April 29th
Mile 4277 to 4788, 511 miles
On the road by 7:20 for our final stretch home. This will be our biggest mile day but then we’ll sleep in our own bed tonight!
At this point the trip home is fairly familiar. We stopped at Starbucks for coffee, breakfast and Internet on the outskirts of town, the traffic for an early Monday morning was fairly calm.
We spent our morning watching the landscape go by. Joshua trees and bright pink cactus flowers.The Joshua trees disappeared and soon it was only dry scrub brush and occasional purple and yellow flowers. The expansive high plains desert is lined with naked mountains eroding in fans onto the desert floor. The angle of their striations telling their story of being pushed up from the floor.
After a quick stop in Beaty I asked Jay to stop again so I could see the wild donkeys.
One was so friendly he was easy to pet and expected treats. I gave him a couple of dates and he followed me back to the motorcycle.
“Great, now he’s going to eat both of us” Jay said. I hoped on the bike and we left him sadly staring at us on the side of the road.
It became cold. As I layered up Jay said “the blueberry rides again!” Again with the motorcycle rain gear so big it’s like wearing a Samurai suit!
But I’m grateful to have it and it was free!Naked mountains became blanketed with snow as we got closer to home.
We took a left turn towards Mono Lake before heading north again and visited a highway we took on a past trip. That was a cold dark night on our way to Vegas on the motorcycle without warm gear. The rolling highway dropping away from us into nothing again and again. The only way of knowing there was a highway in front of us was the blue line on the Google map leading us on. I am so grateful to be a blueberry!
We stopped in Tahoe for dinner, so we would arrive home fed to crazy dogs and an empty fridge.
We climbed one last pass above the snow line for the day, 4 passes today above 7 and 8 thousand feet to get home.
We arrived in time to catch the sunset.
Jay waited until we got home to get sick, woke up today with a fever. He is resting in his own bed after getting us home safely.