Labor Day 2009
September 5-7, 2009
Day Two
Day two was with out a doubt my favorite day of the trip.
After getting up early and getting on the road, we quickly found our selves on some of the best roads we have ever been on for riding. Roads that were clean, smooth and very well banked for some hard cornering. Cornering that never let up.
Originally we had planed to turn off of Hwy 82 and take 24 south in a round about way through the mountains adding more time and distance to enjoy what I call a 'Big Boy Ride.' This of course being a challenging and curvy road. This again being what was originally planed but to our surprise shortly after passing Pinion, this small two lane road turned into gravel and then became pretty bumpy with rather large rocks as gravel.
Now
with a desire not to beat up my tires more than I had to and not knowing how
long the road would remain this way, we elected to turn around and head back
to 82 the way we came in, which was fine with me because I enjoyed the road
on the way down.
The bad thing is, we were looking forward to making a quick stop at the Solar Observatory that was up around Weed but that did not stop us. After getting back on 82 and banking into many more we turned south on 130 to get to the observatory from another direction.
The observatory was nothing existing. There was a $6 charge for both of us to walk through their littlie history thing but nothing to get existed about. All the littlie demonstrations and experiments they had out you can see at you local hardware store or at Academy.
The fun part about the observatory was getting there... Once again, perfect roads with little traffic and great curves. 'Curves that would scratch your foot pegs.'
After leaving the observatory we road into Cloudcroft for lunch and back down the hill toward Alamogordo.
Cloudcroft is a touristy town with a great bit of people and hundreds of little theme store fronts. In fact, there were so many people we decided to wait till we got to Alamogordo to eat lunch. This was a good thing except we forgot to stop and take pictures of the old train trusses they have on the out skirts of Cloudcroft.
After having lunch in a cut little barbeque place we decided we would take another quick detour out to White Sands. Not to take time to actually ride around in see the sights, just a quick stop by to grab a sticker for the trailer and then move on.
Oh yea, the ride out
of Cloudcroft into Alamogordo is a fairly short little ride that drops
around 4,0
00
feet in elevations. A nice ride minus the fact that it is part of one
of New Mexico's safety corridors. A stupid part of the road they label
'Safety Corridor' and then double the fines if caught speeding.
Anyways, heading down from Cloudcroft to Alamogordo you can almost ride the
entire time with the clutch in and never have to hit the gas. Not much
if it were only a few miles but this was almost thirty miles straight with
the clutch in... To me, that is pretty cool.
Well after leaving White Sands we continued our trip back into Texas for a quick stop in the out skirts of El Paso to pick up some food for that nights dinner and then turned east along Hwy 62 to Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
Once in Guadalupe we did the self pay station and found a camp site for the night. Set up camp, had dinner, took a little walk and then returned back to camp for a game of dominos before turning in.
