“The Mittens”.

Only in November 2015 did I find out they are called “The Mittens”.

 The two stone Buttes in Monument Valley, northeast Navajo County, Arizona. The ones you see Airwolf hidden inside & flying out of in the opening sequences of the 1980’s popular kids TV show & countless cowboy & western films over the years.

Well….that’s my first memory of the American landscape and maybe that’s where the desire to see them with my own eyes comes from.
That part of the USA evokes so many memories of cowboy westerns, the pioneers, gold rush towns, we’ve all seen the films, even the Roadrunner cartoons where Wile E. Coyote inevitably fails to capture his prey & ends up squashed flat under a boulder, or holding on to the wrong end of a stick of dynamite!

My own thoughts & imagination dream of such a day riding through the dessert, actually riding and experiencing the dry air, the sun beating down on me, getting as close as I can get to the Mittens & maybe camping out under the stars.
Well, at long last I’m making the dream happen!

This year I am flying my bike and myself to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and we going to ride the length and breadth of North America. The route I have planned is approximately 9500 miles in around 40 days. Sounds a lot hey? That’s what I’m thinking too. I’m so looking forward to it and also have reservations  

Prior planning prevents piss poor performance. Do it once, do it right. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

The enormity of what lies ahead of me now is beginning to weigh down one shoulders, have I taken to much on? Too many miles in such a short space of time? Will accidents happen? Will I be able to make it round in one piece? I hope so, I really do. I don’t do this lightly and know that my riding skills will be on top. But it’s the others on the road, the unknown North American attitude toward bikers, lane splitting and manoeuvres, drivers using mobile phones, radios, eating, talking, putting their make up on, all distractions that take their minds off the road.

What respect lies out there on the road between the road users of a foreign land and the natives who know them on a daily basis?
We shall have to wait to see.
It’s all in the planning!
J