A wispy cloud of dust hung in a shaft of sunlight to mark its passage.
There was the transcendent splendor of the Big Sur coast where the mountains meet the sea in a collision of blues and greens and crashing foam. There was the day trip to San Francisco, climaxed with a ride back around Monterey Bay through fog so thick it seemed like rain.
But the real watershed moment came just after lunch on the seventh day when I parted company with my friends on Lake Tahoe's southwestern shore. They fancied a trip to Yosemite National Park and I was off to visit a longtime friend in Burbank. According to plan, we would rendezvous three days later in Monterey.
We said our good-byes, shook hands and were off. They turned south and I headed west and up and over the Sierras to follow Interstate 5 down the Central Valley to Los Angeles.
It was a supremely liberating experience and, as much as I enjoyed their company and the security of riding with friends, I needed it to grow as a rider and as a person.
I quickly realized, as the road distance between me and my friends widened at a rate of more than 100 miles an hour, that this was what I'd come 2,000 miles to find: The solitude and self-reliance that comes of riding alone and trusting your own knowledge and skill and equipment. As I swept up and over Kit Carson Pass, I felt like a young eagle testing its wings for the first time and I reveled in the experience.
I alone was responsible for choosing a restaurant or a place to stop for the night. If I got off to a late start, it was nobody's fault by mine. Similarly, if I saw six potential photographs in a mile, I could stop for each of them without worrying about inconveniencing a traveling companion. And there were times when I did just that, riding north on the Pacific Coast Highway along the Big Sur coast.
The freedom and responsibility were liberating and set me on a journey that I hope continues for many more years.