Tuesday – Bishop, California

Ok, for those that have had issues with the size of photos, this is what I will do until further notice. Last night I checked all the ‘themes’ within WordPress and previewed them as well, this is the best at this time and I have been using it for a year, so I am very familiar with it and like it. I have since found out the max picture size is 652×652, I am positive it was 800×800 a while back. Never mind, I have reduced the size of the pictures to 680×680 and that is as far as I go!

Okie dokie, today is new tyre day for the bike, which won’t happen until around ten. In the meantime I chased up an email with Eric from Elka Suspension about my shock, he then phoned me and was quite helpful and will make a few more enquiries from his end, but I have a feeling I am up for the customs brokerage charges, not sure yet.

Around ten I headed to the bike shop where I managed to get a new rear shoe and an oil change. I selected the new Tourance EXP, just for a change and will see how it goes for wear, but the tread looks good.

Chad and I chatted a bit about extras and I looked at his light bar. In my opinion, it is a far better system than the Pat Walsh bar that I have. Mine is steel with all the paint falling off, it is very heavy and a real prick to install. I also had to modify the mounting holes to line up. The one Chad has just uses clips with embedded nuts and bolt on from the outside, is light aluminium and looks good too. Anyway, after a few other purchases, I had to leave.

I had no real goal for today as it was gone midday, but I figured I would head south, except I would take the scenic route up the mountains. Johnofchar, from the VSRI forum, had suggested a road that I could do and when I eventually found it on the map it was down south, so that was OK and it was near Bishop, so I decided Bishop was my goal for the day, at this stage. On this map, red is the roads I took and the small blue one is the suggested road.

I headed off first towards Lake Tahau, up on top of the mountain near Carson City. I had a sign like this yesterday but was in the wrong lane and no turnaround, so this time I can add it to my collection. Nothing like our drop bears from OZ 🙂

Now, let me say that the lake looked great from all angles, there are no pictures because there are no view points to get any from, they are taken up with resorts and houses etc. The only places I thought I could get some photos are down near the waters edge, but the roads are still closed and it was a bit of a hike, I am not a hiker. Anyway, this is all you get, take it from me, the scenes were very nice, with the snow capped mountains reflected in the lake water 🙂

Yep, that was it, the blue bit between the trees and the mountains, shades of Basil Fawlty there 🙂
It was a bit cooler up here, I had been in the high 30s down in the city, but even though my temp gauge said mid 20s, it felt colder at speed. The road went through a lot of high forest areas, including a melting lake in the 2nd photo.

This is at one of the turnings, there were a few passes to go through, one of them towards Yosemite National Park was still closed, lucky for me this was open. I passed that camper a few times up this way.

Some of the views from up here at the top, I was at nearly 8300ft or 2.5km, you can see the ups and downs from the trip profile, I had managed to work a way of getting my Garmin tracks to my PC.

Then there were a lot of downward twisties. I had heard about the ‘tar snakes’ used to repair cracks in the road from a VSRI forum thread, maybe not this road but there were heaps. I originally had said they cannot be that bad, we have them in Oz, but these were horrible throughout the mountains, they were not flat and smooth like ours, but raised up which causes the front end to wobble all over the joint. That is bad in the fast corners, which there were a few 🙂 Look back up above and see all the black lines all over the roads, that is tar snakes, now check out the real roads I had to go down. This is where I found out it was not my front tyre causing the front end to wobble, my tyre was good and fast.

This is Mono Basin, nice scenic views around here. Very expensive for fuel, I paid $3.099 a gallon, the most I have paid yet. One day I will work out if it is cheap or not 🙂

I am glad I missed those clouds and the road went in a different direction as it was getting late in the afternoon 🙂

Then from here and on down into Bishop it was all downhill and it started to warm up nicely, I can tell you and if you look at the trip profile, you can see I lost 3000ft of altitude in a very short space of time in the last few miles.

After checking out a few motels, I picked one, but I should maybe have tried the caravan parks as the rodeo was in town so the prices were up a bit, but it is a largish town, so probably more expensive anyway. Oh well, plenty of time for camping from here on south.

I had some Kentucky duck, never again, tasteless crap nothing like the stuff back home, another meal off the menu 🙂

I had a quiet night sorting out a few things and trialling all the WordPress themes as I mentioned.

Day – 228 miles and 367km
Trip – 3,504 miles and 5,639km

Cheers
TravellingStrom
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