The Road to Tombstone

Gerald on his Highball -
Photo courtesy of Steve Mclean

Tombstone; the destination for my first multi-day group ride and longest single-day ride total. By the time we all met up there were nine riders, all of us on Victories for the three-day ride – three Visions, five Cross-countries if we still count Brad Parrack’s beautiful newly and heavily modified bike, and one High Ball ridden by Brad’s son Gerald. On the visions we had Kevin Shaw, the ride leader, Steve Mclean Sr., and Jim Liston. Including Brad and me our Cross riders were Mike Roark, Greg Brown, and Tim Tarbet. In my mind Gerald had the gutsiest ride of us all with the High Ball, moderate ape hangers, no windscreen, and no seat back; he rode the crap out of that bike and reminded me of when my best friend and I took off on our under powered and under equipped Hondas for 4,000 miles – a CB500 and a 350 Scrambler. Well done young man. 

My kick stand was up at 4:27 am, three minutes early, and I headed east out the 210 to meet Kevin at the Seidners Collision Center in Duarte. Fortunately this was not a harbinger of things to come and nobody needed the place other than as a meet point. The Cheshire moon was low in front of me and had Venus hanging below like a Liz Taylor diamond gleaming in the predawn sky. The two us jumped right back on the 210 for 13 miles to pick up Steve at a park-and-ride. Still dark out, we rode out to Moreno Valley and brought the ride number up to seven with Brad, Gerald, Greg, and Tim.

After we met, re-met, and greeted each other we geared up swapping out clear eyewear for sunglasses and jumped on Highway 10 for the first longish, as it turned out, ride segment to gas up 94 miles later at Chiriaco Summit. The sun made its grand entrance and we rode right into it. For the most part I rode in the middle of the pack with Tim preferring the sweep position and Kevin in the lead. We had a pretty calm ride until we hit the San Gorgonio Pass and the big wind farms with the gigantic turbines stretching along the pass and ridgelines like Indian warriors stretched out as shown in the old western movies. With the sun rising more white than yellow making the clouds silver in the celeste-blue sky and us coming up the grade into it the riders ahead of me were silhouetted in front of the turbines in the grayscale scene; the only color showing was the red taillights drawing us onward as we snaked up the grade.

Fueled up, we pushed into Arizona to meet up with Jim and Mike in Quartzsite. At this point Kevin was taken to task for being ten minutes late after 234 miles and three meet points. After all, we had another 100 miles to breakfast in Buckeye and Jim was hungry. To be honest, as soon as he said it, so was I; I hadn’t given it much thought with all the excitement of the adventure ahead of me. Considering that we wouldn’t eat lunch a late proper breakfast, as Dale Moews would describe it, worked just fine. As the rest of the trip unfolded, not stopping for lunch was the pattern; I felt right as home as that was the way we worked microwave radio site visits in the middle of nowhere.

The next hop was 150 miles into Tucson where we stopped at HMD and since I hadn’t taken the time to figure out what that was I had a nice surprise. HMD, Heavy Metal Desigz is a custom design and fabricator for motorcycles and specializing in the Victory line. Arlen Ness and HMD are official distributors of each other's parts. This is where Brad got the parts and design help for his bike. They also do cars and trucks; basically, anything on wheels they will make look awesome! Mike Saenz is the originator of HMD and he hosted a tour of the shop; he and the rest of the team are gracious, knowledgeable and friendly. The current in-shop project is shown here and is similar to Brad’s black XC, they are both stunning bikes. I highly recommend a visit to the website at: http://www.hmd520.com/ . Start with HMD if you want to do some great work on your ride.

HMD design Victory Cross Country

Close up from HMD Website

Another 69 miles later and we checked into the Sagebrush Inn in Tombstone, it was perfect for our group, hitching posts in front of the rooms for our bikes and everything. I had the Fred McLaury room having left the Maureen O’Hara suite for Tim. Dinner that night was a 10-block walk to The Depot Steakhouse & Johnny Ringo’s Bar and since nobody really noticed my western style riding boots I’d have been better off walking it in my tennis shoes. Good meal, good friends, and a good day all around.

When all was said and done and all was seen that I was to see over the 571 miles and 10-block walk the quote of the day for me was something like this: “Hair? I thought she’d just got out of the pool and that was a swim cap!”

Ride safe, be well, and keep the iron side up.