UPDATE: September 4. I have added a full length narrated HD video
on my Vimeo channel using the footage I shot on the Titan Missile Museum adventure but was
unable to edit or upload it to this blog while I was on the road. You
can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/138331672

I am up earlyish this morning as I would like to allocate half the day to riding after touring The Titan Missile Museum. As soon as I am up I start drinking water. I always try to drink at least 1.5L of water between the time I wake up and when I leave.

I can always tell if I have been successful in my hydration efforts when I get out onto the open road and I try to put my feet on the rear passenger pegs. This involves me bending my legs severely at the knees and putting my feet up quite high behind me. I would show you a picture but it is a tough selfie to take!

Mornings I have successfully hydrated I can do this with ease, on days I am less successful I immediately get cramps in my groin, thighs, calves or arches when I try to put my feet up. This morning was one of those mornings and I struggled to get into my riding position. The rider position on this bike has always been less than ideal in my opinion.

I am taking into account I am 6'5" and have very long legs but I think the standard pegs are about 2" too high, this is exacerbated by the riding shoes I am wearing that have heel, sole and arch protection which makes them thicker than normal. Having my feet higher rotates my whole body until I am no longer really sitting on my butt, more like my tail bone. Then the stock handlebars were quite low so I ended up reaching for them.

Shortly after I bought the bike I had 'dog bones' inserted into the handlebar risers to lift them up 3" so they weren't such a reach. I have looked at putting floorboards on it but OEM Triumph ones are almost $750 USD. There is also a highway peg solution but that also includes adding engine guard bars that look, in my opinion, clowny. What I need is a creative and talented welder friend to help me out. I used to have a creative and talented welder friend, but he moved to Florida! Anyone know anyone? Please put them in touch with me, its a paying gig.

So it takes awhile but I eventually coax my old bones into the yoga like driving position, I called the Constipated Dog! My plan was about 15 miles on I-10 then a couple of USGT's to get me to Green Valley where the silo is located. I am still trying to get my legs bent when my turn off comes and goes without me taking it.

I had naturally checked the map before I left and programmed the 3 items that my Goldfish-like memory can handle. (Putting a 4th one in loses the 1st). Sahuarita Hwy (the turn I missed) to E. Nogales hwy to West Duvall Mine Road. Missing the first turn puts me on, literally, a road to Mexico. I know I missed my turn, but stubbornly, because of my whole don't turn back rule, I just keep going, hoping it will somehow magically turn out. It doesn't!

I make it all the was to the Border Check Point at Nogales, MX. All of the turns that I could have taken that were westbound were gravel roads. I am pretty sure having a conversation with a Mexican border agent doesn't help my position in any way so I turn around about 100 yards short. I hope no is watching and wondering why someone would go all that way and then change their mind, no one does. It is about a 30 mile mistake, but I have to drive all the way back. Eventually I find my turn off is about 100 yards off the Interstate!

Once on Sahuarita Hwy everything goes as planned and within an hour I am in the parking lot of The Titan Missile Museum. This is an incredibly interesting chapter of our existence. It is every Cold War nightmare realized in a fire and forget 9 megaton missile guaranteed to ruin your day if it ever comes to your town, in a 3 mile wide fireball hotter than the surface of the sun!

There is too much to tell about this site here, I did buy a book the last time I was here, you can borrow it if you like.



Their website is here: http://www.titanmissilemuseum.org/

A Wikipedia article about the Titan missile family is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(ro cket_family)

One interesting fact was the development of 'stable' fuel and oxidizer that could be stored loaded aboard the missile and reduced the launch time from about 90 minutes to 58 seconds. Yes, from 1958 to 2005 World War III was never more than 58 seconds away. That was after multiple levels of launch order authentication but once the keys were turned and the buttons pressed, the automated launch sequence was started and could not be stopped.

They had no abort, no manual self destruct, no re-targeting once in flight. Once started that bird was going to vaporize some AXIS real estate somewhere on the planet in 30 minutes or less.

That being said the hoops of paranoia missile crews had to jump through just to get to work were borderline psychotic. Everyone had a side arm and almost all areas of the silo, except the restroom and lunch room were called No Lone Zones, you couldn't be alone, you had to be with your armed buddy to keep you in line!



Then the levels of authentication required to get to the point where you twisted a key and pushed a button were layers upon layers upon layers of inter-locking nerosis. You would think there is no way they could have ever launched one by accident. Well, they didn't, but they came close, 3 times they are willing to tell us about says the Doscent, with a wink in his eye!

All 3 close calls were hardware related and resulted in whole scale changes to the systems to prevent that error from re-occurring. The Meat Puppets did their jobs correctly in all cases, which is rare, we are usually the weak link.

The first time I visited this museum, in 2010 or 2011 I was staying in Tucson for a few days to visit The Pima Air Museum and the Davis Monathan Air Force Base (aka The Bone Yard) where surplus military aircraft are stored in the desert, in perpetuity. I rode down just for the afternoon, but inexplicably I didn't bring a camera of any kind.

The tour at that time was about 3 hours long and included at least 5 if not more levels. Now that tour is called Beyong The Blast Doors and only runs a couple time a month.



The tour now is 90 minutes, 30 of which is a video with out of sync audio played in a stuffy room. The remaining 60 minutes superficially scratches the surface, and spends most of the time in the firing room. The doscent points out the 2 clocks in the room, both set to Zulu time, one is called the 'Launch' clock, the other is the 'Lunch' clock.



We then spend a couple of minutes one level down where we see the actually bird. This silo was commissioned and was under construction just as SALT I was coming down the pipe. The missile was never fueled, nor was the nuke fitted which is why it could be preserved as a museum piece. If it had ever been loaded with fuel and oxidizer it would have needed to be disposed of in accordance with the SALT terms.



The last time I was here I got to sit in the seat and turn the launch key, but no fomal record of it. This time I got a guy to shoot me doing it. Do you think I drove 1000 miles out of my way to get this 12 second video? Well, I will leave that up to you!



Everything was said and done and I was on the road by 1430, I was gonna drive for 3ish hours with the goal of getting north of Phoenix. I headed north to Tucson then hooked up with I-10 for the blast through Phoenix. It was about 105 degrees with the typical labyrinth of interchanges and steamroller traffic. There is no sense getting mad, it is what it is. I twist the throttle hard, put my head on a swivel, increase my tolerance for tail gaters and cutter offers and just try to get through it.

Just north of Phoenix I-10 veers from a NW direction to a purely W so I turn off onto a smaller highway USGT 60 which I hope will turn into the desolated lightly traffic'ed goat trail I love. It is the opposite, bumper to bumper with 4 way traffic lights every 100 yards. Each stop is a frustrating 6 minute wait while we go through each turn pahse and each traffic phase. I am dripping in sweat. I had wanted to get to Kingman, but decided to call it a day in Wickenburg. I had put in about 200 miles.

I drove through town as I like to stay in Mo'tels on the far side of town so the morning departure puts me on the open road more quickly. I am not sure why I am drawn to Mo'tels that are, well, not the nicest. Its not like I hafta save 5 bucks, we all know where that has got me over the past few weeks. So although I see some nice mo'tels on the other side of the street (you can always tell a nice mo'tel when they have hanging flower baskets with pansies near the office and a paved lot).

I decide to pull into The Westerner. It has a For Sale sign out front, no pansies, and a gravel lot. Adhering to my don't go back rule I proceed to the office. It didn't look great from the road and up close it is worse, but somehow dive-ish mo'tels often add to the mystic of the motorcycle adventure.



A Nice Indian Fellow greets me and spooges some lavish attention on my bike, he regales me with tales of riding Triumphs and Enfields back in his native India when he was a boy. I patiently wait while he waxes back to his youth, while sweat runs down the center of my back under my shirt.

I am used to attracting the wrong kind of attention with this bike and vehicles that I have owned in general, it is always old guys harkening back to their 1972 Triumph Bonnyville they had in their younger days, no chicks notice or like my bike. Not that chick attention is desired now that I am so happily married to my BuBu!

I once had a truck like that, a 1970 International Harvester Traveler Scout, known colloquially as a 'corn binder' for its agricultural following . I bought it from my friend Neil Zurawell. It did not garner any attention from female admirers, in fact the very few that ever rode in it were reluctant even to get in. Especially in the rain because the floorboards were rotted through on the passenger side.

However on so many occasions I stopped counting I would be at a red light and glance over to the next vehicle to find an older man staring at the truck with the 1000 yard gaze. He would be remembering the time he picked up Bessie to take her to the barn dance and had a roll in the hay in the back seat with her. I swear I saw more than a couple of these old-timers tearing up.

OK, so the mo'tel owner wants to show me the room, he says it is his policy and he shows me this, which even by my own extremely generous standards is a **** hole, and to top it off it smells strongly of cat pee.



I ask about the cat pee odor and he points to 2 Glade air fresheners on top of the fridge. I think they are outmatched. It has a single bed and as we are looking at the room he is sizing me up and he makes the connection that I am much bigger than the bed, he offers me $10 discount because of that.



The bathroom is scary and reminds me of the toilet facilities of a Nicaraguan prison. Not that I have ever been in a Nicaraguan prison but I have a fertile imagination.



Without question the worst room x 100 I have seen on this trip, and thinking back over 25+ years of bike trips, prolly in the top 3. There was a room once in Midland, TX in the 90's, last room in town, horrifically over priced and infested with ants. Slept in my rain suit on top of the covers.

So terrible room right?

I take it!

I unload the bike into the room. I pull off my riding tack and stack it neatly by the door. I turn the AC on high, it makes an ineffectual buzz for 5 seconds and dies. I go and get medicinal beverages, ice and sandwiches at the Circle-K and fill the sink. I decide to move my riding gear to the other side of the room and when I lift it up I see about 25 black bugs scurry around and disappear down a hole in the baseboard. My own incredibly generous limit has been surpassed.

I go back to Nice Indian Fellow (NIF) and tell him I am checking out, I draw the line at bugs. He offers to show me 2 other rooms. I inspect them closely for working AC and any form of wildlife, they pass inspection. I pick the 'nicer' of the two. He says this room costs $20 dollars more, I look at him incredulously, we have a stare down, he backs off. The real question is why didn't he show me the nicer rooms first?

I make 10 trips across the parking lot carrying my half unpacked ***** into the new room. There is a lady in the suite next door who tells me her life story in little pieces each time I walk into and the out of my room. I think she thinks I am going to be her new friend. I am not. She has half a dozen cats and lets them wander into my room between trips. I stop that by closing the door and which point she says "I guess you don't like cats". A carefully calculated silence stops both the life story and the cat incursions.

For the record, I do like cats, and I love our Harvey! I just so happen to have a picture of him on my phone.



I had already filled the Nicaraguan Prison bathroom sink with bevies and ice so I take all the foam out of my laptop Pelican and use it to transfer them to the new room. I don't want to loose all my ice and as I have already had one of the Jungle Jooz's driving is out of the question to get more. Honestly after having a Jungle Jooz operating any machinery more complicated than a TV remote risks serious injury. They are 12%, 25 oz and cost $2. Gawd Bless 'Merica!



His WiFi is sporadic despite him bragging about the gear all being new, it eventually quits all together which is frustrating as it puts me another day behind on the blog. The AC in this room makes a lot of noise but doesn't actually provide any cooling, but it does have a full size refrigerator. I leave both the fridge and freezer doors wide open and the room finally cools.

The only saving grace to this debacle is it is the time of year for the Perseid meteor shower and while I was a day or 2 past the peak I was still seeing one every couple of minutes. Luckily Wickensburg is in the middle of nowhere and I was facing north away from Phoenix. I watched the shower for about an hour until Cat Lady decided to join me. I said I needed to freshen my cocktail and never went back outside. I know, I am a p****

In the morning NIF appears to send me off, he is chatting me up like we are old buddies. He asks me to give a good review on Trip Advisor, it will help with his efforts to sell the property, I smile and agree to. Gotta keep my karma intact!

As I drive out of the parking lot, Cat Lady is waving good bye from her window.

Day 18
Benson, AZ to Wickenburg, AZ
Titan Missile Museum
90 kms + 320 kms = 415 kms