Can you spare a little...

The first time I rode my motorcycle across the country I took the northern states. I started trekking through New York state, Pennsylvania ,Ohio, continuing right below the Great Lakes and heading towards South Dakota. The main highway that I took offered little scenic value and a large part of that trip looked very similar. I spent almost three days traveling with one thing in mind, and that was the terrain of South Dakota. Though I had seen pictures of  The Badlands,  The Black Hills and the monuments in the Midwest I was excited to experience it in person, especially on the motorcycle.
While making my way out there I had some difficult hours of riding, I was tired and sore, my ears had become clogged from the wind and  I was sunburned. At one point in Illinois I had gotten disoriented and actually started heading the wrong way, tired and hungry. That day I made little time and gained very little distance so I decided to spend the night and get some rest. The roads in those states, before getting into South Dakota, are mostly flat and straight and hours of that is enough to drive you a little insane. I found myself getting into an almost meditative state and just rolling on the throttle and looking straight ahead not thinking of too much. Occasionally a song would pop in my head and I'd hum or sing it to myself over and over. I did what I had to do in the midst of some uncomfortable riding just to keep trekking on.
An open field...some horses...some cows...another open field...a rest stop...another rest stop...and another...
On the third day I had crossed into South Dakota and spent the night. That morning i headed towards Rapid City. About an hour or two into that day I started to see some of the topography change. Up ahead I could see the faint outline of mountains. As I got closer they became more defined and I could see the red hue of the rocks. I made it to the Badlands national park and I drove my bike through some winding roads and pulled over to take in the land. There were layers of different colored rock and spires and other shapes that had been formed by the wind over millions of years ago. As my excitement for making it there took over, I found myself feeling rested and happy. My body didn't feel tired or achy and I was overwhelmed by the landscape.
The next couple days consisted of smaller trips on the bike through the twisting roads of the Black Hills. I took my time and saw all sorts of wildlife and the scenery seemed to change constantly. I drove through more large rock formations, thick dense forest , switchback roads that I couldn't do more than 5 miles per hour on and an elevation change that thinned the air out.
I was able to meet and talk to people at most of the sites I stopped at and shared stories about traveling across the states to get there. The land itself filled me with a sense of energy and new life and the miles of mundane trekking in the previous days faded quickly.
The change of scenery exceeded anything I could have imagined or sensationalized from photos alone and filled me with a sense of peace and real happiness.
I was scared when I set out on that trip because I did not know what to expect, I thought about the dangers of the trip as well. I was sore and uncomfortable and I even had moments that I questioned myself, Why the hell am I doing this? But after the long trip out there and the long straight road of miles and miles of constant, what greeted me was an experience I will never forget. I held on tight to those handle bars and  looked ahead and though I was not sure what to expect, if I had turned back I would never known that there was something incredible waiting there for me all that time.

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”~Anatole France

To the winding roads, and switchbacks, and a change of scenery...CHEERS!

Jim