Our route, Saturday, July 27^h, 2002.

 Ken & I were up bright and early Saturday morning, ready for whatever awaited us as we prepared to depart from Dubois, Wyoming. It would be a day of awesome and unusual sights that would include majestic snow capped mountains, beautiful lush meadows, steaming geysers, scorched scrub desert, mysterious, restricted access government installations, and desert hillbillies.

Culturally, Dubois, Wyoming is about as western a place as there is in the U.S. So imagine our surprise when as we sat waiting for our breakfast to materialize, our very friendly waitress fired up a CD player with tunes by the 5^th Dimension, Nat & Natalie Cole, Karen Carpenter, etc (What, no Willie Nelson?). Some of those songs really took me back in time to places I'd been in the late 60's and early 70's. The music, those fantastic cinnamon rolls and our great waitress made for a wonderful, relaxing meal.

Often when I visit friendly, quaint little towns like Dubious, I fantasize about living there. Then reality smacks me in the face when I realize that unless I won the lottery and became financially independent, I couldn't possibly pull it off because one still has to eat and pay bills (reality's a bitch!), even in paradise. As a petroleum geologist, I truly enjoy my profession but it's major drawback is that 99.9% of the employment opportunities are in Houston, Texas or some aesthetically displeasing place that is flat as a pancake, mosquito ridden and hot as hell. So, all those beautiful places in the U.S. like Dubois that I'd like to live in are off limits to me until my next life.

While gassing up our bikes at a station on the outskirts of town, we met a guy who had moved there and purchased the resort lodge across the street. He was quite a gregarious fellow who talked on and on about the beautiful roads that he had ridden in the area on his BMW. I mentioned that I wished that I could figure out a way to make a living in such a place and he offered to sell me his lodge! As he told it, the time required to manage a lodge leaves little time for enjoying ones bike and the roads of the area, so he was ready to sell out.

  We finally got on our way and began our ascent into the hills toward the Tetons and Yellowstone National Park. The closer we got to the Tetons, the more spectacular the scenery became. We stopped at a beautiful lake somewhere near the park boundary to take a few pictures then made our way on down the road. We had originally planned on

bypassing Yellowstone National Park but at the last minute decided to make a little detour and check it out. We reasoned that we would have plenty of time to "zip" up there and back. That assumption turned out to be way wrong because of road construction and a mass of humanity, many in slow moving RV's, that were also trying to go there. After what seemed like an eternity, we finally arrived at the park where a couple from Arlington, Texas volunteered to take our pictures next to the park sign. Once rested a bit we merged back in with the crowd streaming toward the "Old Faithful" geyser.

In my travels around the American West, I have noticed that a large percentage of the foreign tourists that I bump into are from Germany. This observation was reinforced when at the entrance to "Old Faithful" we met a German fellow who was touring the U.S. on his '95 BMW motorcycle. It was one of those classic, black standard models that looked like the old R90 airheads of yesteryear. I had no idea that they had been made as late as 1995 but apparently in Europe they continued to sell them. As we talked to him we learned that he worked at a BMW automobile plant in South Carolina and had been touring the U.S. for almost a month! All I could think of when he told me that was that it must be nice to be able to take off for that long in a single stretch. During the conversation he happened to mention that the geyser was scheduled to go off in about 10 minutes. Perfect timing! We hot footed it down to the geyser field and waited just a short while before it erupted. I was a little bit disappointed because I thought it would spew much higher. I guess that expectation came from the pictures that I saw in my childhood. Things always seem to be larger when you're a kid.

Old Faithful had spent its fury and it was getting late. Because of the inordinately long time spent getting to Yellowstone, we decided against doubling back and heading to Jackson, Wyoming. Instead we made a beeline for the nearest exit on the western side of the park (Highway 20) and got back on our way. Just past the town of West Yellowstone, Montana we crossed into Idaho where the beautiful scenery that we had been experiencing abruptly ended in flat farmland. The temperatures were definitely higher than what we had gotten used to in the mountains and the wind was very high, which made us work to keep our bikes headed in a straight line. At Idaho Falls we headed almost due west on Highway 20 for the town of Arco.

Arco.... what a strange name for a town I thought as I contemplated it's origin. It's the same name as an oil company in Texas (the old Atlantic Richfield Oil Co.). The road to Arco from Idaho Falls was even stranger though. The scenery went from flat farmland to mile after mile of flat, very dry, scrub desert. It looked a lot like northern Nevada to me, just mile after mile of nothing. As we zipped along this bizarre landscape we occasionally passed an isolated mountain sticking up from the desert floor all by itself, completely unconnected from any mountain range. The ultimate in strangeness though was reserved for the several Department of Energy reservations that we passed that had large signs warning of trespass and restricted access. Shades of the X-Files and Area 51! Was E.T. out there somewhere?

At Arco we decided to put up for the night so that we could hit the Sawtooth Mountains the next day, well rested and refreshed. My AAA Travel Guide was of no use since it didn't have any listings for motels in this town. We drove on by the first motel we saw because it just had this "Bates Motel" look and feel to it. Further down the road we spotted a neat, well kept looking little placed called the D-K Motel and decided to call it home for the night. Though a bit spartan, the rooms were neat, clean and appeared to be very well maintained by the owners.

The D-K Motel's proprietors, a man and a woman who were probably in their early 40's, turned out to be quite an interesting couple. They had worked all over the world for mineral drillers in such places as Borneo, Indonesia, New Guinea, etc. Some of these areas were not friendly to western women because of their local interpretation of the Islamic religion. She handled logistics for the drilling operations in these incredibly remote, jungle locations and he had been a rig worker of some sort. They had tales of trips that involved travel in very small puddle jumper planes to boats then finally on foot to reach remote locations where the exploration for new mineral deposits took place. I got the distinct impression that this vagabond couple had decided it was time to set down roots.

I stated earlier that this whole area was strange. It got even stranger as Ken and I sat down to eat at one of only three eating establishments in this one stoplight town. As we sat there waiting for our hamburgers to arrive, a bunch that can only be described as a desert version of the Beverly Hillbillies pulled up in their pickup truck and promptly walked into the restaurant and sat down in the booth next to us. There was a "Ma" and "Pa" complete with a very unattractive "Ellie May" with child and a "Jethro" that was apparently her mate. The conversations that were loudly broadcast from this booth were truly unique. One of the topics that came from the mouths of these intellectual powerhouses concerned the best way to pass a hot check! Their conversation stayed on about the same illegal plane the whole time. Ken & I just looked at each other and said with our facial expressions, "Ruh-Roh!". Finally, these upstanding citizens finished slurping up the cafe's nutrition and left. I failed to look and see if they had tried to pass the owner a check for their meal but I was sure glad to see their large butts in the doorway heading out. As they were leaving the parking lot, Ken happened to glance out the window to see them waving a pistol around the cab of their truck. The horrifying thought that occurred to me was that these criminal morons were free to reproduce!

After our brief encounter with the future "America's Most Wanted", we went back to the motel and crashed, eager to see Arco in our rearview mirrors the next morning. As I drifted off to sleep I found myself wondering if there was some connection between all the DOE nuclear sites that we saw in the area and our hillbilly friends. Genetic mutation perhaps???? Who knows. As they say on the X-files, "The truth is out there".

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