If so, my  Women’s  Motorcycle Touring Article was published in BMW’s ON magazine this month…check it out, and email me at Alisa@MotoAdventureGal.com  if you are interested in support with your touring with us this year!

Pecos River Walk, Carlsbad, NM

Pecos River Walk, Carlsbad, NM

Ah, Thanksgiving. Yes, I ate too much food.

Two plates becasue I never grew out of not wanting my food to touch.

but then I got to walk it off visiting Carlsbad Caverns.

MotoAdventureGal at Carlsbad Caverns 2012

If you have never been there,  let me tell you it is awe-inspiring. Called the Eighth wonder of the World, the subterranean beauty will take your breath way (even if the 750′ elevator ride  or 1.2 mile hike into its depths does not).

Enjoy the pictures!

Rangers say no gum, food, drink, or touching these beautiful and delicate formations.

By the way, there is no colored light in the Caverns: all the colors you see are the natural colors of the rocks.

Never heard of it? Neither had I until I chatted with some local folks.

From the web site: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=638

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is the largest state park in California. Five hundred miles of dirt roads, 12 wilderness areas and many miles of hiking trails provide visitors with an unparalleled opportunity to experience the wonders of the California Desert. The park is named for Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza and the Spanish word borrego, or bighorn sheep. The park features washes, wildflowers, palm groves, cacti and sweeping vistas. Visitors may also have the chance to see roadrunners, golden eagles, kit foxes, mule deer and bighorn sheep as well as iguanas, chuckwallas and the red diamond rattlesnake.

I’ll upload some pics after my visit there…

Liz Jansen of Trillium Tours is doing an interview series with female motorcyclists which appears every Monday. This week Liz interviewed me.

The whole series is quite interesting, filled with heaps of inspirational ladies. Kudos to Liz for doing this!

Check it out:

http://ht.ly/6LFIj

Mike and Sandy Dimond are the local hosts, and they’ve done a bang-up job of organizing a varied and quite interesting line of presenters–including Ted Simon, Gregory Frazier, Carla King and Clement Salvadori. And of course HU founders Grant and Susan Johnson will be there, gurus of world travel and bringing travelers together. Check out their web site for this California and other meetings: http://www.horizonsunlimited.com

If you are anywhere near the Bay Area or LA in California, or planning a motorcycle trip, you should make a point of attending. I’m riding there from Idaho with my friend Zigy (Colorado).

http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/meetings/California2011.php

The plan:
Edward and I were to ride some of the wildest, most remote open spaces the West has to offer.
Montana=The Gravelly Range
Wyoming=The Big Empty
Colorado & Nevada=Pony Express Trail through the desert
California=KTM Adventure Rally (not so empty)
Nevada=Loneliest Road in America (Rt. 50, unfortunately paved)
Oregon=some pavement chasing a fruitless errand
Idaho & Montana=The Magruder Corridor (the largest wilderness area in the USA) (more info HERE)

I tried to send a SPOT message at the end of every day, and sometimes even remembered to send one from one of the really cool, wild places we were at. You can click HERE for a link to our SPOT page–be sure to set the history to “All” . (Note that I do not have the tracking feature enables as I did while riding South of the Border.)

The reality:
All that and more.
Pony Express Trail. Mormon Trail. Oregon Trail.
21 days. 2 Showers, 21 nights of camping. 1 tip-over (me, parking the bike at the last campsite of the trip!)

Here’s a sneak peak at some of the terrain we rode:

It was really fun for us to ride the 500 miles home together–it’s been a coupe of months since we’d been able to ride together, and it brought up all the great memories of the summer we traveled together in 2009.

The great, wide open of Montana and Idaho.

Riding in to Idaho Falls…

So we pull up, and there are three adventure bikes parked out front. Neat-o! I swung around back as I usually do to park, but then realized when would I have the opportunity to take a pic of FIVE KTM 950′s parked in front of my house…

So here are three weary travelers in need of some serious bike maintenance.

Craig, Matthew and Ardie the Australian bloke had already ridden 12,000+ miles to and through Alaska and back. They were headed back to the Continental Divide Ride to finish their southbound journey, then head to their respective homes in the midwest and Australia.

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Here’s what a small moto-world it is:

When I was having the fuel pump issues with my 950 on my Southwest trip, my friend Chris Kelly got online and somehow found Craig…and Craig shipped me a fuel spare pump he had out of the goodness of his heart. Much later I learned that Craig is friends with Edward (Craig didn’t know this when he helped me, a stranded traveler)…

Matthew is good friends with my cousin Ken, who was supposed to ride to South America with me (Matthew had put me up several times when I passed through Cleveland).

So we were glad to host then and even gladder to be able to spend time visiting old friend and making new ones.

Ahhhh…a rest day. Nice. It’s been a little hard for the ladies to ride so much for so many days in a row…most of them are new to touring on a motorcycle.

Two tour members got new tires and two others went off to  ride one of the scenic routes we gave them.

Some of us took a walk together around town in the evening.

We listened to a pretty good (free!) concert

Said hello to the locals

got some local flavor

took time to smell the flowers

laughed heartily at these folks working for their beer (wait…I don’t see anyoen driving that thing…)

ate a yummy dinner (hat’s wrong with me? no food pic!)

then had a yummy snack (ok, at least I have my picture priorities right)

and visited the tree decoraated by the carzy knitter

then walked back to the hotel.

All our gals tucked in for the night, we tucked into the world’s comfiest beds with down pillows and comforters.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s ride!

We left Baker City in much cooler temps than when we arrived…like most mornings I plugged in my WarmNSafe jacket liner to keep the chill out.  We followed OR-7, and it was a lovely, twisty, scenic  ride through the forest.

The forest opened up into a valley

I saw this wagon and had to stop

here was the view out the other end of the wagon:

If I’d been traveling West a centure and a half ago and saw that view, I betcha I would have just stopped right there.

Anyway, I had to ham it up a bit

A gas and pottie break in Dayville, and I find a new friend (attached to the restroom key)

There’s a bench, and a chatty lady having her lunch, so Vicky and I have a snack her and pick her brain about which are the best roads and fossil sites in the John Day Fossil Beds complex.

We opt for the main visitor complex and exhibits

We walk through the exhibits

I like this one: he looks cute and cuddly.

I felt like this one when the tour bus pulled up…  time for us to roll!

We had a very cool (40 degree!) ride out of Stanley. 

Yet it was a spectacular ride, and a slight navigational error (was it truly?) on my part brought my small group through some of the twistiest, funnest roads over the Mores Summit in the Boise National Park.

We roode the Wildlfe Canyon Scenic Byway (Banks-Lowman Road) and even saw an elegant elk (no pic I was to busy braking and pointing.)

I am SO proud of these ladies…a couple of them didn’t exactly embrace cornering when they started the tour…and now they are more confident than ever. And we have several more days to ride!

Rather than backtrack, we deided to ride some hghway miles and got into our hotel in Baker City quite early. That was just fine with my group–it got to be over 100 degrees that afternoon. we sat by the pool in the lovely garden and cooled our heels.