The next morning was a rough one. I ended up only getting around four hours of sleep, and we had a long day ahead of us. Once we collected our things we left for Las Vegas.
...but not before stopping in Kayenta Village for breakfast. This place was a ghost town when we were here. We arrived just as the shops were opening and ate outside.
It was about 10 AM when we finally finished breakfast and got back on the road. We took SR-18 and met back up with I-15 in Arizona. From there it was a straightaway to Vegas. Originally, we were planning on passing through without stopping, but I had never been to the Harley-Davidson Cafe on the strip. We were glad we checked it out. It was something cool.
From there we traveled along Highway 95 for a couple of hours, passed through Boulder City, and then arrived at our next destination, the Hoover Dam.
It was amazing to see in person. I'm not normally afraid of heights, but this thing will give you the jitters. It reminded me of a video I had once seen of a tourist video that captured a suicide right where we were. The next day I found the video and it blew our minds (no pun intended for those who have seen it). On our way out we pulled off at the Lake Mead viewpoint and took this.
From there, we didn't have anymore sightseeing and it would be a straight shot to my brother's house in Gilbert, Arizona. Around the time we were ready to stretch our legs again we were near the Harley shop in Kingman, Arizona off Route 66. We spent an extra 10 minutes finding it, and then took a load off inside.
There are always a couple mistakes on road trips, and we made our first one here. We figured it was still early enough in the day to enjoy some leisure riding and maybe go out of our way a bit. None of us had ridden on Route 66 before and after talking it over we agreed to explore the historic road a little bit.
Our plan hinged on the road called Hackberry that cuts South from Route 66 and connects with I-40 and Highway 93. We left Kingman and followed Route 66 Northeast for about forty-five minutes before it curved Southeast. After another 10 minutes we flew by a dirt road with railroad tracks crossing it. None of us were sure if this was the road that was on the map and none of us wanted to take it. We decided it couldn't be the road and continued on. Just five minutes later we came to another dirt road, and unfortunately, it was marked as Hackberry.
We were all a little devastated, to be honest. We had ridden over an hour out of our way, only to arrive at a 20 mile-long dirt road. After considering our options, we decided it would be faster to take the dirt road than to backtrack and cut back over, which would probably take at least two more hours.
I've had experience riding dirt bikes off road, but riding a Harley in deep sand and dirt with mud spots and water puddles everywhere is a whole different story. At around fifteen miles per hour we made our way South, each with our legs out ready to try and save the bike if anything happened. At one point, our engines frightened a cow and it ran directly in front of Brad. From where I was it looked like he should have hit it, but somehow he didn't.
After riding for what seemed like an hour we stopped the engines and checked the map. We had only covered a little more than half of the distance of the dirt road. With no other choice, we continued on.
The only silver lining was the last third of the dirt road had patches of asphalt. We were able to increase our speeds at times, but just when we would get excited about it we would encounter another stretch of dirt road.
Finally, up ahead we could see the overpass for I-40. What we didn't realize was that I-40 passed over Hackberry and didn't connect at all. We wasted another 5 minutes investigating any possible entrances to the freeway, but there were none. That meant we had another 5 miles of fun ahead of us.
Later, we finally connected with Highway 93, and pulled off at the first gas station another thirty minutes down the road. We were glad we made it in one piece and that the dirt was behind us. As we refueled our bikes and bodies I called my brother, Andy, to let him know where we were. He informed me we still had at least another three hours of riding ahead of us.
The sun was going down, we were tired, and we had already been on the road for more than nine hours. It ended up taking us 13 hours to get from Kayenta, Utah to Gilbert, Arizona. I can honestly say that day two of this trip was a major adventure. It had ups and downs, but all in all, it was amazing.
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