On the road to the Laughlin River Run

Just roll the bike in here and give that battery a charge.

If you know me then you know I like to collect biker quotes, those pithy, funny, all-too-true one-liners that sum up our collective experiences. Well here's one:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a flat tire and a dead battery.

Yep, that was me Sunday morning. All geared up and ready to go and the bike wouldn't start. The battery didn't have the oomph so I figured that was the problem and I needed to charge it. On inspection I found the connection at the post corroded, so I cleaned that and hooked up the pigtail that I bought to make doing so easier. An hour later it fired up and I left.

That night I spent at my brother's in Grand Junction so I put the battery on the charger all night and had no more problems. Until today. At one point it didn't start readily and it was idling rough. I rolled in to Laughlin and Bullhead City, the Arizona town across the river from Laughlin, and stopped at a Kawasaki shop. The guy there guessed a bad battery but the one I have is not very old so I wanted to check things out. I figured I'd charge it again and see if it runs fine again.

I have the charger but knew I had nowhere I could reach an outlet with just the charge unit so I stopped and bought an extension cord. Getting back to my quarters I went to hook them up and found I had bought a two-prong extension but needed a three-prong.

No problem, the folks here told me. Just roll the bike on into the clubhouse and connect it there. That's my Kawi in the picture by the pool table. And that's where it sits charging as I write this.

The trip out

The trip out was good. I blasted across to Grand Junction very quickly, and then it only took about 5 hours to cross Utah and reach Cedar City, where I had made arrangements to stay with a local biker family. (That's another story and I'll tell it to you later.)

Heading south on I-15 to Nevada I was amazed with how green the "desert" is. I've never seen it anything but brown and grey. But I've never been here in April before and it is just as green as you can imagine. Totally blew me away.

I had planned to cruise down along the shore of Lake Mead but the guy at the Visitors Center in Mesquite told me there was construction along there and I'd probably want to avoid it. He also told me there were high wind warnings out.

I don't know about the first because I didn't take the lakeshore ride, but I can attest to the high winds. Particularly south from Vegas to Laughlin they were bad. We had run into really bad winds on that same stretch many years ago but in fact it was worse then because they were crosswinds. Today it was mostly headwinds, so that was not as bad.

I finally pulled into Laughlin and they're setting up everywhere for the big event, which starts tomorrow, but there was really nothing going on today. So the plan is to get a good night's sleep tonight and get up tomorrow and dive in. This should be interesting.

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