After another long night of uploading at our hotel, we got a full five hours of sleep last night. Mike woke up and the first words out of his mouth were: “I don’t think its working”. I responded with “What are you talking about?” “I planned on losing 10 pounds during this trip but I don’t feel that it’s working.” Well, he’s right, Even though we have not been eating too badly, our physical activity has been limited to slinging a leg over a Superhawk seat, squeezing the clutch, pulling the front brake, pressing the rear brake and twisting the throttle. Oh, and working on this darn computer!

We got up and rode over the town of Aztec where we met up with Sun Country Honda’s HRCA Chapter President Ron Kimbell who was kind enough to cook us up some breakfast using a metal cultivating disk off of a farm implement as the skillet!

Also there was Keith Jones, owner of the dealership and Richard Hostetler. We had a good time talking about just about everything under the sun. Afterwards, we said our goodbyes and headed out for Taos New Mexico. The road to Taos we took was Rt. 64 and it is one of the nicest roads Mike and I have ever ridden on. We had over 125 miles of wide sweeping turns and again, some fantastic “eye candy” in the huge cliffs and mountains we traveled across.

We approached the village of Chuma, which sits at an elevation of 7860 feet above sea level. The bikes were starting to show the lack of oxygen in their performance. We have now been over 5000 feet above sea level for the last three days!

We passed through Chuma and headed uphill. For a long time! We got to a point where we would have been happy to have the bikes running in an anemic (help me on that one Doug!) state! We both agreed that as we were climbing the hill, we lost at least 75% of what little power we had at sea level. We were thinking that a Z-50 (OK, CRF-50F nowadays!) would walk by us like we were standing still! We pulled off at a point and got a few pictures including one of an interesting looking flower that was growing all by its lonesome.

We then continued to climb. We went on for quite awhile and reached a peak of 10,000 feet above sea level! The bikes were running about as rich as could be without fouling a plug from the severe lack of oxygen! When we reached the 10,000-point, we pulled off and saw of all things… SNOW! We took a picture of the stuff using the camera timer for the first time to try to get us both in the shot. I ran over and pushed Mike in to the snow just in time for the picture to be taken!

After that we took some pictures of Brazos Cliffs, which consists of rock, that they state is 1.7 Billion years old!

As we were looking around, I asked Mike “Hey, when was the last time we built a snowman in June?” He responded with “In all the years I’ve known you, we have never built a snowman”. “Well, now’s as good as a time as ever!” I said. Well, here are a couple of pictures of the result!

We coasted the bikes, engines off, down the hill for about 4 miles and I got mine up to about 55mph before we had to start them to continue the ride. I have always enjoyed this type of riding, as all you hear is the wind through the helmet. Almost perfect riding.

We got back on the winding Rt. 64 and before we came into Taos we rode over the Rio Grande. The bridge we crossed is famous for bungie jumping! I also saw a flower growing out of a small cactus and could not resist taking a close up. The Rio Grande holds more views that neither words nor pictures can do justice. But we tried our best for the pictures!

After we got into Taos (a true tourist trap if we ever saw one!) we searched for over an hour to find a hotel with access to the Internet that would allow us to upload today’s story. Taos sits at over 7000 feet above sea level but the bikes seemed to have much more power. We can’t wait to get down these mountains, the bikes will feel like CBR1000RR’s! Well Maybe a 600…

Today, we ended up riding 220 miles and that takes our grand total to date to 1415 miles.

We have no idea if our next stop will have access to allow us to upload the story (matter of fact, we’re not sure where our next stop will be!) so, we may be day behind until Monday. Kansas will most likely give me some time to point out some of Honda's history as well since we suspect the ride to be well... flat!

Till then…