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The first half of the day was as boring as an 80-mph day can be battling traffic and headwinds across the desert. I stopped just East of Vegas at a convenience store for a couple bottles of water and stood outside in the shade of the store listening to REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know It" play through the tinny speakers thinking how perfect this was. I couldn't help but wonder what they were trying to accomplish mounting speakers outside to play music to an acre of molten asphalt. Just 40 miles away they used to explode atomic bombs and now all these people live here in the middle of nowhere where you can't even step outside in the daytime because it's so damned hot. Weird. Sometimes nothing makes sense to me.
Some guy on an obscenely expensive BMW stopped to chat. He was an instructor at a local motorcycle school. He admired my First Gear riding jacket and said I was the first Harley rider he'd ever seen that owned one of those. Yeah, I'm a trendsetter.
By early afternoon I was in St. George Utah. A town famous for it's extraordinarily high leukemia rates in the '50's, '60's & '70's. Being good American Mormons there in St. George, nothing ever came of this. If you look at maps depicting the fallout patterns from the atomic testing days, St. George is the first population center in the path. I guess they didn't mind glowing for God and Country.
I had lunch at a Dairy Queen that had the oddest drive through I've ever seen. The drivers pull up and spit their orders into a speaker; they then pull forward to a portal in the side of the building where the food is delivered. The weird part is that the food is delivered by a conveyer belt system that shuttles the food from the kitchen up across the ceiling inside the restaurant, down the wall and out through the delivery portal. Odd, ingenious.
I left St. George and headed into Zion National Park where the same anniversary was still being celebrated so I got in free again. I took route 9 East through Zion. Nothing prepared me for how beautiful this place is. I'll have to go back again someday. I planned on making it to Bryce Canyon National Park that day but a thunderstorm stopped me at the Best Western in Zion. As soon as I checked in, the rain stopped and I was able to sit my sore butt down in the hot tub out back. They also had laundry facilities so I was able to wash the rancid goat smell out of my clothes that had been percolating off me over the last day or so.
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