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| rear sprocket |
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| pac man damage |
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| miles and miles of gravel |
Drank too many of those 32 ounce beers last night. Got back on the Loneliest Road and went east through Ely, where we found Utah route 21, which seemed even lonelier. It's narrower, hotter, and has a lot less traffic. Lonelier. Almost scary. Gravelly. A good place to pick up a stone and break a drive belt. When we crossed into Utah, we set the clock forward to Mountain Time, and got on I 15 southbound to Hurricane, UT, where the temp. was a searing 98 degrees. This was quite a change from the 48 degrees when we left Eureka, NV. We couldn't find a restaurant near the hotel that served beer (Mormons!), so we opted for Subway sandwiches and a six pack in the room. Took the Road Glide through a nearby car wash and removed just some of the over 4500 miles of bugs and grime.
Pack Man Cracks: that’s the official designation in the Harley Davidson Service Manual, and I discovered it after returning from a cross country blast from the Pacific Coast in California, to The Hudson Valley in New York. I’d taken Highway 50 across Nevada, THE LONELIEST ROAD, and decided to head south, just past Ely, on 93. I was going to Zion, and sought out the road less travelled. Less travelled, indeed. And I’m really not sure if I stayed on 93, or somehow wound up on 894, an unpaved road across the Great Basin. Both roads end up in the same place, more or less. But there were long stretches of road that consisted of nothing more than miles and miles of little beige pebbles. And at first, I kind of took it slow, but then I’d drive several miles and get to the top of the next rise, and for miles in the distance, I saw more of the same. Heat waves, like a mirage, dancing off little beige pebbles. So I sped up, going faster and faster on those little pebbles, there was no traffic, no reason for me to stop or even slow down. It was hot like the desert. And those little pebbles were bouncing around, like carborundum, on the underside of my bike, bouncing everywhere…bouncing into the drive belt, and rolling through the sprocket.
Pac Man was the little round video dot, with a big mouth, in the 1980’s arcade video game. And it was with that wide open mouth, that Pac Man would gobble up little pac dots or “biscuits,” in a maze, all the while searching for enemies and “power pellets.” So…when I got home from my cross country adventure, to the beautiful Hudson Valley, each and every tooth on my drive belt looked like it had a mouth. A mouth that could open wide and was ready to devour the various enemies and power pellets.
It was an expensive proposition, changing that belt. I had to buy the belt and both sprockets. I bought the BIG SOCKET TO REMOVE THE BIG NUT….and an electric impact gun, to get that fucker loose. And of course gaskets, and hardware. And while I was in there, some new rubber mounts on the pivot shaft…and I needed a new rear tire, anyway. Expensive proposition. But you know what, that front sprocket, the one that came off the transmission, that fucker makes a great paperweight. And it was all in the name of adventure.
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