Scenes From the 2010 Gathering of Nations

Adventure Man's Spring Break in Juarez

Adventure Man in Haiti

Adventure Man in Juarez

Cook Goes Cuckoo at the Laughing Lizard, Jemez Springs, NM

source: Comedy Central

The Internet and the easy availability of uploadable media have had a profound effect on the service industry, since everyone can post about bad experiences online. Not all service industry people are clear on this, which can make for some interesting video viewing. I never leave home these days without my pocket video camera.

We stopped for lunch at the Laughing Lizard in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, a year after I was served a frozen pizza there that was still cold in the middle. I complained at the time, but received no apology or discount. The menu description for all the pizzas said they were made individually with a blue cornflour dough, but neglected to mention that the 7-inchers were a frozen product. Now the menu no longer mentions blue cornflower, but supposedly even the 7-inch pizzas are made from scratch--due not because of the negative review I posted online, insisted the cook, but because it was cheaper to make them from scratch.

On this visit (I was curious to see if things had changed, and it is a really neat place, so I wanted to give them another chance), the waitress overheard me talking about my previous experience and reported back to the cook, who then confronted us about my online review and refused us service. I had a chat with him on the way out.

The Creature of Cripple Creek

My buddy Sun Ray is a gentleman and a Francophile, and a hell of a lot of fun to travel with. With his wedding just a week away, we decided to forgo the liquor and strippers, opting instead for liquor and camping and motorcycling—a bachelor party on wheels.

Normally I'm a gentle person who enjoys cats. Put me on a motorcycle and crank the Stooges and the MC5 inside my helmet and set me loose on an adventure of sorts, and I become, in my mind anyway, a sexy beast in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

We started out in Albuquerque and soon hit the harder stuff. Slabbed it up I-25 past Santa Fe, breakfast in Las Vegas, up to the sepia Old West time warp that is Raton with its vapor-spewing antique train and pantsuited tourists, then the little hop over the border into Colorado. A beautiful state, Colorado.

The town of Cripple Creek is a tourist cliche nestled in a mountain pass, just the sort of tableau that makes easily entertained travelers like me hard. This is where the Old West conceit, the tourist time warp, really steps it up. It was my idea to hole up there the first night after I saw the name on a mileage sign just before we stopped at a state park whose campsites were full up.

Cripple Creek is a gambling town. I figured it would have cheap rooms in ancient hotels, and I was right. We stopped at the first hotel we came to on the main drag, the Imperial, the oldest hotel in town (opened 113 years ago) and got a room with two beds and a shared bathroom down the hall for 50 bucks. We were the only guests on the supposedly haunted third floor.

Melissa Etheridge was pumping in the red-paneled Red Rooster saloon downstairs, where Sun Ray had his first-ever martini followed by his first-ever Manhattan. The short-haired lady bartender told us we'd just missed the mayor of Cripple Creek, who'd just enjoyed a few martinis himself.

A strange painting on the wall depicted a combination rooster and burro, or what Sun termed a "cockburro." I called it the Creature of Cripple Creek.

Gambling towns are fun for the first few hours. And then you start to see the seemy underbelly. It wasn't quite like stepping off the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The Old West facades played well against the cripples carting their quarter cups, the scammers, the drunks, the dope fiends, the good-time girls who looked like their best times were long passed but were still trying desperately to look the part. No matter where you put a block of casinos, the rottenness will come seeping out of the cracks. We overheard one guy on the street telling his wife, "Focus on the Family should send people here." Indeed: Jesus would not approve of Cripple Creek.

On the wall of one casino there were around 100 framed photos of jackpot winners. Nearly a fifth of them were of a big winner named Herb. He's smiling in the first picture, but his face grows increasingly dour.

There were two nearby natural features on the map that intrigued me the next day as we recovered at breakfast: Nipple Mountain, and not far from that, Beaver Creek. I paraphrased Neil Young over coffee: "Oh to live on Nipple Mountain/With the barkers and the colored balloons/You can't be twenty on Nipple Mountain/Though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon...." We pussied out on visiting those features, however, because they lay on unpaved washboard mountain passes, and we didn't want to risk laying down our shiny machines. One day I will return to Nipple Mountain in a four-by-four.

We did, however, stumble onto a bucolic scene that I can only describe as Llama Heaven. Just as I pulled the bike over, a rainbow shot over this emerald pasture as a happy llama jumped over a bubbling brook. This is where I want to go when I die. A unicorn would not be out of place here. Damn those llamas. They get me every time, right here.

We set up camp late that afternoon in a gale 50 miles from Gunnison. If we'd waited just 20 minutes, we could have done it under a calm dry sky. The next morning I awoke to the dulcet tones of "Fly Like an Eagle." It was 7 a.m. I'd had a fitful, frozen night of little sleep, just to wake up to the kiddies 50 yards away blasting their car stereo. No one else was sleeping at this point. I walked over and confronted a twentysomething kid who looked like one of the Uighurs we just sent to the Caribbean. I didn't ask him to turn it down; I told him to turn it off. Now. People don't like being told what to do, especially ill-mannered assholes like this. He stared at me in disbelief and anger, weighing the consequences of not heeding my demand. I guess he decided he didn't want to have a conversation with Ranger Rick, because he finally turned off the radio. He stood there mad-dogging me as I walked away. I turned around and finally lost my cool.

"Don't you fucking look at me like that, you stupid fucking inconsiderate douchebag. How dare you, sir."

I walked away. A guy around 65, who turned out to be an even bigger curmudgeon than I, had watched the whole thing, and congratulated me as I walked toward the bathroom. He told me he'd had to tell a camper to shut down his generator at 3 a.m. that morning. I hope I don't turn out to be that guy someday. Maybe I should get into backcountry camping. Maybe move to the country where no one can bother me. Nah. I'm a city guy. I'll just have to put up with people's shitty manners.

The next day we camped at Great Sand Dunes National Park, where we met Hubert and Kerstin, a German couple who had been on the road since February on a 1981 Kawasaki. They still had two months to go before returning. They didn't think very highly of our food or our roads. Or our African Americans. Sun Ray and I realized just how American a creature political correctness is when Hubert and Kerstin told us unabashedly that they hadn't enjoyed their stay in Louisiana because there were so many blacks, whom they found to be loud and aggressive.

Around nightfall, a very friendly Ranger Rick type came around to each site with a schedule of the evening's events. At 7 they were having a program called "Horns and Antlers and the Critters That Wear Them." I was chatting with the Germans when Ranger Rick came over to tell them the schedule. Their English wasn't so hot. Hubert nodded and smiled at the ranger. "Horns and antlers, wunderbar," I imagined him thinking.

The Germans' front tire was bare, and they had a new one waiting in Salt Lake City, a 772-mile ride. I hope they made it. Talking to them, I was reminded of the couple of longer trips I've taken. That's what motorcycling is about for me--the trips with no set end point that last a month or two and give you time to think crazy thoughts like, "What am I doing at 4 in the morning on a Tuesday on a dirt road in the middle of Alabama? What am I doing with my life? Are those headlights behind me? Is that a banjo I hear?"

All the menace and adventure have gone out of motorcycling, replaced by fat flag-waving, Jesus-loving assholes who prefer a safe version of two-wheeled rebellion that even my grandmother approves of. Now, I don't think we should all be outlaws, but why do so many "bikers" seek the warm serenity of the rally and the toy run over the balls-out marathon adventure ride? Why do you see so many bikes parked outside bars on beautiful riding days? Why don't we see more Huberts and Kerstins traversing America? Perhaps adventure has gone out of style. It's about a safe version of rebellion now.

Sun Ray may be taking his wife Kirsti's last name (he is, after all, a gentleman and a Francophile), but I hope he doesn't get rid of the bike. We can't be astronauts or superheroes. But we can defy death at a high rate of speed. All it takes is time spent apart from life's little comforts, good tires and twisting blacktop.

The Ex-Con of Carlsbad

Ozona, TX--I met Chopper at the first motel I stopped at on my way to Florida. It was early September 2008. He was just kicking around the country for a few months, as he does every summer, on his hand-built Harley. He'd gotten stuck in the same storm in Texas that I had, my first day on the road, and we decided to ride together.

I was clued in to Chopper's philosophical leanings at our first gas stop on the way out of town when he told the cashier to "have a blessed day, praise God."

Chopper was on his way back to New Jersey after three months on the road. He was a cripple who walked with a cane, an ex-con who owned property in Carlsbad and had spent a couple of years in the pokey there for an ambiguous offense that had something to do with assaulting a cop. I think. He was also possibly the world's strongest man. This born-again evangelical Christian, who was also an ex-outlaw biker, competed in strongman competitions and was set to break a world bench-press record at an event in Las Vegas that November. He told me over a camp fire one night that when he was younger and meaner he would lift Japanese motorcycles he disagreed with over his head and into Dumpsters.

We spent a week on the road together, riding 800 miles in one day to stay ahead of Hurricane Ike and looking for a campground at 4 in the morning in the middle of Alabama.