Day 5 - Bishop to (almost) Bodie to Merced

261 Miles

Day 5 Trip Map

 Well...as Robbie Burns so succinctly put it, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft a-gley."  Set out this morning for Bodie, California.  Made the 10 miles of good road and about one of the three miles of bad road before saying "To hell with this" and turning around.  The road wasn't that bad though it was hard and one huge washboard, capable of jarring your molars from your head.  What made me blow it off was the nice little shower that had been following me up the mountain.  I determined 1) I wasn't going to walk around the place in a rain storm and 2) if it came hard as it has in the area for the past two days the going up certainly wouldn't be worth the coming down.  So, as Clint would say, I improvised, adapted, and overcame.  I went over the mountain(s).

A whopping 50 years ago I was stationed at Castle AFB, California.  This is just outside of Merced/Atwater, California.  So, when I came down the mountain from Bodie I headed over the mountains on Hwy 108, over the Sonora Pass (elev. 9624 ft.).  This is one of those great high mountain pass rides with bunches of twisties and ups-and-downs.  The grades run from 8% to as much as 26% and I can assure you the latter get your attention.  In fact, some of the twisties were as severe as any I've encountered in my many rides through the mountains.  They seem to have a penchant for those "interesting" little turns which go sharply up, or sharply down, mid-turn, making it essentially a blind turn.  These are almost always "1st gear" turns...and it's a good thing, turning blind is another of my least favorite things.  Like Thelma, I want to choose whenever I go barreling off the side of a mountain.

I hinted that the cold was coming.  With the rain it got here.  The trip through the desert was totally forgotten as I armored up, covered those with rain gear and began to feel the pain the higher I went.  It was a great ride though the rain certainly makes those curves appear more problematic.  The up route from the eastern side was pretty abrupt, but, though sharply downward at first, the runout to finally get down to the central valley seemed to go on forever.  Of course, I was hungry so that probably had something to do with it.

The "eastern" side heading out from Bishop.

Mono Lake

More Mono

You see the strangest things on these trips.  I pulled off the road to armor up and saw this pair of jeans with a tee shirt lying next to the fence.  Someone placed a rock on them, I guess to prevent them from blowing away and then just left 'em there.  I didn't need a pair and certainly wasn't going to check them for sizes.  Besides, looked to small for me anyway.

This is a shot of the road to Bodie.  As you can see, the paved section is just fine winding through some neat little valleys with cattle roaming around.  The bad section began with some serious "up" which would have been "down" on the way out.  Any hill climber will tell you the up is the easy part.

 A view upward toward the Sonora Pass

 

Betsy, patiently awaiting my return from a Bob Cummings moment.

 

 Cute little loping stream

That tightened up

Got to Merced about 3:30pm.  Betsy needs a blood transfusion so I located the Kawasaki dealer here.  Naturally they were closed on Monday.  Hopefully they can take care of us first thing in the morning.  Betsy's fine, I'm just overprotective where oil is concerned.  Cheapest insurance you can buy for a motor.  So...if they can't take care of us quickly I'll just handle it in Reno, our next stop.

Merced Cinema

Went out for a little dinner downtown to see if the movie theater was still there.  It is.  Fifty years ago I was a part-time usher at this theater.  My buddy SSgt Pierre Limoges worked there on weekends and got me on too.  I was glad to see it.  Hopefully, if I have enough time tomorrow I can stop by my old base, Castle AFB.  It's closed and commercial now, but there's supposedly a pretty good air museum.  Castle was the only base in the Air Force training combat crews for the B-52 and the KC-135s.  We, obviously, were part of SAC and fully operational even though the primary mission was training.  That means we had ORIs (Operational Readiness Inspections) just like any other SAC base.  There was a great movie called 'Strategic Air Command' with Jimmy Stewart that depicted an ORI.  A SAC plane lands and the lead officers ask to be taken immediately to Operations.  Upon arrival they say, "this is an ORI, the clock starts now at XXXX hours."  The base then scrambles every operational aircraft and is measured on their performance.  Not a few base commanders were sacked after a poor performance.

Since Castle trained combat crews we had lots of planes and lots of pilots.  The prevailing winds at Castle were from the NW.  Once, though, the ORI was called and the planes had to take off SE...over Merced.  It is difficult to describe what it's like for 40-45 B-52s and 30-35 KC-135s (Boeing 707 frame) to leave the ground every 15-20 seconds, one veering left, the next going straight, and the next veering right...and all heading over a town like Merced.  They thought the country was going to war.  And, of course, these were preceded by the always loud above their size fighters stationed there to protect the 93 Bomb Wing assets.  It was something to see...and hear!