California here we come!  All loaded up and ready to roll. Sherm is driving and pulling his bike, since he has to come back across Death Valley on Sunday afternoon, then get loaded up to head up to Oregon in the RV with Pat on Monday.

A couple of shots at their lovely home in Kingman, Arizona...

As I said previously, Sherm likes to buy and sell bikes, and has owned/ridden at least 100 in his lifetime. This is his garage. The big one in the middle is my Gold Wing, and the other 5 belong to Sherm :-)  The one on the trailer is the one going to Solvang, a sweet Honda CTX. That little bugger gets 80 mpg!!

Sherm's lovely wife Pat, on their patio. For folks who don't like yard work, this is the place to live!

This morning we took off about 6:30 a.m. for Castaic, California, where we'll spend the night before heading to Fillmore for a wonderful breakfast at Cat and Jim's house, and then on to Solvang for a rally with our VROC group. This is one of the smaller annual rallies that I've always wanted to get to since it started several years ago.

It was about 97 degrees when we went through Needles at about 8:15 a.m., and it never got hotter than that. As we got into some higher elevations, it actually cooled quite nicely and we had a nice breeze, so the riding could have been much worse. We pulled off in Ludlow for a break, and ran into the two guys on Harley's that I saw yesterday in Truxton (home of Bert, the donkey), and they said it was 113 in Needles when they came through a short time later. Glad we got out early!

A Joshua tree... they were pretty neat looking.

I wasn't really trying to take pictures of trucks, they just got in the way... but there are a lot of them out here!

We stopped for lunch at a little Mexican place in Littlerock, California, called Que Paisa.

I thought Sherm was taking a picture of the food (as he always does, for Sherm that's like saying grace), not taking a picture of the sweaty biker trash who was about to devour it! That had to be the best chile relleno I ever ate :-)  Sherm said his enchiladas were really good as well, and tasted a lot like the Mexican fare he gets in Algodones, Mexico, where they visit quite often when they winter in Yuma.

So now we're parked at a Rodeway Inn in Castaic, cooling off and blogging, and a little later we'll go in search of some dinner.

Can't wait for the Solvang rally to begin! It's always fun to meet VROCers whom you've seen post on the web forum, but never met in person. I love these small rallies, you can actually get to know people and make new friends.

That's it for now, I'll check in again tomorrow evening. Have a great night!