When Great Days Go SOUTH or Welcome to the Bay Area

Sunday seemed like such a good day. I got up early, loaded saddle bags and suitcase on the bike, found a nice little church that had an early service and was on the road toward San Francisco by shortly after 9.

The area between Fort Bragg and Santa Rosa was, on the map, pretty much devoid of rest stops but I didn't think to look at the area topographically. Had I done so I would have seen that between Highway 1 and 101 lay a small forested uprising. 

I turned on to California Highway 20 West and started climbing. It was a beautiful road on a beautiful day. The road swayed, as if on a whim, continuously meandering between the sun drenched trees for miles and miles. It was mountain dancing at its finest; accelerate, glide, lean, accelerate, glide, lean. The only challenge was the early morning sunshine flittering through the trees on my east-bound route meant that I was periodically and briefly looking into the sun, trying to peer into the quickly approaching shadows of the next turn.

But that was a small price to pay for some good mountain dancing. Had that been the only price for this jaunt it would have been a near perfect day. At one point the trees over head apparently caused the GPS to lose track of my position. It began to call out a series of commands with no more than 5 seconds between utterances:

Take state highway 20 east for 1.5 miles... Take state highway 20 east for 1.5 miles... Take state highway 20 west for 13 miles... In 500 feet turn right... Do a u-turn... Take state highway 20 east for 24 miles... It was quite comical.

Eventually I came to 101 and headed south toward Santa Rosa, just north of San Francisco. When I finally approached Sant Rosa I decided to stop for a cold one and to load my sister Carol's address in the GPS so I could find her house a few minutes south in Cotati, Ca. I found a Chevron station and pulled in, shut the bike off and went inside. It took only a couple of minutes to locate the cooler with the Arizona Ice Tea (my version of a tall cool one). With my purchase in hand I returned to my bike. While standing along side the bike enjoying both the weather and the opportunity to stretch my legs, I noticed that when I had wiped my bike down the night before I had missed a rather dirty section of chrome along the side of the rear fender where the saddle bag fits. It was just that simple, a piece of dirty chrome! That was what made my mind reset, then race ahead to the obvious conclusion that was right in front of me.

I had missed cleaning that piece of chrome because it sat behind, or inboard of, the saddle bag. But I shouldn't be seeing that little piece of chrome because the saddle bag covers it. I may have even looked at the other side to figure out what was going on before the all to obvious  struck home.

My saddle bag was missing! Gone! Where, how, what the....

GONE!!!! With it went my backpacking tent and a couple of smaller non-essential items

Because I get on my bike from the left and have the "suitcase" tied on top of the fender, the right saddle bag was for all practical purposes out of sight, out of mind. I have no idea where it went; was it ripped off while I ate breakfast at the restaurant, while I was in church and the bike sat on the side street in a residential neighborhood? Or did something in the latching mechanism not seat properly when I mounted it that morning and it fell off somewhere over the last 100 plus miles?

I spent about an hour at Sanoma Harley Davison finding out that no HD dealer in California carried that bag and the factory lead time for it was 14 days. But then the parts guy, on a whim, entered the part number for the individual bag, instead of the kit that contains both bags and the hardware and found one dealer in California that had just the right bag! So I'm riding two hours east on Monday to pick it up.

To brighten my day, before making a four hour round trip I'm meeting Scott and Bev for lunch before I hit the road. Circumstances dictated that they are about 25 miles south of here and, because they've been following my adventures, they thought I might be rolling in while they were still here. That will brighten any day, even a gloomy overcast day like this.