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.

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

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