Yippee, I'm getting ready to hit the road again...Is Willie Nelson popular in Europe, do you know his song, On The Road Again.  It always goes through my head since my Dad always sings it when we're heading out.  I think I left some pictures of him and his motorcycle "Ol Blue" in an earlier essay, but its a catchy tune and its been going through my head with increasing frequency.

In the US system, the 4th amendment is the core protection against unreasonable search and seizure, like all constitutional law it is very dependent upon interpretations.  Over the course of the last 40 years, the law has swung away from protecting individual freedoms from unreasonable searches toward giving the officials license to introduce evidence that has been gained from those unreasonable searches.

 

Its an odd job being a criminal defense attorney.  In the State of California those of us employed by the state to provide indigent defense on a regular basis generally work in Public Defender offices.  I have worked in my county's Public Defender office for over 20 years.  It can be a brutal job, and one that forces you to confront the very worst in people, politics, and law.  Some cases are worse than others, of course, in some there is nothing but tragedy all round.  I currently-and I earnestly hope, permenantly, work with kids at the Juvenile Justice level, but there was a time when I was involved in Capital (death penalty) cases.  This is a tangent of the story of one of them.I have edited this to try to remove identifying characteristics for the client's privacy.

What could we do with the money we are wasting by throwing it into the financial sector of the economy?  With these many billions, we could rebuild the rail system, we could retool Detroit, and the hundreds of towns that have manufacturing plants that feed Detroit.  We could end the necessity for taking out loans for going to college and just make it free, we could repair every damned bridge that needs it in the whole country.  Instead we are pouring into a rathole.  The executives of the financial firms don't plan on losing much.

From MSNBC business section

"Even though the banking sector may be returning to normal, the economy still isn't. The economy continues to face a host of other problems," said Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist at ChannelCapitalResearch.com. "We're in for a tough ride."

.  Well, we are in for something that goes beyond a "tough ride".  We are going to be losing our houses, our insurance, our savings, our retirements and we are going to be in hock up to our elbows-but the banking sector will be back to normal.

 In Part 1 we went from Calistoga (just north of San Francisco) across the Central Valley, up the Sierra Nevada range via Hwy 50 and descended the dry side into Nevada and The Desert.

We are riding a big blue Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Classic.  Blue is a 1987 model with the 88 cubic inch evolution motor, a 5 speed transmission and very comfortable seats for a motorcycle.  Blue has pretty good luggage space, footboards instead of pegs and has always been well taken care of by its two owners, Jimmie Lee, long since gone, and my Dad who first rode a motorcycle at the age of 52 and two weeks later started his first trip across country from Indiana to Santa Rosa California.  This is the iconic bike for the trip across the thin ribbons of road that connect the far-flung towns of the SouthWest.

I have struggled in vain for a way to convey the immensity of this area, it is one of the great Places on the Earth and we will go over a pretty small piece of it and cover nearly 1700 miles doing it.  The empty lands defy easy depiction or description, and one experiment I made here is to take pictures of the same emptiness from vantage points miles apart but still of the same emptiness.  Sometimes one composes pictures to emphasize a point or to leave out what is non-harmonious, but in looking at these pictures I ask you to remember that in nearly every picture you could stop, turn 360 degrees and see the same thing.  We are not taking careful shots, we are grabbing nearly random hunks of 20 or 30 or more miles at a stretch and at the end of that stretch the same thing awaits and again after that and it would be the same if we took off at right angles and tried that, of course we would die, if we took off at right angles from the road and went any distance, the heat and the aridity would kill us within the day.  So we won't do that.

Howdy You All, I been in the sticks (backcountry)the last couple of days on a little bit of a whirlwind tour of Nevada with a little Arizona-very little-and some Utah for some needed seasoning.  The truth is that there is general similarities throughout the region I covered once I slipped over the Sierra Nevada Mountains at Lake Tahoe and headed east into the classic west.

The grand departure.
Word to the prospective shopper-2 piece zip together leathers are much more convenient than a 1 piece suit.  The one piece suit is very comfortable while on the bike but a pain off it.

From the diaries with minor pic edit - afew

I've long promised a diary about traveling the Western US on motorcycle.  I've had the lame excuse that I don't know how to post pix inside, so I'm trying to drop the excuse and try some pix.  Wish I had a grandkid around to help.  Colman to the Rescue.  Thanks.

The following photos were taken on a couple of different trips across the Desert Southwest and the classic "old west" of the US.  That is why some of the dates don't match up.  On these motorcycle trips I was primarily accompanied by my Dad, My brother Chip, and my long time friend Mike Springer.  

This is the field down the road from my house, I always go by it leaving, it doesn't always have a rainbow, Mayacamas mountains in the background:

From the diaries with an edit - afew