Walkabout day 21: goat trails, coffee, and hand dryers

Got a slow start this morn­ing, kind of on pur­pose, only have to make a cou­ple hun­dred miles today. spent a few min­utes decid­ing which way around the uin­ta moun­tains, north­ern route, throug Flam­ing Gorge, or south­ern route. Decid­ed on the Flam­ing Gorge route, it only added 35 miles.
Turns out that was the right choice: it’s is gor­geous going up through the range there:

and they had some of my Bik­er Scum friends’ favorite creatures:

I then pulled a trick that Lara and I call ‘GPS Tour­ing’: ask the GPS for a direct, short­est dis­tance route to some­where. In cities, this gets you routes through inter­est­ing neigh­bor­hoods, in the wilds, it leads to par­tial­ly, once-upon-a-time-paved goat trails like this:

and scenery like this:

A per­fect KTM road, it was awe­some! many smiles/mile on that leg of the journey!
I made two obser­va­tions dur­ing my trav­els that i’ll share today: 

The first is about hotel-room cof­fee; near­ly every hotel room these days has a lit­tle 4‑cup cof­fee mak­er. and most of them use the same 1 or brands of prepack­aged cof­fee grounds. I *NEED* my cof­fee in the morn­ing, espe­cial­ly when I’m on the road, so i’ve been mak­ing cof­fee in hotel rooms for about 3 weeks now. I can tell you this: the water makes the dif­fer­ence. Even if the hotel buys high qual­i­ty cof­fee, if the have crap tap water, the cof­fee will only be mediocre. If the place has good-tast­ing tap water, the cof­fee will be accept­able, no mater what cof­fee they buy. I learned to make sure i had at least 4 cups of bot­tled water left in my hydra­tion pack when i checked in, that way i could make good coffee.

The oth­er obser­va­tion is about restroom air hand dry­ers. Most pub­lic restrooms that you run into on the road have those awful warm-air hand dry­ers. They suck, we all know that. In one restroom I used, I think in New Mex­i­co, I ran into a device called a Dyson Air-Blade. This is an air-hand dry­er that real­ly works. Flash tells me that they are every­where in Japan, and it’s just because were a coun­try of idiots that we still have the lame ‘World Dry­er’ brand that we have. Hope­ful­ly, these things will take over the mar­ket, and one more source of pet­ty incon­ve­nience will be removed from our trav­el­ling lives.

Tomor­row, day 1 World Super­bike Rac­ing from Miller Motor­sports Park!

keep the rub­ber side down,
blackdog