yawn.
I only managed to get the first half of my notes from 7/6 up tonight before starting to fall asleep at the keyboard. I'll try to get the rest of them up tomorrow. :)

pretty harley.
I'm not generally a cruiser person, but I have to hand it to Harley for their new V-Rod. That's a gorgeous bike.

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5:30pm. Red Lion Hotel, Redding. 3673 miles, 548.9 trip miles.
Suddenly I'm having the opposite problem that I had yesterday -- every time I've gone somewhere to try and write for a minute, I've been flagged down or waved over to join someone. Can't really complain about that! I woke up early this morning, even though I didn't have 300 miles to cover for once, and went to the WoW hospitality room (a hotel suite they'd reserved as a place for attendees to hang out and look at photo albums, chat, eat munchies, etc). I saw a couple of the women that Sara had introduced me to last night as being Bay Area WoW members, so I chatted with them for a few minutes. I ended up sitting on a couch next to the woman who owned the newish Honda Nighthawk 750 that I'd seen last night, so we talked Nighthawks for a while until she headed out. Danelle, the SV rider from Colorado, came in, and we sat and talked for a while about SVs and tattoos and other sorts of really important things. ;) Last night, I'd noticed that the paint was stripped off of a section of her tank; I asked her about it, hoping she hadn't been in an accident. She said there had been an accident, but not the usual kind -- apparently she parked her bike in an inner courtyard of her apartment complex, and on one hot evening, a fan vibrated off of a balcony and landed on the SV! Whoops.

At 9am, I went to see Dee Gagnon give a slide show presentation about her 100-day trip. Since I'd really enjoyed her book, it was neat for me to meet her and hear some of the stories first-hand. She was pretty much as she came across in her book -- spunky, independant, and personable. She was very nice: she signed my copy of her book and chatted for a minute about being a female rider who prefers to ride solo. I felt sort of bad staying to chat with her, since it seemed like the other women there were sort of pushy in a way -- they were sort of tripping over themselves to offer her lodging or free dinner, etc., if she ever stopped through their towns. The gestures were all very nice and sincere, but I got the impression that she had had experiences where people had taken it personally if she decided not to show up in that town after all, or ended up not feeling like being taken to dinner if she did arrive. One of the nice things about riding solo is that you can plan your own life, and stop when and where you want to, and all the offers -- while, like I mentioned, were very sincere and well-intentioned -- also somewhat put obligations on your plate. I can see why she looked a little apprehensive. I'm sure she also gets people who want to do everything in their power for her when she stops by their town, as a means of living vicariously through her. It's much easier to take a world-traveller out for pizza when she stops by your city than it is to be a world-traveller yourself. I wonder if that's hard for her -- for me, one of the best things about travelling solo is the opportunity to be anonymous or anti-social if I want to me, and I wonder if that's impossible for her to do now that she's pretty famous in the WoW circles. I don't know. Maybe I'm reading way too much into people, but that's the impression I got. After hanging out a little after the slide show, I got my picture taken with Dee, and I wandered off again.

I walked down to the hotel restaurant for lunch, with the intention of getting a table to myself again and writing, but as soon as I walked in, a group of women saw me and waved me over to their table. They were Linda, Sue, and Rhonda from Illinois, and Joan from Redding (originally from Southern California, she pointed out). They wre all very laid back and funny. Joan was an older woman who'd been a nurse, and she and Sue spent most of lunch talking about Sue's ailing mother. Joan kept referring to Redding as "Dorky Town," which was pretty entertaining. They were all fun. After lunch, I walked over to the corner of the parking lot where BMW had set up their demo bikes. I was surprised at how low the seat of the R1200RS looked, but the guy working the booth said it was all stock. I sat on it, and was pretty surprised that I could fit on it. I was definitely tiptoeing, and wouldn't have trusted myself to keep it upright on anything but the flattest asphault, but it was still fun to sit on. I met Dezi, one of two women who had unfortunate encounters with deer on the way to the Ride-In. She was in a wheelchair with a broken kneecap, and her other leg was covered in iodine-stained gauze. Her arms and face were pretty bruised up. She was in good spirits, though. Her husband Ron was there with her, and she was happy that they'd continued on (not on bikes, obviously) to the Ride-In. I guess the accident happened just outside of Reno. The other woman was still in the hospital, with a punctured lung and other internal injuries. Thoug she was expected to make a complete recovery, it was pretty sobering.

9:30pm. Poolside, Red Lion Hotel. same mileage.
This afternoon, after lunch, I rode out to Shasta Dam. It was still bloody hot (~110, I think), so I didn't want to ride all the way to Lassen, but I didn't want to waste my life sitting in the hotel, either. The dam was just twelve miles away, with a little bit of freeway, a little bit of small-town roads, and a little bit of twisties. Sounded good. The dam itself was actually shut off for repairs when I was there (figures), but it was still really impressive. The reservoir for the dam is Lake Shasta, and the watercourse is the Sacramento River, which irrigates most of the Central Valley. The dam is approximately 1100 feet high and 3500 feet long, and was built between 1938-45. I met a little friend there; a squirrel was sitting on the walkway when I came up, and graciously allowed me to take a picture. He followed me for a while and would periodically stop and look up at me, as if to say, "aren't you going to take more pictures of me?" He was pretty cute. After I walked around the dam area. I went back to the bike and started gearing up. A park employee walked by and stopped to chat about the bike. He was a rider as well, and we traded ideas on how to keep cool in the ungodly heat. I rode down to the bottom of the dam, but since it was all closed for repairs, there weren't any tours going on. So I rode back up and over to a vista point that I'd passed on my way into the dam area -- from the vista point, you could see all "three Shastas": Shasta Dam, Shasta Lake, and Mount Shasta. It was really gorgeous. I took some pictures (surprise!) and headed back to the hotel.

The second half of my notes from 7/6 should be up tomorrow.
See the rest of the pictures from Day 3