The bike is loaded and I’m as ready as I’m going to be. It’s a ominous, foggy, sixty-ish degree morning in LA. I get on the freeway headed east with the city behind me. A mix of emotions and thoughts of leaving home for two months flood into my helmet.

Forty-five miles into the trip, the fog is long gone and the thermometer on my bike tells me the air temp has hit 100 degrees. A forty degree delta in temperature is acutely palpable on a motorcycle. You get to feel it all. From there, it doesn’t drop below 105 for the next 9 hours of riding, and there was a balmy spike in Needles, CA at 111. Riding through temperatures over a hundred on a bike feels like riding around in circles in a tumble dryer. The wind is intensely hot and the pavement relentlessly radiates. The desert cannot feel more extreme and vast.

[The docoder to this view is 6th gear, 89 mph, 10:56 AM, 186.9 miles into the trip and my fuel is 4/5 full]

[Sweaty]

With no set route established and no final destination for the day, I decide to take the long way. I wander my way through the Mojave Desert and over the Colorado River into Arizona. After over 600 miles of incredible / scorching desert roads, I land in Saguaro National Park near Tucson, AZ. The setting is incredible and the cacti are cartoonish. Couldn’t be a better place to call it a night and pitch a tent. Peeling off the heavy black riding gear as the setting sun offers the first relief from the heat feels too good to be true. The sunset is spectacularly picturesque.