It didn’t. This would be Fiona’s first (and hopefully not last) day of riding in the rain. I asked her if she was ready for it, and she replied, “Yeah, it’ll be fun.”

Fun.

Exactly what the ride wasn’t.

As we headed for Vegas, the skies darkened once more, and a HUGE crosswind tried to blow us off the highway.

“Having fun back there?”

“Err… sure. Can we get hit by lightning on this thing?”

“Yes… why?”

Fiona had never been on a motorcycle before, and certainly never done anything like this trip. I was a little nervous about how she’d handle the trip and how she’d deal with the stock back seat. For over 700 miles in four days of riding ‘bitch’, she never once bitched, at least to me.

And now it looked like we were heading into Armageddon. The temperature dropped, the winds swirled, and then… the rains came. Heavy, soaking rains that feel like someone is throwing golf balls at your helmet type of rain.

In the middle of the storm, I snuck a peek back at her, and she was… laughing. Having a great time. This girl is nuts. After a half hour of dodging cats and dogs and lightning bolts and golf balls, the skies suddenly cleared. Las Vegas was the last obstacle in our path.

We did the obligatory Strip cruise, made up for missing the ‘Welcome to Nevada’ sign at the border by posing at the “Fabulous Las Vegas’ sign.

We stopped again at the border to get the last ‘Welcome to…” picture. Ahh, California… WE MADE IT!

Pulling off into the Stateline rest area to fill up, I suffered the only motorcycle damage of the whole trip. Getting ready to leave the gas station, I grabbed the clutch lever, pulled it in… and the tip of the lever simply fell off. In 3500 miles that was the worst thing that happened to the bike. Annoying, but in the grand scheme of things… it could have been worse.

Then it was time to drop the hammer down I-15 (or, if you are a Californian… ‘the 15’) So drop the hammer we did, keeping the needle in triple digits to get to Los Angeles.

As the speedo needle stayed above 100, the gas gauge needle was periously close to ‘E’

For some brilliant reason, there aren’t any gas stations gas stations out that way. Fortunately for us, in a town that could easily double as the set for a horror film, we found an open station.

Full of fuel, we only had one more problem to overcome. For reasons that a guy from the East Coast will never understand, The California Department of Chaos decided to close ‘the 15’ – the the highway that would take us to the end of our journey. This minor inconvenience added about 40 miles to the trip.

Of course there were about fifteen billion others that were also minorly inconvenienced, and they were stopped in a huge traffic jam. Again, for reasons that I don’t fully understand, California allows motorcycles to ‘lane split’ or ride on the white lines between two lanes. Now, I’ve only lane split once before, and it’s scary. But the other alternative was waiting forever to get through, so we went for it.

I glanced back at Fiona, and she wasn’t laughing anymore. “I’m sore and I want to get off this damn thing.” My sentiments exactly! With the detour finally complete, so was our trip. We popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

3500 miles. From Niagara Falls to corn fields, through rain, cold, snow, a U-Haul, Utah, more rain and a painful detour, we made it.

I’m already looking at routes to ride back home in the spring, but for now will be content riding each and every one of California’s excellent back roads.