Peenie Wallie

He must be a local and know these curves, because there are no signs at all.

The air is really dry and my contacts have sort of dried out and my mind keeps going back to this stupid phone interview I'm supposed to do at 12:30 p.m. PST.

My mind keeps wandering to the stupid phone call. Where on earth will I find cell coverage? Why do I have to go back to work so soon? I don't understand. I haven't had any time off at all. I don't want to work. This sucks.

And the turns keep flying past me and every time my mind wanders back to work I almost die in another blind hairpin and I don't understand why these people keep bothering me. I need to be here now. Inside my head, focused on the road. Not on some stupid project in a different time zone. No space for that now inside the head. Have to push it out if I'll live through this drive.

After about 20-30 miles of roller-coaster curves, I find myself in the little mining town of Coulterville, and I'm not sure what to do here. I stop and walk into the Information office and there's a guy in there with a beaver on his head for a toupee. Not a good one. It looks like it might get up and walk away at any time.

I should take J132 up to 120, and then I'll be close to Rainbow Pools and the exit for "Cherry Oil Road", which is labeled "Cherry Lake Road", but everyone I've talked to has called it "Cherry Oil Road". I'm not clear why this is. "Cherry Oil Road" leads to "Cottonwood Road", of course. And Angus says I have to go on "Cottonwood Road". I owe him this somehow.

If this is my cross to bear, then so be it.

But by the time I reach Highway 120, it's noon, and I'm supposed to do this phone interview at 12:30, and of course, I have to find a place where I can actually get cell coverage. So I head west, back to Groveland, sit down for lunch at the little burger joint in town. Plug in my laptop and cell phone, and then I get a text that they want to reschedule the phone interview till tomorrow.

Ah, the hell with it. I decide to have lunch anyway, so I sit and fiddle with my laptop some and eat lunch, then back into the park.

Now, I take Highway 120 up and over Tioga pass. Today, I meet a lot more people on bikes, for whatever reason. A couple of guys came down from Vancouver. And I'm like "seriously? I was just in Vancouver on this bike two weeks ago. Did y'all do the Sea-to-Sky Highway 99?"

And they're just floored, of course, that someone drove an XR from Vancouver to Yosemite. And we ride together for just a little bit.

One of the guys from Vancouver has a "Spot Personal Tracker" so people can follow him. I think I'll have to get one of those set up.

I meet some other people in the park. Now, get this. He's on a KTM 690 with second after-market 3.7 gallon tank. She's on another bike. It's a little blue Yamaha. Now, these two live back East in Maryland. They're running this little trip out of Las Vegas though. And, somehow, they're coming from San Francisco with these bikes.

Now, her blue Yamaha, they had some work done on in Maryland. Then, they shipped it out here, and had Scuderia West do some work on it in San Francisco. Scuderia West is where I used to work in San Francisco...about two blocks from where I used to work.

So, they take the Yamaha into Scuderia to get it lowered, etc. And the guy looks at it and say...did you get some work done on this bike back east? In Maryland? He says yeah, we did. How did you know? Dude says "I did the work. I used to live in Maryland. I just moved out here. This is the same bike I worked on in Maryland a few weeks ago."

Small world.

I go into the little gas station in the park and ask them for a map of Nevada, and they look at me like I'm crazy.

So, his KTM is so new it's still got the little tire nipple things on the tires. Nice bike. So, we ride together for a while.

At 9,943 feet, Tioga pass is much higher than I'd expected. It's cool at 10,000 feet, and I'm wishing I'd worn a shirt today.

I keep bumping into the couple on the KTM and the Yamaha until finally, they catch up to me at the Mobil station at Lee Vining, by Mono Lake.

At the Mobil station, I get a map of Nevada, but then I realize that I need a map of the Western U.S., really. Because I don't know jack about western Utah. So, I get a Western United States map, and finally I can start to cobble together a plan to make it back to see Jennifer.

I don't want to take Interstate 80 because it goes too far north. It looks like US 6 will get me pretty close to where I want to go. What I never realized before is that I-70 dead-ends into I-15 in Utah. So, I really want to get onto I-70, but I'll sort of have to work my way over there on US 6 and US 50. That's my plan, if you can call it a plan.

I've never really driven to the west coast before. I mean, I've never actually driven past Moab, Utah. That's as far west as I've ever driven, without flying into an airport first, if that makes any sense. So, this will be my first time crossing the Great American Desert as it used to be called on all the maps.

It's about 6:00 p.m. when I finally am ready to leave the Mobil gas station at Lee Vining. I decided to buy some more Gatorade, in case I broke down in the desert. The way that I'm going is not, shall we say, heavily traveled.

I roll out of Lee Vining south to 120. Then 120 east. Slowly, the trees fade to tumbleweeds. The desert winds push the tumbleweeds across the roads. Furious desert winds make it feel more like I'm sailing than driving.

Light is fading. It's cool in the desert now. But tomorrow it will be a nightmare. A scorching August oven. This is not the best time to be crossing the desert.

The road is not great. It's grooved and beaten, with tight turns, and odd little dips and hills that make your stomach come up in your throat. It's the reason they normally use road graders before paving the roads. But not here, for whatever reason.

The trees fade away and finally the desert scrub fades away and now it's just nothing but open desert.

It's so dry here you just can't know. The wind sucks the moisture from my eyes. My lips dry up and start to crack.

There are not many people on this road. I pass someone every 10 to 15 minutes maybe. This would be a bad time to break down. Or to crash.

But it's so hard to stay focused. You can see the road as it leads straight away into the distance for 20 miles maybe. As the light fades, I get more concerned about the cattle. There are free range cattle here. There is a cattle gap on US 6 at the state border between California and Nevada.

I watch the tail lights of the car 20 miles ahead of me as he approaches the headlights of a car coming towards us. Both of them are so far away. Just little dots on the razor thin road. I wonder if the two dots will miss each other. Somehow they do.

My mind wanders and I find myself in the wrong lane. Not that it matters. But I try to stay in my lane and stay focused. I've go a long way to go. So far to go to get home to Jennifer. At least another 800 miles to go, and only about a day and a half to get there.

This is not the brightest thing I've ever done. Tomorrow, the desert will be an inferno. I'll get an early start and try to find a truck to ride with once I get to Interstate 15.