Vegas Baby!

Vegas Baby!

We got through all of Death Valley without the bike having any trouble at all. We were mostly travelling at 60+ mph through there and the temp gauge stayed at a steady 80-90c  (175-190f)  but as soon as we hit backed up rush hr traffic in Vegas the crankcase temp spiked up to 120c (250f)  in 15 mins!  Oh Sh!t!   The bike was starting to knock a bit and I started shutting her down any time we came to a complete stop even if for just 30 seconds to a min at a time.  We had to find a place to pull off and quick!

We took the nearest exit which happened to have a Motel 6 right across from the strip and an In and Out Burger down the street, Sweet!   We got a room and noticed that we werent the only ones who had overheated, there was 3 more cars in the parkinglot with their hoods open and steaming.    We got some lunch at my first In and Out Burger and waited out the heat of the afternoon watching a Dirty Jobs marathon and went to check out the town.

Cece took some pics while we rode down the strip.  They came out somewhat ok considering we were moving and it was low light, the top pic is a 8 second exposure with mine from the motel parking-lot.

We finally found a place to park at the Excalibur and were going to walk down the strip.  I wanted to go inside real fast and check out the inside…   When the shops in the mall inside started closing we finally realized that we’d been in there a loooong time and it was getting late.   So much for checking out the strip at night, those casinos are dangerous black holes of time.

Please hurry and take your dam picture, the dam tour is this way for our dam questions.

Wow Lake Meade is extremely low, unlike Lake Powell at the beginning of our trip that was at record high levels and flooding everything.

Bone dry spillways. There was lots of weeds and grass growing off the side of the rocks against the spillways it must have been low for a very long time.

Pretty cool bridge. Sure will be nice when this relief route opens up so traffic doesn’t have a huge bottleneck going over the dam and all the terrorist checkpoints for large vehicles left over from 9/11.