I went with my brothers church mens group to a retreat this past weekend to a camp here in AZ, up in the high pines close to the south rim of the grand canyon. We left from Phoenix on Friday afternoon, for the couple hundred mile run and made it in time for supper. Highway most of the way, beautiful scenery, no problems, real nice ride. I put up a shot of my brother and I complete with pine trees! The weekend was nice, lotsa good food, uncomfortable bunks, and lots of snoring. I knew those ear plugs in my saddlebags were a good idea! Then comes the ride home. It was raining all night Saturday and all during breakfast and services, but cleared up by the time we were set to leave, noon. Good sign. The first leg of the journey was awsome, great scenery, nice and cool, smelled great from the last nights rain. Then we got to the little town we had to get through to get to the highway. DEADLOCKED!! It took us 45 minutes to drive the 10 miles to the slab. well, here we go, woohoo, then....... what are all those brake lites up there?! Stopped again! We found out later a tanker had overturned and burned, closing the highway in both derictions. We were detoured onto this real nice route through the Tonto Basin, REAL nice scenery, a lake, which is rare in our neck o the desert. Hey, this aint so bad. Then we come to Roosevelt dam, and a sign that says ' Tortilla Flat 30 miles' {or so} The guy we were riding with says 'lets go this way, Tortilla Flat has a place with the best hamburgers in the world. Cool. lets go. So we take off down this road, called "The Apache Trail" Well, what we didn't know at the time, but soon found out, was that 26 miles of this 'trail' was really a 'trail' a dirt road! And not a real good one either!! So, here we are, me on my SB, my brother on his show piece Sporty, and this other guy and his real nice 1200 BMW, bouncing along this washboard dirt road with hundred foot cactus filled drops down to Apache lake on our side. Now, my brother and our partner are kinda bummin, cuz they have these pampered rides and they are getting all dusty, and had actually gotten rained on the night before, but I am kinda digging it. We got about halfway through and everybody was stopped again. We stopped too, for awhile, then after a couple dozen other bikes rode on past all of us stopped traffic, we did too, till we were stopped by the Sheriff in his big truck towing this big Sheriff boat. We found out that because of all the traffic, going both ways due to the detour, there was a huge jam-up up ahead where the trail is only wide enough for one car. We ended up stopping there for another couple hours, with these pretty cool riders, while the jam up was straightened out, then continued along our way being escorted by the Sheriff. A couple dozen bikes rattelling down this dirt trail led by the Police, followed by about a mile of cages. Quite a site. We did agree that the hamburgers were world class, probably since we hadn't eaten since 8 am and it was now 5 pm. I could go on and tell you about the OTHER detour we came across and the traffic we hit in town but, nevermind. 8 hours after we started out, we got home, Looking back it was a pretty cool weekend.

 

I've done that ride in my suv but not on a bike! Impressive. We usually ride to the part just past Tortilla Flat where it turns to dirt and turn around....awesome ride but I wont be attempting on my Harley. Especially the part going down the hill with the cliff on the left and basically 1 dirt lane....yikes. Thank god it didn't rain on ya that road when wet is nasty.....sounds like a blast tho!

 

Yeah, three things that don't get along with me. Dirt, gravel and Harleys.[:@][:@]